Gum Wall

It's like an undersea coral reef parody
But with a little bit of sticky, and a big bit of icky.
Some sections seem rock solid, some look a bit drippy.
It's got a little smelly and the thought just churns the belly
Of all those chewers, turned to gluers...

___

Imagine one big fish
like the one in the Raw Shark Texts
scarfing all this gum
chomping it up
making a giant gumball
out of all the sticky icky
what about going to the trouble
of maneuvering around so many teeth
and working against water properties
just to blow a bubble
only to have a tiny jelly pop it

Five Each

Five Things I like about Being In Portland (no particular order)
1. Food carts.
2. Bridges (whee!!)
3. No sales tax
4. Friendly people
5. Living situation

Five Things I Cannot Stand about Portland:
1. Lack of air travel options/expensive fares/proximity to airport (this is so annoying it gets two spots)
3. Income tax
4. Expensive housing market
5. Lack of awesome grocery store in my neighborhood. Or even surrounding neighborhoods. ! I will waste away or grow like Jack Sprat's wife due to lack of groc options. (Those are not quite like stock options, but are nearly as valuable in some cases.)

LA Same-bots: even the radio

It was my opinion when I lived in LA that everything was the same.

Everybody was trying to be (a) skinnier, blonder, browner, manscaped, landscaped, toned, tweezed, and whatever else have you. Even the palm trees, which were peppered along at mostly regular intervals.

Everybody drove BMWs, Lexuses, or Mercedes. (Whether they could afford them or not, and if they didn't drive one, they wanted one.) Seriously, every other car it seemed was one of those three makes.

Everybody drove on the same freeways. Everybody talked about the same stuff. (Celebrity gossip, mostly). *this is an injustice and I know it, but I'm being hyperbolic to emphasize my point.

Last week, when I was back in LA, I rented a car. I was on the road for maybe ten hours of the 80 I spent there. And the more I drove, the more my mind was numbed. But before the numbness came a concern for the musical souls of everybody in the barren wasteland that is LA. It has its beauties, but those are for another post.

I was mournful because I had six presets, with six different stations. One was classical, and one was country. That left four. I listened to some classical, no country, and bounced around between the other four stations for awhile. I even spent a lot of time with the radio off, because I felt like Groundhog Day. I heard the same songs...over....and over... and over...until I just started keeping track.

I thought, okay, you'd think the Top 40 were the only songs allowed, that we were in some dystopian society. The music was so repetitive and became so lame in my mind simply because of the overexposure that I actually wished some teenage girl would come along and rescue me and the rest of the teeming metropolis from the horrid music.

Here's the count for you.

Pink - Blow Me One Last Kiss: 10, including switching away from it on one station only to hear it start up immediately after on two stations. IF I NEVER HEAR THIS SONG AGAIN IT WILL BE FAR TOO SOON.

Rihanna: Where Have You Been: 7 (The lyrics to this one are particularly inane, it seems. "I been everywhere, man, lookin' for you, babe. I been everywhere, man, lookin' for you babe." It just seems like, a mix of "dude" and "honey" that isn't remotely appealing. I mean, the sentiment of the song is nice on a flowery level (not that Rihanna ever gets flowery, but I do), but she would have been better saying, "dudney" or "dooney" or maybe "hondud" instead.

Calvin Harris (not the history teacher): Feel So Close: 2 (I actually like this song, so I'm not complaining, though I can only take about two listens before I'm done.)

Katy Perry: Wide Awake, 4 Seriously, enough enough enough!!!!!

Fun. Some Nights: 3 I could actually take a few more listens of this one.

Flo Rida: Whistle - 5 I love the whistling part, but seriously, the rest of it? This is the sad exception to the rule that any song that has whistling in it automatically gets bumped up 2 points on the out-of-ten cool scale. :( It's a sadness.

Demi Lovato: Give Your Heart A Break - 4   I remember the first time I heard this, I was like, oh, yeah, this is totally bubble gum, and then I got to one of the lines and I was like, WHAT? they put that in a song, unedited, for tiny children to hear? I was so disgusted I turned it off and subsequently switched the channel whenever I heard it, which is probably why the count on some of the other songs is so high. Life lesson: Do not be a Mickey Mouseketeer. You'll grow up really fast, always be under the spotlight, have screaming tweenage fans, and go from being all little girl to must-be-as-sexy-as-soon-as-possible in about three months. And then the chances are you'll wear crazy clothes that are (a) inappropriate and (b) age inappropriate on national television, or go crazy and shave your hair and have a complete breakdown.

Carly Rae Jepsen: Call me, Maybe - 3. This has got to be the stupidest song ever, after Rihanna's Umbrella, Flo Rida's Whistle, and all of the Black Eyed Peas songs ever made. (See Dysphemisms post.) Seriously, I understood the term "bubblegum pop" after I heard this song.

And then finally there are a couple songs I heard that I was actually GLAD to hear, but alas I only heard them once each.

1. OneRepublic: Good Life . This is one that is definitely in the whistle-makes-it-better category.
2. Train - Drive By. This one didn't jump out and grab me the first time I heard it, but now, I kinda like it. Ah, train, there are only a few songs of yours I don't like. Like Drops of Jupiter. Maybe that's the only one I don't like.


Gosh. It's late. (I'm on early bird time since moving to P-town.) There are so many more songs I want to write about. So I will, later. But I'm going to make a list of them now so I don't forget.

Mumford & Sons - I will Wait :)
One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful :(
Taio Cruz - Break Your Heart :)
Gotye - Somebody

Chelan in the Springtime

About half a year ago (yes, I am running behind on my blog) I went to Lake Chelan. It's gorgeous.

So I thought I'd share some of its pulchritude with you.

Left: The tree at the top makes me think of the oft-lamented Seahorse Tree. Also, I love how springtime clouds can be white and gray at the same time.
Below, Top Right: A bunch of bare apple trees. And some getting-green hills. And some grey not-so-puffy clouds. And a surprisingly blue sky. And half a stOP sign.

Below, Top Left: Blossoms at the park. :)

Below, Right: The town has in the last fifteen years or so become the Washington version of Napa. (I think that Napa snobs would be very upset at the comparison...but if the grape ferments...)

Below, Left: Low lake. Wonder what it looks like now?

Left: Saw Easy Street and just had to have a pic.

Right: View of one of the bridges over the river.









Left: All that grey fuzzy looking stuff is actually a conglomeration of apple tree branches. Acres and acres of them. From a distance they look like warm fuzzies. (well, at least fuzzies. The warm is automatically implied because I'm me. :) )

Right: Here's another bridge.

Right: The view from my balcony at 5:45 am. (There was a "fun run" that I was in charge of that began at six... Ugh.)

If you drive up the mountain approximately ten miles, the view of the river is gorgeous. I parked my car in the scenic pullout and climbed a little way down the hill (I was in dress shoes, so I was a sissy and didn't go much further). I turned around and looked back, and my car looked like a car ad...the kind of shot they do at the end of the commercial when they've shown the "Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt." in tiny letters at the bottom. 

Here's the view. I can't really do panoramic on the blog without smooshing the pic together, but hopefully from l-r you'll be able to see how pretty it was, even in pre-bloom springtime.

The first one is on the approach; the rest are the 180 view from where you see the car.

 Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It was so peaceful...I think only one car drove by me the whole ten or fifteen minutes I was out there, just snapping photos (some of myself with the view in the background...but none of those turned out satisfactorily enough to post). It was so beautiful it made my heart sing.