HOMER (AP) — The one-step-at-a-time growth of Bear Creek Winery, which opened in 2004, takes a giant step forward this week with the opening of its new bottling plant. To celebrate, winery owners Bill and Dorothy Fry are inviting the community to tour the plant Friday evening.

The new 50-by-60-foot plant is located on Bear Creek Drive a short distance from the winery’s 60473 Bear Creek Drive location.

Begun a year and a half ago, the building was designed by the Frys to fit the winery’s expanding activity.

HOMER (AP) — In his shop just off the Sterling Highway and a few miles south of Ninilchik, Lonnie Lambert is hard at work. Around him, towering aluminum dip-net frames stand as sentries, guarding Lambert’s design of an “inter ring system.”

As of May 3, Lambert has a more formidable safeguard: a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Commerce.

HOMER (AP) — A photo of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ninilchik, snow-covered mountains in the distance and blue sky above, were too intriguing for Sergey Pashkevich to ignore.

A promotion copywriter with JCSC Publishing House Reader’s Digest in Moscow, Pashkevich was in Alaska in May to film the church and other key locations and interview people for “The Russian World Without Borders,” a project he described as “dedicated to various aspects of Russian heritage in places as far apart as France, Alaska and Nepal.”

HOMER (AP) -- It started as a study in geometry for Fireweed Academy third- and fourth-grade students, complete with reading assignments exploring the many-sided characteristics of polygons, circles and polyhedra. It ended with more than a thousand colorful expressions of hope for student Sophie Morin's great-uncle, Pat McBride of Homer, injured in an automobile accident earlier this year.

During the time the youngsters were immersed in the geometry study, teacher Stephanie Zuniga saw "Between the Folds," a PBS film by Vanessa Gould.