Portland! I'm In Portland!

The weather here is so perfect that it reminds me of Colorado, and I again ask myself, "You left Breckenridge WHY?"

We came back from lunch and a trip to the International Rose Test Garden (so tranquil and beautiful), and as I dropped my handbag in the client lounge, we heard a loud bang, everything dimmed for a second, and then all we heard was machinery cycling down -- air conditioning units, and printing presses, and the power went out in parts of the plant.

It's so strange to be in a printing plant that is totally silent; usually you aren't aware of the constant, almost subterranean rumble of large pieces of machinery running. Printing presses are hungry things. Inactive presses do nothing but sit there depreciating and losing money.

So we were dead in the water for about three hours, during which my rep drove me around different parts of Portland.  Everyone has rose bushes in their yards, leading me to marvel, "Gosh, everyone has rose bushes in their yards. They should call this the City of Roses."  Long pause.  "Ummmm, they DO."  Okay, so maybe I'm not so bright sometimes.

I like Portland. I could see myself living here, actually, working some okay job to keep body and soul together and bicycling to work and doing artistic and outdoorsy things.

I'll post pics of the funny hotel room, with its mishmash of patterns and leopard and zebra robes, another time.

You know, this morning while I was subjugating myself to the terrorism of the patriarchy, er, I mean being victimized by the beauty industrial complex, er, I mean plucking my eyebrows in that super-magnifying mirror that hotels have in the bathroom (and I always pluck my eyebrows in hotels, because that mirror lets you see all those ghosty little hairs you just don't catch at home), I noticed that there was a phone next to the toilet.

I ask you, does anyone need a telephone next to the toilet?  Is there a fear that if someone calls you might  miss something important?  Is it an ego thing, in which people have to feel, "I am so important that I need to talk to someone while I am taking a dump?" Why would someone want to subject anyone else, even telephonically, to the indignity of splashes and other sounds that would accompany them being on the toilet? And even if they don't hear you actually evacuating your bowels or bladder, they will still hear you flush, and don't you think they would think, ew, that person was talking to me while they were on the toilet? Are there people who actually have telephones next to their toilets in their homes?

Has anyone ever actually used the telephone next to the toilet, or is it something that some random hotel planner long ago got kickbacks for from the phone company and suddenly everyone decided they should do it?

Honestly.