Street Painting, Cat Palace, Aquaponics, and Naked Bike Ride

So I went up to Portland with soem of the people from Mountain Home to tak epart in the Village Building Convergence, this 10 day event trying to make the city more community oriented, blah blah blah. it's really cool, neighborhoods paint their intersections every year, build public spaces out of cob and other natural or recycled materials, plant gardens, that sort of stuff.

So yesterday we helped paint a street mural, that was fun getting messy, and we saw a cat palace being built, basically a tower that cats can go into and play around in with an aquarium and solar powered led string lights, very fancy. the guys property by the way was awesome, with lots of cob structures,exterior walls of the house, guest house, some other stuff.

we saw a guys aquaponics set up. thats where you grow fish and plants together. the waste pf the fish is food for the plants. It was pretty cool, cause it's probably one of the best ways to get fish, other than having ponds or just plain going fishing.

we had dinner and a salsa dancing lesson at the vbc headquarters, and then it was off to the center of town to witness the Naked Bike Ride, held annually all over the world, thousands of nude, semi nude, or weirdly dressed people riding their bikes through town, with police escort to boot. It was wild, and liberating. I kind of want to do it myself at some point. And to come back to the VBC next year, we only caught the tail end of it and there were lots of free or low cost workshops that i missed out on. One mre day in portland and than bakc to the homestead.