The Butcher Sez...: My busy week

Tuesday morning I went back to Baggenstos Farms with my friend Mary Kate and picked about 14 pounds of blueberries, raspberries, and marionberries. I was disappointed that there were no more strawberries. That was what I really wanted. Oh well. I was able to freeze the majority of them and store them in the freezer in Erik and Mary Kate's garage. I should have bought some small freezer bags instead of using the gallon ones that they had. It will be interesting trying to use only part of the frozen bag at a time.

I finally went to the Portland Art Museum on Friday evening. I've been threatening to go for several years but never made it. They have a free day once a month and there was an R. Crumb exhibit so I decided to take the plunge. It was a fairly large exhibit and since it was a graphic depiction of the book of Genesis we stood in line and it took several hours just to get about 3/4 or the way through it. Robert Crumb's artwork is fascinating and seeing his original works, with white-out and pencil marks, was really cool and this took a HUGE effort to complete. The expressions and details were amazing. I have a new and greater respect for R. Crumb as an artist. I'm definitely going back next month. We really didn't have time to look at anything else while we were there and there is so much more to see. Here is the cover and a small example of his work in it.

Saturday morning I went to the Village Inn on 103rd and Stark to see some electric vehicles. It was an informal gathering of locals and their electric cars, motorcycles, and ATVs. There were some really interesting cars and very knowledgeable owners/builders. I kind of lost interest in converting my bike because of the costs and the lack of any real income. I still want to build one (several!) but it will probably be a while before I am able to do it. I took a whole bunch of pictures. Way too many to include all of them here, but I posted some of the more interesting ones. There were a couple of Tesla electric cars there also. Pretty cool, but a bit pricey at over $100,000 each.

We (Erik, Mary Kate, and I) also went to the drag races on Saturday night. They did have a few electric vehicles running, but it was mostly gas and diesel vehicles. I was a little disappointed. It was getting really late and they were still running but we decided to leave before the end. I probably would have stayed longer, but didn't want to lose my ride. The fastest run of the night was about 183 mph and the fastest electric car was about 110 mph. I think the fastest electric car (White Zombie - holds many records for the quickest and fastest street legal door-slammer, currently goes under 11.5 seconds in the quarter mile!) might have gone faster after we left. They had a brand new motor in the car (they blew up the old on the night before at the drags) and were working their way up. I'm sure I will have more opportunities to see it again though. It was still a good time and I hadn't been to any drag races for a long time.

If you didn't already know, you can left click on any picture to see a larger version.

This is White Zombie. The owner has been working with this same car for about 15 years constantly making improvements. Very cool.

Under the hood. The new siamese electric motors clearly visible.

Batteries with charge management system. Very impressive. And expensive. Good thing he has a battery sponsor.

Another electric racer. He was also at PIR drag races.

He also had a siamese motor setup, but not quite as advanced.

I really liked this one. It looked like a piece of junk, but he built it for under $1000 and it went over 100mph in the quarter mile at PIR. Very interesting owner.