Here’s a bit of an attempt to catch up. Having been offline since Friday, there’s plenty to catch up on, and I’m afraid I’ll miss something. Oh well.

Friday, after the conference was officially over, I had a liesurely lunch with Ken, after which I took a long nap. Wow was I tired. I tried to go out and read by the pool for a while, but there was a young’un out there who screamed without taking a breath for about an hour, before he was finally carted off to somewhere else.

I inquired about an Indian restaurant at the front desk, and walked down a few blocks to The India House for some very good chicken tikka and paratha. Mmmmm.

On Saturday morning, after a liesurely breakfast, I went off on my geocaching hike. I think that Saturday was about as close to a real vacation as I’m going to get any time this year. I walked about 1.25 miles to Washington Park, where I took some pictures. Also while there I visited the rose garden.

And I found 5 geocaches, most of which were actually very challenging.

I also found a wallet. I pulled a business card out of it, and attempted to return it to the address thereon, but he didn’t live there, so I took it to the police station. I think by that time I had probably walked 4 miles, but perhaps a little further.

While I was in the rose garden, my brother had called with the names and addresses of the various ethiopian restaurants in town, so after stopping by my hotel, I headed out for Mudai (45d32.0964,-122d39.44436). That was another 1.5 mile walk. Very enjoyable little hike.

On the way there I observed Flugtag, which was very odd. Strange people built flying machines (for a rather casual usage of the word flying) and drove them off of a 30-foot pier into the river. Very amusing. You should read about it on their website. I saw the Santa’s Sleigh team, among others. I even got a few pictures, although it’s a little hard to make out what’s going on.

Dinner at Mudai was fantastic. Just amazing. And well worth the hike. I was planning to get a taxi back, but the day was still so beautiful that I just walked back. Along they way I saw this Amazon.com advertisement on the side of a HUGE warehouse. Kinda funny. And that’s about it for Saturday. I have a remark to make about Sunday, but I’ll probably make that as another post.