City council isn't meeting this week, so now would be the time for Portland's city commissioners to take a freaking break, right?

Well, I'm was heading up NW Couch this morning and there, crouched on the corner of the bus mall in the 100 degree heat, was the unmistakable curly hair and pastel suit of Commissioner Amanda Fritz. She's hunched over scraping graffiti off a Portland Tribune box with her bare hands.

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"I saw these on here a few days ago and I thought I would have time to clean them up while I was waiting for the MAX. I was right!" said Fritz, picking off the postal labels covered in Sharpied tags that people stick to seemingly all of Portland's flat surfaces. "I hate these stickers because they're so lazy."

That's right. Fritz is using the downtime on her public transit commute to work to stage a one-woman graffiti cleanup campaign. And then she had the tenacity to try to get me to try and clean up, too. "Your paper could partner with the Office of Neighborhood Involvement to do a graffiti clean-up campaign. We could provide the solvents and the one good thing about these stickers is they come off really easily in the heat," said Fritz, still scraping away. I'll see if I can fit that into my schedule of excessive drinking and frivolous Twittering.

If you're someone who likes to do Good Things for the Community, Fritz is hosting a volunteer graffiti abatement event in the Pearl District this Saturday, July 10, starting at 8:30 AM. Volunteers should meet at Peet's Coffee (1114 NW Couch). Everyone who helps out gets free lunch at Noodles and Co! Everyone who sleeps in gets 50 lashes.