Plaster board is going up. Two days of pounding and crashing as they throw the stuff on the wall starting at 7am. This is happening on both Friday and Saturday so there will be no sleeping in this weekend.

The remodel is taking shape and it now looks like construction rather than destruction. The walls are all up and the insulation is in. Pink everywhere.

Yesterday's marathon training run was 12 miles around downtown Portland but, because of security around the fleet that is docked downtown and the setup for the Grand Floral Parade -- all part of the city's Rose Festival -- we ran south from downtown through the beautiful Clearwater Corridor.

This is a 40 mile loop bike trail that goes along the Willamette River. The section we ran (no, we didn't do the full 40) was along the east side of the river from downtown to the Sellwood bridge. Green and lush with eagle's nests on the tops of power polls and attractions like the old fashioned amusement park Oaks Park.

Except for the heat, it was a beautiful and good run.

Look out in the Pacific Northwest -- there is a blimp on the loose.

With this hot weather, when I get up in the morning, I open the patio door and start a large fan to get some of the cool air outside inside. The other morning, after running the fan for a while, I found my remote controlled flying saucer outside in the trees by the patio. It would seem that the air currents pushed the floating craft around the livingroom and eventually out the patio door.

This morning I wasn't so lucky as to find the craft in the trees. I'd forgotten about the tree incident a few days before when I set up the fan this morning. So now, floating in the skies far above our town, must be a radio controlled blimp enjoying it's freedom in the wide open skys.

We normally think that terrorists and people who support them are poor, down-trodden people with nothing to loose. As this is researched, we discover that the "down-trodden" is the most important part and that the supporterd tend to be educated and not necessairly poor. A good article on this (with good comments) is at the Buzz Machine