About 20 minutes before my flight back to San Jose starts to board. Six days in Portland, and I pretty much enjoyed myself the whole time. People are generally nice here. There's no sales tax (but the locals pay for it in higher income and property taxes). On the down side, they don't have the same laws we have in California regarding smoking indoors, so many of the restaurants I went to were smoky. The club I went to on Tuesday was almost completely full of smoke (but the music was worth it). All in all, a nice place. A place I could live, if I were dead-set on leaving the bay area, and were not interested in returning to Denver for some reason. (For the record, I'm in no hurry to leave the bay area, and if I were to do so, I'd most likely return to Denver where I still have a handful of friends.)

I'm sure there was a lot more to the city than I saw in my limited exploration of downtown. Being near the river was good and bad– there was the occassional "river smell" that crept up to the hotel, like dead fish or something. I should have taken one of the boat-tours, but I was too busy with geeky stuff.

Today, I went along with gnat and his brood to the Portland Saturday Market, which is a kind of combo farmers' market/crafts fair sort of event, that runs each and every weekend. Lots of booths. Clothes, wood crafts, stone crafts, calligraphy, face-painting, etc. Naturally, tons of pro-pot stuff. You can always find tons of pro-pot T-shirts, rings, etc. at these things. Some booths even had pipes and bongs. I do wonder sometimes, what I missed by never trying pot. But I never wonder enough to actually care enough to take that first taste. I did get a couple of clearance-priced granite octagon-shaped coasters. They're the right width and thickness to use as bases for my figurines, and they were only about $5 each, what I usually pay for polished and stained wooden bases. After the market, rested a bit in the hotel lobby and now I'm here at the gate. Boarding should start within the next 10 minutes or so.

So, good-bye for now, Portland. I'm told that OSCON will be back there in 2004, so I'm sure I'll have at least as much fun (if not more) the second time around.