Yesterday was a busy day, a busy day of fun! The ex was in town to celebrate our 17 year old's birthday yesterday. We took him and a few friends to the Oddities & Curiosities Expo at the Portland Convention Center.
The expo was freaking awesome! There are some real artistic folks out there and the Oddities expo seemed to collect some of the weirder ones and put them all in one room. There was lots of skulls, drawn, cast metal, resin, painted screen printed on t-shirts...There was even a person who made all sorts of skulls (realistic and fantasy) with felt, and they were awesome!
There was a booth with furniture; all size bookshelves, vanities, mirrors, that were all in the shape of a coffin. There was LOTS of animal taxidermy, some crazy ceramics (ceramic decapitated doll head bong, for instance), and even a person that made ornate ceramic doll bodies dressed in early 1900s fancy outfits, with real taxidermized animal heads, like a human body ceramic doll with a crow head! insane!
I could have spent the whole day there and all the money on some of these things.
I did not take any photos though, I was too much in awe of all the cool shit. Also I wouldn't feel right posting photos of someone's art that I hadn't bought. I did get some stickers from Gloomy Grove that I find funny. She does drawings of a ghost (like, in a sheet xD) in odd, real world places. Her business card says: Gloomy Grove -Exploring the life of a ghost-. Cute.
We got home from Portland earlier in the day than I thought and it was a real nice fall day out, so we dropped the teens at the house with some money for dinner, then we headed out to the Hood River Hops Fest.
There were over 30 breweries pouring beer and I think 90% of the beers were fresh hopped, which is always a plus. Fresh hopped beers are brewed with, well, freshly harvested hops that have not been dried. This makes the fresh hopped beers seasonal, with the season being NOW!
If you enjoy beer and have not had the pleasure of sipping a fresh hopped brew I'd highly recommend trying to find one. I happen to live in a hop-growing region in the US, so I'm spoiled, and have no idea if breweries in non-hop growing regions even make these beers.
The atmosphere was great, with two big tents full of people and beers. They even had a table of hop vines on the way in where one could fashion a hop crown.
Hood River bridge 👆
We were able to sit on the bank of the Columbia River and sip some some tasty brews :D
Again, I pretty much kept my phone in my pocket, which meant no pictures of beer. But I did get this snap that the folks in the #shadowhunters community might enjoy :)
