A Protest, a play, and pictures

This weekend was so busy, we still haven’t caught up on our missing sleep time or our weekend chores! It was a great weekend, but we definitely could have used another day or two. Unfortunately, next weekend will be similar.

Saturday we spent the day at our Petland protest. We had a pretty good turnout, despite the weather. It was in the fifties and very windy and cool. We took Chloe with us. She started out okay, but then she saw the puppy mill rescue dogs that were also there and wanted to play with them. When Chloe wants something, anything, she barks in a very loud and demanding voice. She continues doing this until she gets what she wants. In this case, though, she couldn’t get what she wanted. The dogs were tiny and traumatized and weren’t really interested in playing with Chloe the very loud giant. Chloe continued barking loudly until after about an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. Mary took Chloe home and left her there with Jezebel (who is terrified of cars and busy streets, so she would never be happy at a protest. He brought Daisy back, and she was absolutely perfect. That doesn’t happen that often, as Daisy is quite…um…’special’ and has more behavioral issues and tends to cause problems and/or destruction. This time, however, she was just wonderful, so she got to stay until the end of the protest.

L had fun playing with Chloe, Daisy, and my friend Melody’s son. Both kids were phenomenal for the duration of a four-hour protest. They played, climbed the tree, helped pass out literature, beheaded lots of dandelions, and played with our dogs. They spent a lot of time with Allegrea, too, as children just love her!

After leaving the protest, we had less than two hours in which to do chores, try to catch a quick catnap (Mark succeeded, I failed), get L’s stuff ready for her overnight at my parents, get ourselves cleaned up and dressed nicely, and drop off our girl and head to Madison. M had another one of his surprise outings planned for me as a Mother’s Day gift. We were so short on time we were unable to eat dinner at one of the places we love to eat in Madison. We were forced to hit the Taco Bell drive thru for bean burritos eaten on the road. Somehow, miraculously, I ate that whole burrito in the car without spilling any of it down the front of my chest. That doesn’t often happen, so I appreciate when it does happen every blue moon or so.

We arrived at the Bartell Theater with plenty of time to spare. M had tickets for us to see “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” We have never been disappointed by the quality of a show at the Bartell, and this performance was no exception. It was only the second night of the show, but the company put in a fantastic performance. We particularly enjoyed the actor who played “Chief”.

When we got home late that night, we were both still quite tired, but spent a while hanging with our animals. We were gone so much during the day that we were really missing them. I was up way too late again. I just couldn’t get to sleep very well or stay asleep the past few nights, so I ended up being awake until around 4 both Friday and Saturday nights. Sat. night, I just gave up on sleeping and went downstairs to hang with Dej & Joe after they got home at around 3.