A lot to report from Portland:

I have been very busy with work. There is the eight to five at PGE making clips from newspaper articles and doing other office busywork and then there is the retail job at Patagonia.

Both have advantages.

At PGE I get to spend the majority of the morning skimming through the major and not so major newspapers from the area while I drink a cup of coffee. So I feel really up on my current events, especially those in Portland. Did you know a local surgeon removed a woman's diseased gall bladder through her mouth...just opened up her stomach, snagged it and closed up the hole. All this to avoid a painful incision in the abdomen. It was the first of its kind in America.

The Bonneville Power Authority lost at the ninth circuit on the issue of providing cheap, subsidized power to privately held utilities...like PGE. The result is a 13 percent, which took effect June 1. PGE also just put a new LNG generator online which means another 2.5 percent on top of that.

But still, I think people like PGE because they support a lot NFP organizations in the city. I also think people are sympathetic because of Enron. There are plenty of employees still running around who are old enough to retire but can't so they stay at the company. I saw some relics in the basement from the old Enron days. My office-mates want me to include clips in the daily distribution about former Enron Execs getting sentenced. I usually skip them. I think they have heard enough.