the octopus tree

Today, I went to see the Octopus Tree near the lighthouse at Cape Meares which I visited three years ago. The tree was amazing (I can't believe I missed it last time) and afterwards we went around to explore the park, looking over cliffs. It was slightly rainy which made for an enchanting atmosphere.

What else?
We also went to Tillamook where we got cocoa at Muddy Waters, perused the Tillamook Farmer's Market, listened to a blue grass band while playing cards and having a beer at the 2nd St Public Market, went back to the house quick, had an awesome mushroom enchilada at La Mexicana in Tillamook, had a mediocre drink in a dive bar in Netarts called the Upstairs Bar and then walked on the beach in an everlasting twilight at Oceanside. Busier than yesterday but still as enjoyable. 

oceanside getaway

I like to be in control, especially when it involves my dog. However, I let Andrew do the driving literally and figuratively today. He took Dean and I to a rental he made in Oceanside today for the weekend. I enjoyed letting go and it's nice to know that I can trust him.

We were out of phone service and internet service as well which was nice. Not only were we out of contact but we stayed in for the evening as soon as we got to the in, unlike last time we went to the beach together. It was nice to just relax, do tequila shots and know that we didn't have any more responsibilities. It's a great way to start a vacation marathon for me. After today, I only have one more day of work for me before I start a two week vacation.

questioning authority

I don't understand how more people aren't upset with the system or why more people don't do something about it. During my winter quarter of school this year, my teacher challenged me to write about why my non-profit job should or shouldn't pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage. My initial reaction was that my company can afford it and it's a discriminatory anyway, applied to only people with disabilities and prison populations. However, upon researching it, I found all sorts of reasons why it's wrong.

I'm not surprised that my company doesn't want to pay the people with disabilities minimum wage. The feds say they don't have to and they've been paying less than minimum since 1938 so why would they change? However, the feds position is surprisingly outdated and unjustified. They'll look back on this in shame before too long. I can't see how they can't see that.

As part of my job, I had to go to a class put on by the department of labor today about how to go about "fairly" paying people less than minimum wage. Someone asked if they could get people with disabilities a job at a big box store and then have the big box store pay them less than minimum wage. The trainers said no, the big box store cannot use a non-profit's 501c3 status. However, they offered that the non-profit could get the person a job at the big box store, pay them less than minimum, and then bill the big box store and that way everyone can benefit on exploiting this individual...except for the individual.

This training was supposed to last all day. However, due to the lousy set-up and the fact that we knew all of it, (not mention the fact that it was greatly upsetting me), our boss let us bail after 5 hours which was still 5 hours too long.

It's just shocking. I expect this attitude from an older generation (like my superiors at work) because it's the way they've always done things. Like old slave owners, it doesn't make it right but they are just repeating the behavior they were taught. However, my trainers were all younger and not willing to talk about the fact that initiatives are being proposed to eliminate sub-minimum wage. I hope more reasonable people start making better decisions. I'm going to keep working on people to hope they see their errors.

dink's like eating out

A co-worker commented to me that I eat out really well as in, "How the hell do you afford it?" Yes, I eat out a lot and I know I don't make a lot of money, not even as much as my co-worker. However, I buy all my clothes second-hand, I don't drink to the point of having large bar tabs, I don't pay car insurance, my hobby is riding my bike (or walking my dog) and I don't have loans so yes, I treat myself well and eat out at good places. I also don't have kids so, when Andrew and I go out, we each become what marketing strategists refer at as "DINK"s. DINK stands for Double Income, No Kids. When I first joined Queer Revolution years and years ago, I researched the idea of dinks to see why companies were targeting queers for advertising and the term dink kept coming up. I don't like being a marketing target but I guess they want me. Well, the Armani Exchange can bug off because my dollars go to my appetite.

As a sink (single instead of double), I had lunch at Sushi Mazi on Division. I never dine out for sushi by myself but I needed a new thing and this was on my way back to work. It was really good, especially with the Thai iced tea. But it was a little pricey.

Later in the evening, Andrew and I went out as dinks to eat at the Caldera Public House. We've been here before but I think today is the first time I've had their eggplant sandwich and I know it's the first time I've had their chocolate martini which is now my favorite chocolate martini in town!

Afterwards, we rode to the top of Tabor to watch the sun go down. See, we'll spend a little bit to eat out but in the end, we're cheap dates.

What else?
I don't remember what my new thing was on Tuesday but on Monday, I ate a new slice of "pizza" at Pizzacato. I use the term pizza loosely because it had garbanzo beans, artichoke hearts and a spicey green sauce on it instead of actual pizza items but it was delicious!

fair obligations

Since 2009, I've given this weekend up to the country fair. I shouldn't complain about it but it's beginning to wear on me. There's always a lot to do on fourth weekend in Portland. Ashes and Victory were given tickets to the Portland vs Seattle soccer game and there was a Browncoats showing of Serenity and a few select episodes of Firefly that I would have like to have gone to but nope, I'm Eugene-bound. Next year, I might just camp there instead of spending 8 hours in a car.

Yesterday, Ashes, Raven, Victory and I all went down. Victory found some construction projects while the rest of us hauled bamboo. It also rained for the first time in fair setup for me. That didn't really help me in wanting to be there. However, just walking onto the land restores a sense of calm in me. Also, I just need to keep my eyes on the prize. Fair week is coming up in two short weeks. I can't wait. Today, I drove down there with Victory. It was my first time driving to fair and the first time driving Ashes' car out of town. I also went to the newly required Humane Intervention Training which actually was pretty entertaining.

I like the fair and I like most of the people there so I'm not going to complain. I just wish there was more purpose or less effort in getting down there.

lit and loud in 2012

 Sigh, it's the end of another Pedalpalooza for me. The celebration goes on for another week but due to other obligations, tonight was my last ride. Unfortunately, it's not a ride I really love. The Lit and Loud ride has gotten a lot bigger since it first began in 2010. I was a little more excited about it this year because I had made plans in advance. Last year, I bought my stereo with the intention of taking it on Pedalpalooza rides. Plus, I bought solar powered Christmas lights with two purposes in mind: Country Fair and the Lit and Loud ride. So Andrew and I encompassed our bikes in the lights and I strapped my stereo to the front of my bike again. However, I couldn't really hear it most of the time because the other bike stereos (and there were a lot of them) were REALLY loud.

We ended up biking downtown. People still clapped but after going down there for the WNBR, everything else kind of pales in comparison. Still, it was enjoyable and the party continued long after I was done.

What else?

In other biking news, I biked to work with my quickest time ever: 9 minutes and 50 seconds!

biomimicry

 I went to a speech tonight at Science Pub, a bi-monthly event that OMSI puts on, usually at McMenamins' pub theaters. Today, Richard Louv was speaking about biomimicry. I don't have any particular interest in this and, really, I didn't even know what it was before going to the speech but I was looking for a new thing to do and Sophia's talked up the Science Pubs quite a bit so I decided to give it a shot.

It was very educational and right on with my line of thinking. To sum up what I learn, we as people have pretty much assigned ourselves to either sticking our head in the ground and not thinking about the future or we've accepted that the future will be some post-apocalyptic wasteland where true nature (a vast diversity of flora and fauna) will be a distant memory. I guess I subscribe to the latter category. However, assigning ourselves to a shitty fate is making us lethargic about being able to do anything to change it. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy now.

Sustainability really isn't the key either as it implies just maintaining an equilibrium with nature which is a difficult balance to keep up. Instead, we need to be more creative and look to nature to model our dwellings, our habits and our lives after. Ignore the hippie connotations of this concept but we need to become one with nature. We also need to get our kids back into nature. Kids are lost in a world of technology and ADHD diagnoses. By making nature a more relevant part of our kids lives, nature will become more valued and incorporated. I think that's about it.

Anyway, I think that I could spend days at this guy's seminar. I should probably just buy his book. However, I've got too many other books to read right now and it's summer. Biomimicry isn't exactly light reading.

What else?

Speaking of summer and school, I got my grades back yesterday. Another A. That's another whole year of solid A's!

my future car

One of the greatest conversations I can remember having was between a handful of other sophomores at McCook Community College one fall evening in 1995. I was in Bryan and Nate's dorm room with a few others while we reminisced about the 1980s, specifically about cartoons from our childhood. The power of our brains to reconnect with a time over 10 years old and reproduce the emotions that went along with that time is truly spectacular. That night was one of the first times I had realized that I just found my new two best friends in college and that's what happened. We were pretty much bonded after that.

If you didn't experience childhood in the eighties, it probably seemed like a pretty shitty decade with Ronald Reagan and the onset of AIDS and more. However, all of that was background noise for me at the time, drown out by Intellivision, He-Man, Rubix Cubes, Sixteen Candles, Care Bears, Space Invaders, Girls Just Want to Have Fun (the movie which I can still recite line for line), Cyndi Lauper, Pac Man (both the game and the TV show), the Never-Ending Story, Burgertime, the Karate Kid, Nerds candies, and Revenge of the Nerds. My friend Teddy and I spent what seems like a lot of time in Ed's Drive, especially when we discovered Mario Bros (the original) and Q-Bert. I was a lot better at Mario Bros. It was Shangri-La but that's because it was an innocent time for us as people. Talk whatever smack you want about the politics, health care, fashion mistakes, or overly synthesized music but I loved the 1980s and I always will.

Dominic recommended a book to me over a month ago and I checked it out from the library last week. It's Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Once I started reading it, I realized that I didn't want to do anything else. It's set in the future but in a future preoccupied with the 1980s so it packed with wonderful references, both blatant and obscure. It's like reliving my childhood or at least that conversation I had back in September of 1995. My only problem with the book is that I'm going to finish it way too soon and then I'll be stuck looking for an adequate summer book to follow it. I'll probably just do what Dominic did and I'll read it again.

I went home for lunch around 3pm today and walked Dean so I didn't need to head home right after work. Since Ready Player One, I've been itching to spend some time dorking out on arcade games while eating mediocre pizza so I planned to go down to Ground Kontrol and kill some time there. Fortunately, I checked my twitter feed first and saw that Powells in Beaverton was hosting Ernest Cline tonight for the tour of the paperback version of Ready Player One. I biked downtown, bought a copy of the book to replace the library's copy I had been reading, grabbed some pizza at Sizzle Pie and jumped on the MAX.

I hadn't biked in Beaverton before and I was quite unprepared for the suburbs but it was going to be worth it. The Beaverton Powells is even in a mall which made even more 80s sense, although I loathe the mall. Ernest's presentation was great. Fortunately, he didn't give away the ending because I haven't finished it yet but he did talk about the work he had to do to get his screenplay Fanboys made and how he came to write Ready Player One. He also introduced me to his contest that he is doing in which he has mirrored his book by placing a hidden easter egg in the book that leads to a video game. The first person to solve all three riddles and games will win the DeLorean pictured above. I don't know if I'm going to compete but I might give it a shot. Really, it was just enough for me to sit in the DeLorean and then bike back the the MAX with a big grin on my face while listening to Huey Lewis sing about the Power of Love.

the portland pride pups of 2012

Andrew and I attended the Pride Parade this year. It was my first year watching it with a boyfriend. I also don't think I've sat through the whole thing before. It was LONG! I realized when looking at my many pictures, I took a lot of the dogs in the parade which shouldn't surprise anyone who's read this blog for any length of time.

However, the highlight of the parade for me was getting a bear hug, pictured below and the Gay is Good contingent. Here's some non-canine pride pics:

What else?
For my thing, Andrew and I drank at the Living Room Theater which is right next to the Red Cap Garage pride block party. I felt like I should go to the block party since I knew Sharron Needles from RuPaul's drag race was going to be there but then I just couldn't bring myself to go. I was too exhausted and didn't want to deal with crowds. Misanthropy wins out.

let's just bike naked

I bike a lot and I go on a lot of group themed rides where costume is highly encouraged. However, my favorite ride has to be this one where costumes and clothing in general is discouraged.

They are estimating that over 10,000 people. I don't think it was as big as the one in 2010 but it was close and it was bigger than last year. However, I think we were more spread out as I observed that Jesse and I were the some of only people in the immediate area when people were taking pictures. Oh well, I guess I knew the risks when I took off the uniform.

What else?

After the ride, Jesse and I went to Blow Pony. It was a typical Pony except they have the back parking lot open as a dance floor for the June Pony. Out there, Jesse and I dance in the light rain to "Starships" among other remixed songs. It was an awesome way to end an awesome night!

return of the pedi or the search for spokes (star trek vs star wars 3)

 

This ride has gotten a lot bigger since the last time I went on it. While many of the costumes (and of course the AT-AT walker) were impressive, I was a little disappointed that not more people were dressed up. Plus, I think that the Star Wars costumes were a lot more impressive because they are a lot flashier than the standard Trek uniform. Well, next year, I might just bring flashy back with Khan. Or I might cave and go with Star Wars. At any rate, I want to start on my costume earlier and not end up wearing polyester. It doesn't breathe! Sigh, the things I'll do to look authentic.

Here's my YouTube video of the ride:



What else?
Yesterday, we had the Gayest Ride of the Year. I love that this is a ride in Pedalpalooza but it's also usually the tamest ride of the year. I brought Andrew and my stereo this time though. I had made a playlist at work and then went home and zip-tied my radio to the front of my bike. I think that it went over great. I had a number of people asking me about it which was cool. I'll have to break it back out for next week's Lit and Loud Ride.

Also, today, I did laundry and decided it was too nice of a day to use the dryer so I strung up some string in the back and hung my laundry out to dry. It felt good to be able to do that instead of wasting the dryer energy.

the one, two, three punch

Life has been good to me for some time now. I don't know if you can tell by my posts lately but everything seems to be going right with me except for work. Well, work decided to take an extra big dump on me today. I was due.

However, I just read that holding a grudge is letting someone live in your mind rent-free. I don't get paid enough to think about work when I'm not there. I'm going to turn at least two of these negatives into a positive. I originally posted a list of the crap was dealt this morning. I went back and changed it though because I'm not going to dwell on the negative. It will consume me and I've got too much else going on to allow that.

What else?

 

My new thing today (because taking shit at work is anything but new now) was driving my first Car2Go. It lightly sprinkled today but I biked so much yesterday that I wasn't willing to put up with anything less than perfection today so I checked out the car. It was easy but a little scary to drive due to the size. To paraphrase my friend Michael, I'm used to driving around a leather sofa so this itty bitty contraption was a different experience. Still, it was convenient and, even though I didn't officially end my reservation when I parked, they called me (two and a half hours later) and said that they think that I meant to lock it. Since it was my "maiden voyage," they didn't charge me for the extra time. So my morning didn't turn out to be a complete failure.

'turo time

I got a chance to hang out with Arturo today. We don't get to see each other that often so I was happy to hang out today. I've been trying to arrange for time to hang out for a while now but it's been more pressing as of late because I wanted to ask him if I could borrow his car to go back to Nebraska this summer. However, right before he came over, I remember he had a stick shift so that won't work. Still we ended up going to Wild Abandon for my dinner time for the first time. It's a better brunch place.

What else?
I biked to Clackamas again for work today. It makes Monday a lot easier to handle.

I also reserved a car from Hotwire today for my trip back. It's cheaper than flying back at this point. Plus I'm excited to take Dean back.

on the edgefield

 

I took a break from Pedalpalooza today and went...for a bike ride. Andrew and I headed out to Edgefield for the day since I've never really spent time there. I've ate there quick with Ashes and Victory on the way back from the Gorge and I went there for Vampire Weekend a while ago but I've never just relaxed there. It's like a real vacation getaway. There's Scottish Golf Courses, a number of places you can get a drink, and a nice campus to walk around. I'd like to come back on a weekday sick day and just hang out when it's not so busy.

the doctor rides

A lot of times, these pedalpalooza rides are just about getting on a bike, in a costume, and presenting a solid unified front while making a spectacle of ourselves. That's one of the things I love about them. I figured this evening's ride, The Doctor Who Ride, would be not different except that most people wouldn't know what we were dressed as. However, this ride was a lot more about being a fan of the Doctor.

We started out having a quick contest. I went dressed as Rory because it was easy. However, when I went to line up with the others for the contest judging, one of the organizers asked me what I was doing. I had to explain my costume which is not a good sign. I'm in a couple of pictures above. Here's what I was going for:

I was the only Rory so I guess that's something.

Anyway, after the contest we headed to Pizza Schmizza to see the Dalek statue there. Then we went to Voodoo Donuts for some custom made Doctor Who donuts. It was then on to Rose and Thistle for a long Doctor Who trivia game in which I met some fun fellas. We made one more stop quick to see a phone booth in the yard of a house even though it wasn't blue like the TARDIS. Finally, we concluded at the Tardis Room at Fish and Chips for my first time there.

It was a long experience but it was a lot of fun. Dressing up as Star Wars/Star Trek is fun and more recognizable but the truth is I'm a bigger Doctor Who fan than I am for either of those shows. Still, this year's Star Wars vs Star Trek ride is next week and I already have my costume ready.

What else?

Andrew was a sweetie and waited for me near the Tardis room even though we were running over an hour late. We ended up eating late at night at The Delta Room which is very similar to the Delta on Woodstock except this one has yummy vegan collard greens!