Pedalpalooza!

I'm so excited! Today is day one of pedalpalooza, a yearly week long bike-fest that happens here in Portland every year! Pedalpalooza is ten or so bike-related events that happens every day for a week...and we're talking events like naked bike rides, bike tours of wild edible plants, bike tours of urban gardens/farms, bike-jousting, bike-in movies, bike parades....!

I'm so very excited! I've got a pair of butterfly wings in my backpack here at school in preparation for a bike parade I'm going to participate in tonight after school downtown! I also can't wait to ride in at least one of the naked bike rides...I've been saying for a couple years now that I'd like to, and now, I think I'm ready...hopefully it warms up a bit! Portland is also hosting the Carfree Cities conference in conjunction with the Pedalpalooza event, and we have offered both of our living room couches to two lucky strangers who get to stay with us during the event...I can't wait to meet our couch guests! My roommate Coral is on a bunch of mailing lists and gets e-mails all the time of folks looking for places to stay for events like this..so we have strangers on our couches quite often. We've made one lasting friendship with a guy named Daniel (or Couchboy, as we call him,) this way....he was moving to town to join Americorps from Texas and e-mailed all the Americorps people in town to ask about a couch to crash on until he found his own place. Coral is in Americorps, so she invited him to stay with us. Come to find out, Daniel is one of the hippest Texans ever...he sings Spanish Opera, is generous with his food and likes to snuggle...

In other news, I'm turning 26 this weekend and to celebrate I'll be camping with the Earth Community Alliance near Mnt Hood; another reason to be really excited!

Love ya,
Carrot