Odd encounter today on nw Trendythird street.

Among the richest folks in town a broken, houseless, old gent was hobbling down the street and looking real bad. He looked like the wooden driftwood version of his former self. He hurled himself onto a portapotty on NW 23rd and as we passed i could hear "Opum da door!" I ran up "You got it cousin, here ya go...hope everything comes out alright. But he didn't go in. He did some kind of gibbon swing down to the floor and began fishing around the drift papers and scum. He looked like a zombie cat pawing into a fridge. Then he pulled out a cylindrical object and smiled a huge toothless grin. He giggled loudly and hobbled off. I thought it was a stogie. "Good for you gettn some toilet tobacco" I thought. But i was wrong. Olive's observation was better in this encounter. It wasn't a smoke...it was a whistle. The guy must have lost his thing while dropping the kids off at the pool. We are so glad he got it back. Looks like it made his day.

We used to live in a house that rents out rooms.

We used to live in a house that rents out rooms.
Well that boat sailed so now the rooms are being used as drying racks for mask material.
We have to do laundry in the tub these days and the rooms are perfectly positioned. We got some great donations of fabric and elastic yesterday.
All that had to be scrubbed really well before and after we touched it. Olive is getting better and better at making masks. She is even getting better at making them with strings instead of elastic. I suck at sewing. Odd since I took 5 years of Home ec in school (to avoid jocks).
I just can't see very well and I'm not a very neat worker anyway.
Also I keep stabbing myself and complaining constantly. I do the laundry, clean her workspace, cut out fabric and most importantly my job is to lightly pet her hair while saying encouraging things.
The goal is to innovate so the masks take less than 30 min. each to build.
It would go much faster if we had microfiber to sew right in. Till then we are stuck having to make pockets for the masks to hold filters.
Olive includes a template to cut out the filter with. We suggest vacuum cleaner bag material but that is hard to get.
Right now Olive is rocking a coffee filter in her mask.
Every day people are showing up to pick up masks, also every day I hear someone telling Olive it isn't unethical for her to accept money for her work. They have a point, we did just get our income wiped out but still we approached this thing with the mindset of filling sandbags for the village to survive, not making money selling people something they need to avoid sickness and death. Good on ya Olive.

help from above

I was already good at social distancing. Yesterday it was tested when a couple of 30 somethings walked by having a heated argument. 
I'm sure there is a lot of that right now. They didn't see me in my hiding place but I saw him shove her. 
I was like "oh crap, I didn't want to put my hands on anyone today" I didn't have to. 
Across the street some Latino-mericans were roofing.
 I mention their ethnicity to clarify that until Mr.Shovesworth got handsy, they had been happily hammering and shouting/singing in Spanish.
 Now they had all stopped and were looking at him and/or the ladder. 
He realized it was decidedly unhealthy to pursue his course of actions so he promptly effed off. 
Thanks Fellas!

keep our wheels on the ground. :)

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Covid days. Today the last of the guests left.

We had a great week with a lady from Thailand who was in town doing a coffee lab. I didn't ask what that was but she delighted me by gifting a lot of coffee from her work. 
We had dinner together after she made us an authentic curry. My mouth is still on fire. 

She said everyone in her country are very quiet and it's fun for her to see Olive and I always singing to each other and dancing, making out and carrying on. The other room was a young couple from Utah. 

They are technically Mormons but actually were here to get a break from those people. The first thing they asked was "Where is the legal weed?" 
They bought some down the street and then commenced rolling giant joints. I didn't share with them as normal. We talked about people who leave their church but don't leave the church alone. 
Interesting convos. 
Now they are off, the rooms are closed and we are battening down the hatches to protect the owner of our house who is in the danger age range.

Our "shadow roomie" has left.

We only see her shadow as she quickly goes to the bathroom.
Other than that, it was like having someone in your house but never seeing them.
They only come out when you are gone.
That is cool with me. I'm very antisocial so good on her.
It was still odd for some reason.
We finally saw her after 4 days when she was leaving. I was like "Wow, I had no idea you were a black businesswoman from the South.
I thought you were a pair of Canadians on vacation.
So many people go thru I get them mixed up.
When the room got cleaned, it was clear why she sequestered herself for so long.
Her wastebasket was full of pot food wrappers.
30 of them.
Makes sense why she didn't want to interact with the clowns.
I wouldn't either.

6 hours of Portland rent

This lady keeps asking Olive to walk her dog for $5 a day. That is $5 or aprox. 6 hours of Portland rent.
Not gonna happen.
Ironically she was rude to our teen son who has the time and thinks $5 is a fortune but unfortunately she burned that bridge the first day.
I don't think he is fashionable enough for the dog anyway.

Care for a corona?

In the email we got notice that a lady with a Chinese sounding name was coming.
In the comments she wrote "Don't worry I'm from Canada"
lol
We were issued our own hand sanitizer for our floor.
Now we smell like a rest stop. WooHoo!

Young couple from the middle of Oregon.

They came for a weekend in a city that doesn't roll up the streets at dark. They were just as wide eyed as the folks visiting from other countries and middle America. The other night I was out front chomping on a doobie when the guy walked up an embraced me.
"I'm so glad to see you!"
I told him I was glad to see him too. I'm kind of a loner but I'm always happy to engage in some diplomacy. Then I found out why he was glad to see me.
"My wife is ashleep and I was logged out of the house." He was locked out and apparently just walked around to all the local bars pounding drinks. He was tore up!
So he vanishes into the house and I hear nothing from him again until late night.
"BBbbbbrrrrrrrraaaap!" He was going there. hurling his guts out in the bathroom.
Right across the hall is another room with a different couple. I hadn't met them so I had no clue what kind of night they were having. I can't imagine they could be sleeping through that calamitous noise. The drunk man's partner found me and asked for a garbage bag for the barf.
She didn't know I had seen him earlier so she said "My husband seems to have caught the bug I had last week" He puked on as I sat at the table researching boring stuff.
Then Olive came downstairs mostly asleep to go to the bathroom. She found a naked man she never met before clutching the commode for dear life and singing the dry heaving song.
"Ooops, sorry, didn't know anyone was in here , would you like the light back off?" "He said "yeah that would be great, thank you." He couldn't have picked a better bathroom to do that in. The bathroom and the two rooms get cleaned and pro-scrubbed every few days.
On top of that, my housemate chore is cleaning the toilette so I know it'a properly buffed and scrubbed surface for worshiping the porcelain god.
That was pretty entertaining. The next day I met the couple from across the hall. They were a (30 somethings) Chicano couple from L.A. I asked if they were kept up.
They said "Um yeah."
They hadn't been as amused as me. Then I gave them the details and that made them both crack up. The husband said "I'm not gonna say that ever happened to me, but I do know where that kid was coming from.
Hope he feels better."
Yeah!I loved that Tude.

Grapegate!

I followed a trail of clues and solved a problem. I live in a house that rents out rooms. 
This morning I went to the bathroom to clean out a paintbrush in the sink. 
It quickly filled up with water. So I boiled a bit of water and poured it down to maybe free the obstruction. I could see a flash of purple when I gave a look with my bike light. 
So I turned both spigots on and furiously started doing the plunger businesses on this sink. 
Yes! I grabbed an emaciated grape. 
Still the sink was clogged so I plunged on. 
I was getting debris that I couldn't readily identify. 
I seemed like someone dissolved a cardboard box into the drain. Then I started making out that it was food. Former food to be precise. 
The smell informed me that It had already been in somebody. 
We live in a "Foodie" hot spot. I'm guessing someone over-imbibed and then puked into the sink during the night. 
I learned right away that the folks who rent rooms here are not shagging (those folks go to motels) or binge drinking. These cats came to eat. 
I'm more than happy to add another notch on my plunger handle for crazy stuff I have pulled up. 
The most exotic thing I ever found was the contents of a jar of pickles flushed down a Ptown warehouse commode. 
After lunch one day the receptionist had clogged the toilette the natural way. She then decided to add all the pickles knowing it was gonna be up to me to plunge. She never told me why she flushed the pickles. 
It was a red herring but I didn't know that. 
I cleared the situation and reported to her. 
"I found out why your pickles weren't going down...they were blocked by some turdlettes. Maybe next time you should flush the pickles first, then take a dump."
 LOL.

Single serving friends to remember.

Our life is like mice constantly negotiating a maze only we are creating a maze behind us as well. 
That means we change directions so frequently that regular friend relationships are problematic. Living in a house with constant random traffic affords us "single serving friends" that we can relate to but have no obligation to run into again. 
Don't get me wrong. We love our locals too but running into them on the random or to serve a goal works for us while sitting around does not. It wears out our social batteries. 
Single serving friends it is.
Many times we hit it off with our S.S.F.s and are very sad when they go.
They would make great neighbors.
We just had a pair of women from opposite sides of the country come through. One was here for work and the other flew cross country just to enjoy her friend. 
They were only here a short time but still it felt like we were long term roomies. They felt like old friends and moved around the house confidently.
I love when you find out someone was poly-amourous or vegan in the first conversation, this duo gave us one of each. We thought it was charming that they really enjoyed playing cards with each other. Lots of folks would be staring at phones. When they left, we were busy doing a kid exchange with co-parent. It was too fast and busy a goodbye to tell them how profoundly enjoyable it was being co-habitants. Lots of folks meet in Ptown from other places. 
It's a joy to be all up in that.
The other room was occupied by a lovely woman from No-Cal.
We didn't know anything about her until her last night.
She was sad and a bit tipsy.
That is how we learned she was here for a funeral.
An elder in her family had passed away, she paid her respects and now she was going home with heavy heart. It was our dinner time but Olive got up and started trying to make her comfortable. 
We don't own or work for the room renter but we are handy to have around because we are compassionate and very nosy.
The lady had questions of her own.
"Really, you two are clowns? Do ya juggle?"
We told her that juggling wasn't in our toolbox.
Portland has some of the best jugglers I have ever seen. I never saw a point in competing with those big fish.
"Too bad, I got these tennis balls from the funeral."
She pulled out some tballs and threw them at Olive. 
They hit it off by not juggling and talking about life. 
My son and I were cracking up because Olive sounded as tipsy as our guest but she hadn't touched a drop. She is just fun.
They were all laughing until Olive asked
"Why were there Tennis balls at the funeral?"
The lady got sad again.
"There was a little dog who belonged to the deceased. The elderly doggy also passed away after losing will to live."
What a double downer. They soon shook it off and retired to the kitchen to talk about pleasant things.
Early flight so we didn't get to say goodbye...we still have the tennis balls though.

During holidays we get a lot of folks from Othercountrystan.

 This weekend the rooms have two pair of 20somethings from I'm guessing Asian countries like Japan or maybe the Seattle. There is a language barrier but that didn't stop lots of convos. 
One was water coloring last night as we sat around. Found this on the fridge this morning. 
I'm delighted that she drew lips on me. Last I checked I have no lips, just an awkward opening. Maybe she drew us open mouthed. 
One of the other women wasn't at all intrigued by clowns, a huge jar of pot on the dining table or the "no Perfume" rule. She was intrigued that our place houses multi generational people who aren't blood family. "You mean you aren't related to the home owner in any way?" 
I hadn't thought of it so strongly because that's always whats up. "I'm on her Friends list...does that count?" 
I don't think the two pair of guests ever actually met each other. They are doing different shifts of vaykay it would seem. 
The way we are all related is that somehow almost everyone in the house is menstruating. It's a super clean house but I can tell because the trash bins are overflowing with packaging and entering the bathroom I'm overwhelmed with the scent of iron. #goodtimes

"Uncle Joe"became our gargon for any relative voted off their family island.

Sometimes during huge family events like weddings and reunions folks need to park out of town relatives somewhere because they don't have room. Oddest relative usually gets the boot to our place.
They called him Uncle Joe thus so do we. "Uncle Joe"became our gargon for every relative voted off their family island. If he is too much for them maybe, he is perfectly entertaining for us.

It was great having Uncle J around all week. The upstate NY accent really added to the mix. I can listen to that all day.
He was more than happy to hang with us. He said we are not the kind of humans he is used to seeing up close.
"I'm gonna miss you kids. I feel younger and hipper just hangin' out wit ya."
His beer looked like ancient artifacts in our fridge. Usually microbrews are the normal fridge fare. I haven't seen a Coors since the 80's. Gonna miss ya Uncle Joe! We sat on the front porch one day just watching a colorful array of portland people walk by.
Olive asks lots of questions. We found out a fun fact. Uncle Joe's birthday is August 15th just like mine! Only he was born in 1970 and I was born in 1969. Yup. I'm actually older than Uncle Joe.
We took some moments to realize we had very different interpretations of being a 50 year old.
I sat in the back jaw jacking with him last night. I was delighted to share some Croptober surprise from our Uncle J (the high end pot farmer)
I forgot my little tolerance trick while puffing with our new friend. I can puff away at a cigar sized doobie and not really be much different. It's just relaxing to me. But Uncle J got FADED after a few puffs and two Coors.
He had plans to hit the town but instead hit the sack.
I was a little bummed. Sorry man.
I don't like doing that to folks.
Those vacations are expensive. Thankfully he was bright eyed and bushytailed the next day. Good times and handshakes all around.
I hope he comes back to Puddletown someday.

a bit about us

Olive and Dingo from NW Documentary on Vimeo.

rain

This morning two young Japanese women shuffled by presumably not knowing what to think of my clowny self sipping coffee. I smiled and waved.
They waved.
Then outside I could hear them conferring.
They came back Greeted me and said
"Can we borrow umbrella?"
I almost said "What is that?"
We don't use those around here.
It's raining but never exactly a deluge.
So I tore the house apart looking for umbrellas.
Finally I found a crooked old bumbershoot that looked like a dead washed up seabird and handed it over.
They were delighted and took off just as the sun came out. Glad I could help.

Best single serving" Friend

Last week we had a first. I don't tell the guests that I consider them "single serving" friends. That is unless they aren't.
I met my first "Best single serving" Friend.
She showed up from Hollywood taking a 3 month break from her job as a prop artist in game shows.
She walked in to find me at the table pruning a pot tree.
"I guess I'm in Portland now." she said. I hear that a lot.
We started enthusiastically trading life stories.
She lives behind the curtain, we live behind the curtain.
I told her about the single serving friends we entertain. We hit it off so well I decided to take a chance. Before I could think too much I said "Hey wanna take a strange ride on a strange vehicle with a strange stranger?"
Moments later we were rolling down the main drag on my tallbike with her laughing her head off.
"You aren't bad tricky are you?"
I said "I'm tricky but all good tricky."
I rode her around, dropped her off at a bistro and went on with my clowny day.
I was hoping Olive would like her as I did. That night I came home and the first thing I saw opening the door was Olive and her embracing. "Yup they found each other. lol
Our family was there and I was delighted to see my best single serving friend having great convos with our very permanent family. I told her she was my Best single serving friend" and she said "I bet you say that to all the folks." I don't, it was legit.
Then she split. We are now friends on instagram thus voiding her single serving friend status. :) We hosted a hansom hard-hat type
Said his house a few blocks away was having plumbing and electric problems. He said he would just stay a couple days while his house was unlivable. The other room had a couple who were toting around pro massage tables. We were too busy to get to know them.
Couple days later the Hardhat came home from his job crestfallen.
The situation at home was worse, he squared a few more days in the other room.
He works on skyscrapers everyday.
The couple moved on, they said they were sad they didn't have time to hire us for a tallbike tour.
We never offered that so I'm glad our life lends itself to people knowing they can bribe us to do some things (especially if it's something we were already planning to do). So guess who rented his original room again. Mr. Hardhat.
Things at home took a turn for the worst. They had to chase the plumbing to the street, never an easy or cheap fix.He has a new neighbor across from his room. A very smily young woman who is here for a wedding. Her name is Meow!
Guess how much fun we have coming up with reasons to say her name? Heaps. she had some good conversations with Olive.
She is from Bangkok.

We love her. She is such a great diplomat for her side of the world. We would do anything for her. Mr.Hardhat is starting to see how busy the house is weekly even when it's sleepy day to day.
He is also booking more days so we are pulling for him.
Hope I don't have to go down there and construct his house for him.

half of a young couple from Ireland

Last night half of a young couple from Ireland walked out of the bathroom and stood in the hallway grinning huge.
He was only wearing the smile and some boxer briefs. ""I'm in me Boxas." he said before walking into his room like it's a carnival ride.
His outfit was more brief than boxer but nobody complained (especially his wife I'm sure).
Glad to hear they are having fun in the Portland.
b't'w' he wasn't the first country represented in the underwear show.
Last year we had a Japanese fella give us a Funduchi demonstration of traditional men's underwear.
That was very cheeky and educational.
Lots of folks run around our house in skivvies, but it's none of our beeswax unless they somehow say "Get a load a me" then we are happy to sit and be the audience for a change.

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"People in Florida act more like how they teach us Americans are in China."

"People in Florida act more like how they teach us Americans are in China."
That's not a good thing, She was talking about diet, temperament and level of awareness.
She was not looking forward to returning to her insufferable hosts.
She had a magical week here in Puddletown and now has to go back to The Sunshine state to complete an advanced degree.
We gave her a good send-off.
Florida state motto "In God we trust"
Oregon state motto "Alis volat propriis “She Flies With Her Own Wings".

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