Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

With my motorcycle of course!) I rode 726 miles this past Friday and Saturday and had a great time. Friday I went back and forth to Memphis to see my sister and three nieces, the youngest, Elizabeth, turned four, and the middle one, Elaine, graduated from Kindergarten, both on Friday. We went to the graduation in the morning and had a birthday party at my sister’s in the evening. Saturday morning I rode down to Hohenwald, TN, and met up with an uncle and we rode with a group of about 18 bikes from there to the top of Monteagle mountain, where I jumped on the interstate and zipped on home. It was the first time I’ve ridden with a group of bikes and it was pretty fun. I can see the attraction, even though I had the only bike with no chrome. Oh, I figured up my gas mileage for the Memphis part of the trip (~90mph interstate) to be slightly above 40mpg, but during the group ride I was getting 54.2mpg!!! If that’s not efficient I don’t know what is. I was able to get back in time to go helmet shopping in the afternoon and find a semi-stylin’ helmet for a lady friend and just chill on Sat evening. If all weekends were like this one (three days long, sunny, lots of scenic riding) life would have nothing to aspire to!

OK, after being gone from home and work for a week and now being back for a week, I’m back in the groove of things. Today was mother’s day and I went to church with Mom & Dad and then we ate a wonderful lunch of roast and potatoes and carrots, broccoli and fried squash. It was a great day outside and wonderfully cool (about 60F)! I’ve repaired lots of small spelling errors across some of my posts and I have uploaded some pictures from my trip to the west coast.

Friday I went to a new restaurant in Lebanon called The County Seat. A friend of mine helped them set up their computer and phone and video systems, and he treated me to anything I wanted! That was pretty cool since all the staff knows him and I got the behind the scenes tour. I’ve never seen the inner workings of a restaurant before and it’s a lot of people in a small space working at a fast pace. Pretty neat to see how it’s done.

My laundry is done which to me is a monumental task, not so much the washing part, but the folding and putting things away is painful! I am looking forward to hopefully being able to relax some this week!

I’ve now been here for a couple of days and this is a really cool place. Yesterday I took Kevin’s bicycle and went all over downtown and around through North Portland. The downtown area is really bicycle friendly in layout as well as the people, and almost the entire way from their house has dedicated bike lanes, very nice. I wish Nashville had more lanes than just the one near Vandy. Thai food is everywhere here, and so far it’s really good too. The Portland Central Library is impressive on the outside, but more impressive on the inside. There is a huge marble staircase going to the second floor, with fairly intricate engravings of vines and leaves and birds all in the stairs. I visited REI, the Columbia store, the Library, Riverfront Park, the North Face store, ate at Pizza Schmizza (which was good and the greek salad was perfect), and visited Powells Books. I must expound a bit about Powells… Holy Cow that place is cool. Being the information hoarder that I am, I was very disappointed to know that of all of these awesome books that I would like to have for cheap would have to be shipped home if I bought them. If this place was anywhere near Nashville, I’d have to line my entire house with bookcases. For those of you tech heads out there, there’s a Powells Technical Books as well, which I visited too, of course. And just to give you an idea, there are several copies of lots of books, good books too, ranging from math to networking to engineering and any other technical topic you can think of. One of the copies may be a new book, one a used book, another an early edition, another a hardback and some of them were even in special packaging, and the prices vary accordingly. It was enough to make me drool through the whole store.

Last evening, Kevin and I went to the Rogue Ales Public House and had some incredible food. We then proceeded to check out 23rd Ave. and the panoramic view of Portland from the top. Today we’re going the the Columbia River Gorge and check that out, then watch Katie and the Break Neck Betties whip tail at Roller Derby.

Ok, now I’ve seen some beautiful scenery in my time, but this area is incredible. The green hills with the vinyards and the fog in the mornings is a sight to behold. Yesterday we visited two wineries. The first was Guglielmo, a family owned traditional affair of three generations. The place grows 13 acres of grapes and does all the pressing and bottling on sight. The guy giving the tour was from the Netherlands and reminded me a lot of one of the guys in my office; a great sense of humor and can truely play the part. The second stop was at Clos la Chance. This was a much newer facility with high tech gadgets and large facilities. They grow about 70 acres of grapes and monitor soil conditions like humidity and temperature. They also bottle many wines with a screw-top. The tour director gave a long explanation about all the benefits of the different types of corks and bottling methods for the different wines, but it really takes a lot of the romance out of the whole “waiter opening the bottle at the table” thing. The drive out and back was incredible, the San Jose valley was originally agriculture and most of that was orchards. The valley is surrounded by mountains, duh, it’s a valley, but beautifully rugged and it has all these monstrous houses tucked in on the tops.

Today is finally over, it’s always the most boring, yet necessary, part of the conference. From here on out it’s much more interesting. Over half of the attendees this year are first-timers, so there are lots of new faces and many new ideas. It’s late, but I’m off to more networking time