I'm in Portland now, staying at my sister's house. The conference ended on Saturday. Then the group I was with went to the Squoomish waterfall, about an hour's drive east of Seattle, for a short hike. In the late afternoon, I checked out the Space Needle and the Science Fiction museum (sort of lame, but I got a neat Barbarella T-shirt).

Seattle is a beautiful city, and I was lucky enough to be able to visit it when the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Sunny and in the 80s or 90s the entire time I was there. Scheduled to be the same for the rest of my state in Portland, although today is a bit too hot with a high in the 100s. Back home, it has been raining and miserable.

Yesterday, I drove to the temperate rain forest on the Olympic peninsula and did a small hike. They get over 140 inches of rain a year there. I managed to be there on one of their non-cloudy days. It was gorgeous. The rain apparently makes everything grow enormous. There were lots of trees that were over four feet in diameter and 200 feet tall. Even the clover grew bigger. I saw some clover that looked exactly like the ones from my yard except the leaves were about nine times as large. I like to eat this type of clover when I find it on my yard (it has a slightly sour limey taste), so I tried a few of these and they tasted the same. I learned four trees (sitka spruce -very tall, big leaf maple - like our eastern maples with very big leaves, western cedar - neat red, peely bark, douglas fir - deep bark furrows and cones with three pointed bracts, and western hemlock - very similiar to eastern hemlock, needles softer and variable in size), one wildflower (foxglove - very pretty purple bells, grows everywhere), and fern (swordfern - looks a lot like Christmas tree fern in the east).

At the conference, Matt Perry from NBC's "Friends" gave the closing talk about his fight with addiction. The dude is a serious alcoholic and prescription drug misuser, who has only been clean for a year and a half. He was an addict the entire time he was on "Friends". He wasn't the best speaker at the conference, but in some ways he was the most disturbing. I looked at his IMDB profile, and it's amazing that he has been in so many movies and TV shows while at the same time he was getting drunk or high every day.

Anyway. There was something odd about the way he came across. I can't quite put my finger on it, but for some reason I came away with the feeling that he might not yet be done with his addiction. He was very nervous and twitchy speaking up there. My clients get nervous in front of the court, but they aren't trained actors, and I would say that a lot of them are more relaxed speaking in public than Perry was. He kept touching his face, and glancing to his side, and for some reason he didn't sound like he had found anything to replace what the drugs and alcohol were giving him. I hope I'm wrong, and I'm an attorney, not a drug specialist, and I don't have a drug or alcohol history to compare his behavior with. I am a person though that has to rely on his gut to read people a lot, and my gut read him as a person who still had significant issues.