I was gonna tell one of the guests "Did you see who was staying across from you?

 I was gonna tell one of the guests "Did you see who was staying across from you? That was Noah from 1980's Mtv." I met him in the livingroom as we came home from a gig. 
We sat talking for a long time about the industry, Hollywood, New York. 
I told him where I was when Mtv started, he was appreciating my tale of the fresh crowd we just had at our show. 
"Gotta love a fresh crowd."
 I wanted to tell the guest about her neighbor but I don't think a millennial from Columbia would understandably give a shlitz

Guest staying with us (From the distant exotic land of Seattle):

 "I love Portland. I want to Portland.
 I noticed you have a staple gun. May I walk around posting your guyziz fliers?"
 Us. "Yes indeed!"

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Two flavors of confirmation bias

 I got to have heated arguments with two middle aged women who stayed at our place. They were separated by political persuasion and about 6 months but connected because they stayed in the same room...they both also got their confirmation bias played by a hyper observant clown.
"Obama isn't from this country" and "Most homeless people are on the street by choice." Were the conclusions they wanted.
I don't play that. 
It got heated both times. 
Both times it got so heated we teared up.
This is why it's so important for us to not be employed by the room rental people.
I need to have my own voice. 
My voice is of a benevolent carnie. One who sees the consequences of people's poor perception and conclusions.
I'm full of tricks and I know what people's motivations are almost always before they speak.
My goal is to sus out what they think, have them agree that I understand them, then offer my reality from my neutral perspective.
Then they can't backpedal saying "You didn't understand me." 
 I don't think I know everything, I just have the perspective of someone who has never been plugged in.
With the est. democrat lady (from Salem) we were talking about how liberal she is
and then she let go "Except the homeless, they want to be there." I say "WTF?" Then we spent 15 min. arguing about it.
Eventually she cited her source "The Tv"
I keep digging and eventually found out she was mentioning one person that she saw once on a tv news story. That person said he loved being homeless.
She threw everyone else under that bus over a tv news piece.
It was delicious watching her eyes disagreeing with what her mouth was saying.
We shook hands and moved on. I don't judge her, media is powerful. I gave her something to think about...her own words.
Months later, a lady came to rent a room who is from Orange county CA. 
Some folks were sitting around a table talking about old folks enjoying cannabis.
She jumped into the convo saying she is a nurse who keeps her patients as far away from weed as possible.
Instead she touted the synthetic version "Marinol" as a better way to treat people without appealing to folks who just want to get high.
As the night went on we would discover she didn't think anything about the president or his supporters was racist "He gives everyone a chance"
She didn't believe there were racists in town and if there were they certainly don't have Trump stickers on the trucks.
She had mentioned that she was a researcher so I was glad to debate someone who would have more info than the typical simplistic bumper sticker slogans the Trump supporters typically have.
I was hoping she would give me some good complicated explanations to why she thinks this Trump disaster is a good thing.
It never happened. 
She couldn't tell me why she liked Trump or why she thought Obama was such a crook. She also mentioned how France is under Sharia law
and mentioned other "hits" that were clearly from a think tank round table.
I wasn't a big Obama fan but if she doesn't know the difference, that is a huge citizen fail.
When I told her our friend was murdered on the train by a sectarian violence person associated with Trump flags she told me it was lie.
When I told her about the Hispanic yard guy who was shaken up by the "Trukka de Trump" she didn't believe me.
 When I told her that the only reason I met members of the Black Panthers, was because they were guarding black children from people
in Trump trucks (who were harassing them), she said it was all propaganda. 
She seemed to need to believe I was making it all up.
She insisted that she didn't believe me but I think her confirmation bias was reveling itself to her. For a person who is a Nurse and a researcher, she showed little compassion or insight.
It was delicious seeing her eyes not agree with what was coming out of her mouth. I gave her something to think about...her own words.

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Mother Goose Rock 1

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Olive went to Salem

hustling Pilates. We take any opportunity to make the daily bread.

"Had a good sized show this morning but didn't make much dough. 

So we went-a-vid poking and lost a little more. 

Got home to the lady we have been living with the last few days. 

We met when she came but hadn't much to say.

She is a fitness writer from New York city.

She hired us to be in her fitness viddy."

Our new friend Kerri had to do a video dispatch and Pilates demo for

 her fans back in the Big Apple.

We agreed to help.

 First we filmed funny banter and tallbikes with me,

then Pilates and convo with Olive.

She is a tough girl not into showing her cards. 

So tough she was mad at herself on the back of my tallbike for laughing.

"Damn it, I have been grinning non stop, I can't stop.

 I need to stop frikkin smiling, damnit!"

Olive was breaking Kerri's character too making her howl with laughter as we made her video segments and put them together.

We love when a normally reserved person belts out an awkward belly laugh at something. Adorable.

I made sure to have our camera going too taking stills. 

While her and Olive taped the workout I was crunching out graphics for her. 

Looks like we all respect each other as artists and basic super hero types. lol

Glad I didn't have to Pilate.

I like having abs that tell the tale of a clown who gets lots of free birthday cake.

So her favorite take of the intro she got my name wrong (Django)

 I told her I don't give a shlitz. 

My fans know who I am, 

I don't care what her fans call me.

We wrapped up and all went off in our own directions to finish whatever.

That was pretty fun.

I will try to share Kerri's dispatch as soon as her client publishes it.

Loud house

The floors squeak like mad in this house.
Makes for a lot of racket.
Daytime isn't so noticeable but late at night it's ridiculously loud.
I looked online about shivving the boards below but decided we love the security.

We are pretty loud too.
Clowns are pretty loud.
Sometimes it's not a problem.
The fellow staying with us is hard of hearing.
He thinks we are a riot and encouraged us to ham it up as much as we like.
We been having a blast doing midnight band practice, fake arguing and banging pots and pans around late at night.
He just smiles and reads his paper.

Loving this job.

 Last night we spent some hours producing a journalism video.

 A while back when we were at a documentary screening in a theater. 
We were introducing ourselves to people afterwards, A small group laughed at us as no introduction was needed. 
They were the editors of the movie. They spent hours scrutinizing our face and movements. 
That is the case here.
 Luckily we love Lisa Loving. 
We spent hours lining up footage, matching it with the script and fussing over settings. 
Olive is generating slides and I'm working on music. I can't wait for her to launch this
. "How to street journalist with Lisa Loving". I will let ya know.

I'm worried about someone I don't know.

 We were s'posed to get a guest in our house late last night. Plane was to arrive in the early hours but this morning nobody. I hope he made it. 

The Trumpdown shut down has thrown monkey wrenches into lots of people's lives especially around the airports. 

Lots of folks got vacations ruined by the shutdown.

The folks not shut down are the two mid-aged women who have been here with us a few days. We love them. 

They seem to be having a good time here in Portland.
These friendly folks are best friends from San Bernadino. 
Soon one will be moving across the country and this is their last good adventure together. They have been enjoying the nightlife, booty shaking, eating and laughing. 
It's been lovely having lots of conversations with them about food and culture. Olive was grumpy with me for calling them mid-age (they are closer to me, than you Buddy) but if you know who The Adolecents are then me calling you mid age is claiming you as my own. I'm happily mid-age.
I'm sure these two will be crying when they part ways and if we are anywhere around, FER SURE we will be too. lol 
This morning they were looking at us with sheepish grins. "We looked you two up last night...can we have you autograph?"
We wanted their autograph!
We didn't get to say goodbye and that was sad but they did send us a lovely note a few days later.
At some point of their stay, one of them caught me taking this pic of their shoes.
 I was too embarrassed to mention that I'm writing about them on my blog so I just lied and said I have a foot fetish.

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the scrape. My wife is a scraper. Olive fights the war in myplaque

So Olive and I were doing dishes.

Me washing her rinsing. I wasn't crazy about the job she was doing but I decided I would just take the diarrhea rather than smash the domestic bliss by saying something (because married.)

Olive didn't subscribe to those methods because after buffing dish, we went to brush teeth.

She was paying more attention to me than herself.

"I'm gonna mimic what you do and see if I get all my teeth."

She didn't think my style was up to par. 

She kind of has a right, we makeout a lot (especially for folks who have been together 10 years).

I wasn't hip to her scheme though. 

It made me self conscious being watched so I did a rush job. At the end she said "I missed like 8 teeth copying you."

So I did what a lot of spouses would do. 

I made a break for it.

Didn't work, she caught me by the scruff, sat me on the tub, examined and then broke out the tools.

She has a set of metal dental tools and she knows how to use them.

I gave up and let her have her way with me. She does this once a year or so.

An Olive scrape is strong but no frills. There is no sanding in this project so it takes a week or so for the back of my teeth to smooth out. She isn't gentle dental either, she scrubs them teeth like she is washing a car. All I can do is hold on and try thinking pleasant thoughts.

Thanks wifee.

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Still empty rental rooms

. I got to admit that the Shut Down did kind of give us a chance to deep clean the pad. 
We were amazed at what we found. Lots of sand. It's a "no shoes in the house" pad but still people track in a lot of sand from the coast and the National Forests.
 I thought we were more of a nightlife crowd place. 
We are both. 
Adventurers and booty shakers. 
Glitter is "night club sand" 
but we can't gauge that since we add a lot of our own glitter to the mix,

Someone in the neighborhood clearly wants to make my day.

Just noticed someone made flags for those disgusting "Power ups" that are all over the place. 

I wonder if the people who do this are the same who throw cig buts in the road?

 "Power ups" are what we call little bags of dog poop that unscrupulous people leave all over the place.

Guess they never heard of a "social contract."

Seems like it would be easier to dispose of these correctly (and keep their dignity).

Coffee syringe on the drying rack

This was super funny to see on the drying rack one morning.
It's amusing to see people's bathroom products from around the world but what I see in the dish bin can also be an adventure.

Guests left us a present.

Guests left us a present.
A bottle of Chum!
Yum.

Glad they left it behind but no idea what to do with it.
I come from a small fishing village in South Texas.
I know what chum smells like so I'm not about to open this bottle.
I guess I would for a prank.

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Up late watching the roof

Up late watching the roof (that I sleep on the other side of).
There is a hail of mortar fireworks flying around.
I'm kickin it by the hose.
Crowds of roving revelers are stumbling around. Some hollering, "Happy Halloweeeen!" as they slap each other into bushes.
I'm always tickled by the clip clopping of drunk heels negotiating dark sidewalks. It's like jazz drumming.

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shoes by the door

You can tell a lot about someone by their shoes. All kinds of people rock many kinds of footware.

I took this pic New Year's eve.

Two guests in each room and everyone was snoring by 9:30.

Quite often it seems we have more fun than the guests. To be fair, they are jet lagged and I'm drinking coffee all day.

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Happy New Year.

The guests in both rooms are Americans. The couple we just met have no New Years plans.

 They are exploring  the country. The big concern is what will be closed in the AM.

The two women in the other room look like a party so I expect they will be doing something fun. 

We didn't make a plan. Maybe a bike ride and first cuddle puddle of the year.

Happy New Year. 

Dead fish on the doorstep.

We found some cryptic gifts on our porch.
Upon opening the one with my name on it, I found a dead fish in a lovely box.
Olive got a vial of Christmas scented essential oils.
The fish is a callback.
Earlier this year we did some house sitting for friends.
I wrote a long dry-erase board novel about what happened every day of the two weeks.
In the tale I wove
their fish actually died (from me registering that I fed it three times a day).
I told them on the last day that I replaced the fish with an exact replica.
In actuality the fish was fine until now.
Little did I know that 6 months later I would have the product of my fisherman's tail.

That wuz weeerd,

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