Choco-Russian-French toast.

The other day Olive brought home some chocolate sour dough bread from a Russian market.
I decided to try it today betwixt gigs.

Here I'm saturating it with cauterized chicken menses. Chocolate, Russian, French toast.


Scrumptious.
Hope ya got some laughs from this blog
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/


Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

Meanwhile...this kid auditioned for our gang.

Sorry kid, too small. We would like to see a lot more of you. 

Like literally double your size a few times and try again, 

Hope ya got some laughs from this blog
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/

Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

new digs debrief

It's interesting adjusting to our move from the old place. We spent many year directly in harms way. Living by the Safeway bottle return was no picnic but it was all we knew for almost 10 years.
It didn't start that way.
We used to have a vibrant community.
Then most of our neighbors were classed out.
Now all that was left were the new middleclass folks and the chronically desperate.
 We felt compelled to help the people as much as we could but then withdrew when it got really bad.
 Now we have to understand how not to always have the heightened sense of awareness.
The new place offers safty, comfort, we can actually see the stars and have a yard.
But in our heads we are still by the bottle return.
Hope this survivor's guilt fades soon.
An odd side effect of the new place: sleeping.
We used to only sleep a few hours a night but now in the relative safety of our new place, we found ourselves sleeping in and actually being late for gigs. Oops better not get complacent.

Hope ya like this blog
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/

Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

We like taking romantic walks

Hope ya got some laughs from this blog
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/

Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

We moved away from all my coffee haunts.

It was decided that I need to get a coffee pot for me to make it my-damn-self.
I used to have the standard Portland hook-up where it was free.
We don't do many cafe gigs anymore so it was time. I'm afraid we over-fixed the problem though.

I got this mocha-pot from Village Merchant.
It works...too well. In the cafe i get 20 oz.and a refill.
Now it's wide open.
The coffee that this instrument makes is A-Frikkin-mazing and flows all day.
I keep returning to the light like a bug.
This morning I've have had so much coffee that I can now summon humming birds with my mind.
Too much of a good thing.
I'm doing a baking project to help rid myself of the superfluous birdies
...seems like the correct tweetment.

oliveanddingo.com

Meanwhile...we did late night radio comedy on KBOO WOOHOO!

1st night in the bungalow

Olive was a bit nauseated from days of moving and not sleeping. It  also wasn't easy for her to leave the place she has lived in for so many years. 

I'm pretty happy to be a house person again. Apartments life is not my bag at all. It is hard to get used to how loud everything is.

I'm used to walking on a carpeted cement floor right next to the roar of 39th street.

This house is on a quiet street so all you hear is the croaking wood floor "SCRAAAAW" and banging doors.

 I noticed this because I got up to awatch the sun rise and was trying to be as quiet as possible.

Last week we made it a point to savor arriving at our new pad as a visitor.

Now that we spent our first night we can call it home.

The lady who invited us to live here is a real fantastic human.

I can tell we have a lot of the same "Classic P.N.W. bohemian playbooks.

I'm gonna make it a point to be on point being a good roommate and friends to her.

Meanwhile...we took lots of brakes during our clowny day so stop and eat the roses.

Hope ya got some laughs from this blog
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/

Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

Covering over the old place.

It was very sad.
That is how it goes.
Like what we do?
We live out of a tip jar (sometimes chicken sometimes feathers) if you are in a place to keep our sunny side up and rubber side down then feel free to drop off a donation at our website.
http://oliveanddingo.com/donate/
Thanks! It's a great town to be a clown.

As we were leaving our old apartment. Olive said "We had memories of a lifetime here." 
Then she looked at me and started laughing "Actually YOU had memories of a lifetime here,. I agree. 

We cleaned the pad so much that we didn't recognize it. Then we went from room to room with two containers of ice cream each.
 We sat in each room remembering events that happened in them, eating Ice cream, giggling and crying, then we would go to the next room and repeat. 
Most of my fond recollections were on the sexy, steamy side then she would make me feel like a chump by bringing up memories pertaining to family and kids. 
Olive said "OK now the house is telling us to go into the world and be great clowns. 
You two entered the place single and are leaving together as a team, go be clowns!" 
I filled a bottle with the last clown cave tap water and we left never to return (till the next day to check mail and hug more neighbors goodbye).
We just found out a violent altercation happened shortly after we left the previous night. Had we not left when we did we would have been caught up in it. It's why we moved in the first place. We got very lucky. bye dreadful apartment (or whatever name you go by now)

huzzah

Mole looks like a dirty diaper but boy is it scrumptious. We just went to the Mercado in FoPo after our show for dinner. 
I had the $8 mole bowl and Olive had the $5 mole tamale plate. It is so filling! 

We weren't planning on eating originally. 
This is our leanest month. It's OK not complaining, we are really good at simple living and we have other things to stay satisfied by. We own a very sexy form of "poor and famous. "

The plan was to just drink morning dew water from leaves and suck on old shoes for nutrition until the busy season arrives just like we do every year. 
Then a funny thing happened.
 Y'know how sometimes you are out in the rain and just when you think lightning is about to strike $1300 bucks falls out of the sky? Yeah that happened to us. 

We were cleaning our old crib and rediscovered an old hiding place. It had hundreds of bucks in it. 
We were cracking up (literally r.o.t.f.l.m.a.o.). 

Hard to believe it was there many times when we really needed it. 
The hiding place did it's job like a charm. 
One of the advantages of living in a high crime zone is we got good at hiding valuables...like good as squirrels. Glad we found all those nuts. 
Now we can go eat, buy more paint and have some more cash to put down on our damage deposit for the new place. 
Huzzah!

We gotta go Tensions in our neighborhood were growing to a head.

We didn't have the neighborhood watch anymore so the parking lot had became a nightmare of drugdealing and violence.
Every time we came and went they all watched us come and go like hyenas.
Every time we opened our front door they were right there ion a big truck looking right at us. We were happy to get out of there.
To our delight, we learned that the house was an authentic 1922 bungalow.
It was adorable. So colorful, I could see us fitting right in.
Kate is pretty hip and fit for someone who has been around awhile.
Like us, she has a touch of the radical and is very interested in preserving the Portland buildings and people.
We hit it off.
The biggest perk of this situation has yet to be mentioned.
This house rent out rooms. The house runs like a resort. We would have to get used to living with a constant stream of strangers. Kate lives in the basement we will live in the attic/bungalow.
This room

in a wonderful house.

It's that exciting moment. The moment where we knew we were leaving the place we had lived for 10 years.

Refugees of gentrification? Maybe.
Most of our neighbors had long been classed out.
With them went the neighborhood watch and a lovely little community I will miss.
Now it's all classed up, sterile, impersonal.
I'm a clown. Now the scary kind. I'm afraid of those too.
My wife and I are cute clowns.
 Poor and famous clowns.
We gotta live out of a tip jar but it's really not bad. Portland treats us very well.
Our calling brings a lot of freebees, we don't wait in a lot of lines and people cheer for us as we go down the road. Wouldn't trade this life for anything.
Our life is a lot of clowning the gigs to be had in Portland, The Portland of Oregon.
After 10 years the most fun, sexy place I ever lived had become really sad and dangerous. Lots of homeless wars just outside our door. Bikes were getting stolen, people beat up, cops were there all the time. I even had to square up with a few dummies to make my point for them to back off.
It had become untenable.

We got our chance to escape the felony flats when someone saw an ad I floated on the internet looking for new digs.

"You should let Olive and Dingo live with you Mom."
This Mom and Daughter new what we were about.
We had all been aware of each other from the internet.
Funny how you can share some laughs or political rants with someone and the next day you make a meeting to see about living with them.