Piedmont Neighborhood Update

I just got back from the Piedmont Neighborhood Association meeting, it was great, I signed up to help a local school build a community garden - I'll use my rain barrel skills for good now. It was funny, a woman stood up to introduce herself as a person involved in the Stop The Columbia River Crossing (stopthecrc.org) and a couple of people were also there to promote the $4.2B mega highway, bridge, and lightrail project.

I am going to write a letter to the Portland Parks Department telling them that they should grow fruit trees in their parks, people can enter a lottery to be able to pick bushel of apples when they come ripe, for example.

I'm also going to write a letter to the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services telling them to build more bioswale treatment facilities in our neighborhood. These will treat (and store) road runoff prior to their entry into the UICs that handle our road runoff in this area of Portland.

We may be getting a Farmer's Market soon at Ainsworth and Albina, in the vacant lot there. That would be so great for the area.

Brew-a-thon

Last Sunday was a big day of beer brewing and total fun! I want to get into brewing beer, so I got my Dad's old kit (carboy, bottle capper, bottles, tubes, other things that I don't know how to use yet) and headed over to my coworker Brian's house to make some beer with him and his friend Ox.

The night before we spent about $200 on malt extract, yeast, and malt grain. Brian had thought up 6 recipes for different kinds of beer, when we get done we'll have a: nut-brown stout, IPA, a red, a dark lager, a citrus blonde, and something else I can't quite remember.

We had malt cooking on two burners inside and a turkey deep-fat fryer outside, then added the malt extract, then the hops, then the rest of the hops. It was quite a process! I was there about 9 hours, Brian didn't wrap up until about 11pm. That all after he drove up from Corvallis with a hangover after partying it up after the Floater concert.

During the off time we drank beer and played a couple games of Settlers. Settlers is great! It's got this board made of hexagonal cards that you rearrange for each new game, it's really fun and fast paced!

I will have to let you know when I get my share of the 32 gallons of beer, which will be about 100 bottles of beer (on the wall) to try to fit in my fridge!

Gary Johnson

The guy in the center of the picture is Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico whom I had a chance to hear speak a few weeks ago at Lola's Room, I'll get back to this place. He is running an exploratory campaign right now to decide whether to run as Libertarian, I'll get back to them. He's a really interesting guy, he was or is an entreprenuer; he started a handy-man business and grew it to over a thousand employees, he sold it before becoming governor.

He talked about his background and answered questions from the audience. This was one of the few times that I've been around a politician and it was really interesting when he answered questions from these people, straight off the cuff and honest.

I'm a poster boy for big government, my position was created through ARRA (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), it has a website where contractors and other employers enter how many people they've hired as a result of the stimulus every quarter. Anyways, Gary Johnson is the man when it comes to keeping government small, he cut 1,000 jobs during his two terms (which seems like as many would be reduced through natural attrition), while the guy after him increased their roles by 4,500. He also talked about how he is different from the present governor from A to Z, he told about 'H' which was for 'helicopter', he flew in it something like 6 times, his successor has flown in it 1,000 times and purchased one for his official use, seems wasteful to me...

Another thing I liked about him was his stance on legalization of drugs, he talked about a policy called harm reduction. Harm reduction is the reduction in harm that a drug user would cause themselves or others in order to get their fix. An real world example he had of this was from the chief of police in Zurich, Switzerland, if anyone had an addiction to heroin they could get an authorization to have as much heroin as they needed. They would no longer need to steal to pay for the heroin, dealers would have to move somewhere else, and the drug disputes would be handled in the courts. This police chief told him that crime had been reduced significantly in Zurich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_E._Johnson

I've been reading a lot about the Libertarian ideals lately and though I'm not a Republican nor one of the crazy Tea Party people, I feel more and more like our liberties have been taken away.

About Lola's Room: it's usually a dance club at night playing eighties music while people bounce up and down on the bouncy wood floor. That made it kind of an odd venue for this event.