Tand Stickor, Omnichords and Baris

A lot has been going on this week with work. I have been in Portland prepping one of my store's for a visit from the Visual Director of the company (read: my bosses boss). Therefore my right brain has been in overdrive, seriously trying to figure out ways to really make Portland stand out to them, as a result, my left brain was pushed to the wayside, making my communication and rationality skills absolutely nil. When you venture too far into one brain or the other, it gets a little off in there. 

There is a very real possibility that we will be moving to Portland in the near future, which makes me so happy. Not that I don't love Seattle, but I just fit better in Portland. It feels more natural to me. Besides, we might be able to buy a house here! So in our nomadic ways Rob and I have both managed to need to spend the week in Portland, sharing the hotel responsibilities between our two employers and using our free time to work on our new musical project...which is a secret. shh don't tell.

In that vein, Rob has been teaching me how to play the omnichord. which I am having a hard time thinking about how to explain it, so I will defer to wiki: 

An Omnichord is an electronic musical instrument manufactured by the Suzuki Musical Instrument Corporation. It typically features a touch plate and numerous chord buttons. The most basic method of playing the instrument is to press the chord buttons, and strum the touch plate. Omnichords often feature preset rhythms with a tempo control which the player may use as accompaniment. Other features may include a selection of voices, and effects such as vibrato and sustain, as well as a chord memory in more advanced models.

In other words: awesome. So he is teaching himself the baritone ukelele, while I am learning the omnichord, and we are practicing beatles songs and both singing, in our room at the ace hotel at 5 in the afternoon. We actually could smell cigarette smoke drifting in from our neighbors room while we were playing. There could be 2 reasons for this. 1: He was really FEELING the music and needed a smoke to help him enjoy it even more. 2: He was so stressed out by the intensity of sound coming from our room he had to smoke to chill out. Either way, we definitely had an EFFECT on him. Although Petty seemed uneffected by the whole scene... he just napped through the chaos.

The second set of pics are from my harvest of Rob's wheatgrass crop. I don't mind cutting this kind of grass. Speaking of which, if Rob and I do end up buying a house we are going to have to look into real NW landscaping (ie: no grass) because i really hate cutting grass, and Rob always wears a weird outfit of KC Royals shorts, no shirt and sunglasses with a trucker hat while mowing, which just makes everyone feel uncomfortable.