Yo quiero!!

I was reading a magazine article about how you spend your energy. Basically, you need to be expending energy, and also recouping it at some sort of even ratio in order to feel happy, stay sane, not get burned out, etc. It asked you to fill in several circles that were cut in half - emotional, spiritual, mental, physical energies - to see what filled each half. One half was what was expended, one half was how it came back to you.
One lady was just exhausted and thought she needed a vacation, but when she filled out her circles, it turned out that really she wasn't spending enough mental energy. She needed a new job, not a beach vaca.

I feel like that today, and yesterday and the day before...

I'm looking forward to starting Grad school this fall... that will give me a good mental workout. But organizing files, making the Boss's flight arrangements, and re-organizing his business cards is sapping me of my mental vigor. But anyway, I found it interesting that by not spending enough mental energy you actually can feel more lethargic! Mysteries of the universe!

In other news, I am doing really great these days.
Yesterday, I (left work early b/c there was nothing to do and the boss was gone :) and came home to make a strawberry pie with the berries that I had picked at a beautiful farm, on a picturesque day. I liked doing it all from scratch! That was very fulfilling.
Then I went up to Alberta street for some fun-filled (and freak-filled!) people watching during the monthly "Last Thursday" art night. {the link does NOT do it justice!} It is very ripe for people watching! There were some Cirque Du Soleil style people on stilts, an aggressive 12 year old white boy trying to sell candy so he could "buy a bike," and the regular fare of Obama supporters and interesting art.

And for the daily spontaneous laughter, I was driving home when I spied a little Chihuahua with a major bout of machismo in the drivers seat of this little hot-rod. He was trying for all his life to start a rumble with the bikers and peds...!

Really?!?

This 2nd hand fortune seems to be eluding visibility.

It reads
"Maybe you can live on the moon in next century."

Oh, to be so lucky!

its a bird...its a plane... its a coon-skin cap??

There are lots of reasons why I love living in Portland!

Last weekend I was with one of my friends and we were about to pull out of her driveway when I exclaimed, "Watch out for the guy in the coon-skin cap!"
As he proceeded to walk by it became apparent that he was not actually wearing a coon-skin cap, it was only his gross ponytail protruding from underneath his backwards hat...

I love that after living here for a year and a half that I would automatically assume that he was wearing a coon-skin cap, of all things.

That's what we do here... we Keep Portland Weird!

Another friend of mine told me that while she was sitting in a coffee shop, she thought that she saw a guy walk by on stilts right outside the window. But in reality the street sloped sharply upwards and he was just really tall...

But I really did see 3 people unicycling down the street in the course of 1 week.
I guess that some people are really doing their part to "Keep Portland Weird" and the rest of us are just mentally compensating for it.