The Think Tank

As I’ve written about before, Joel and Tim and I are planning on participating in the Seattle to Portland bike ride this year, and as such we’ve been trying to train for it.  I say “trying” because we keep falling short.  We were doing very well in the early stages, but when the weather took a turn for the worse several weeks ago, our training regimen followed suit.

To that end I bought a new bike a couple weeks ago using my REI member dividend (accumulated over two years) and their annual Spring 20% coupon, plus some birthday contributions, to bring the price down to a very reasonable level.  Since I got such a good out-of-pocket deal on the bike, and since I am a certified fat ass and the wheels that came with the bike had questionable reviews, I splurged on a new wheel set.  As it turned out, that delayed delivery of my bike for quite a while due to several screw-ups, but I finally was able to pick up my new toy Thursday night.

Today seemed like the perfect day to take it out for a spin.  All in all I really liked how it performed, the lighter weight was a real boon on the hills, although my general level of unfitness did dictate that I had to stop a few times on some of the longer hills.  However, usually those stops were paired with navigational fixes, as I got lost several times due to the rabbit warren nature of the streets in west hills.  They are crazy.

My route took me up to Pittock Mansion, where I stopped for a few minutes and took some pictures, then through Washington Park and by the Zoo, up to Council Crest (where I took another photo break), and then down past OHSU into Downtown on my way home.  All in all it was about 23 miles and, according to MapMyRide, about 1,100 feet of climbing.  I swear to God it felt like more than that.

It was a nice ride and a perfect day for it.  I think I even got a couple of nice shots to boot.

Shannon and I went to By Ways cafe for breakfast on Sunday morning. We’d heard about it on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives several years ago and thought is sounded good, and today we finally went. I highly recommend it!

Shannon had the blue corn pancakes which look a little funny due to the blue color, but they tasted wonderful – especially with the pecan butter.

I had a hard time deciding between the apple sauce hotcakes and the Aamaretto French toast. In the end I went with the hotcakes. They were served with cinnamon sugar on top and were absolutely delicious.

Next time though, I’m totally going for the Amaretto Fench toast. That sounds really good.

They are on Glisan between 12th and 13th in downtown.  They are open for breakfast and lunch, but they serve breakfast all day on Sundays.

If you decide to go, come hungry: the portions are very large. Neither of us could finish our breakfasts.

Here’s the website

*** Update***
I uploaded the photos to the friends.thinktankgallery.com.  You can click on the image at left or click on the Think Tank Gallery link at the top of the page to see the rest.
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Its all even now!!

All-Star Brandon Roy returned to the floor tonight in a surprise for fans and the Pheonix Suns alike, helping the Blazers defeat Phoenix 96-87.   He had a decent game, nothing to get all excited about, but having him back seemed to insipire the Blazers as much as it vexed the Suns.

Despite the hubbub of Roy’s return, it was  LaMarcus Aldridge who stole the show with his game-high 31 points and 11 rebounds.  The Suns had no answer for him at all.  The rest of the team played the sort of basketball that Blazer Maniacs have been dreaming of since Game 1,  limiting Amare Staudamire’s effectiveness, keeping a man on Steve Nash at all times and forcing players like Jaren Collins to beat us.  Those players couldn’t get it done.  Thankfully Jason Richardson finally remembered that he is a streaky player and came back down to earth.

We controlled the tempo, crashed the boards, got in Phoenix’s face from time to time (gotta love that Bayless flagrant, even though it wasn’t really a flagrant), and limited the Suns to only 4 fastbreak points on the night.

All in all it was another outstanding performance from the Blazers on TNT.  The way the year has gone, if we could have played all of our games on TNT we’d probably have won about 65 games this year.

I brought my camera with me this afternoon, so I’ll update this post in a bit with some pics.

Game 5 will be in Phoenix on Monday night, and Game 6 will be back in the Rose Garden on Thursday.

Go Blazers!!!

I found a neat plug-in for doing polls, and what better place to test it out than with our little feud with our neighbors.  (If you aren’t up on the story, you can read about it here)

Who do you think, if anyone, was out of line in this situation?

[poll id=”4″]

For the last several weeks we have been engaged in a feud with our neighbors.  By and large we have always been very friendly with Shauna and, since they married a few years ago, Tom.  There have been some things that she, and now they, have done along the shared property line that have upset us – and apparently us them – but all and all we’ve always been pretty good friends.

That all changed a few weeks ago.  Tom and Shauna are totally pissed off now and have gone from not speaking to us at all, to very sarcastically saying things like “Thanks, Chris.  Thanks, Sue.  Love you guys.  Thanks for being such good neighbors!” whenever they see us.  The words themselves are not at all offensive, but believe me when I tell you that they can be uttered in very unfriendly ways.

For the life of me I can’t figure out why they are so upset, and since I’m none too eager to have another unpleasant conversation with them, I thought perhaps I would post the details on here and see if anyone else thinks that what we’ve done is out of line.

Click through for the story.

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