It's an honor just to be nominated.

Awww...someone nominated me for Best Animal Blogger at the Bloggers Choice Awards. That's so sweet! Thanks, whoever you are. (And feel free to tell me if it was you.) Dolly and McBeady (and the rest of the crew) will be so proud.

So, I'm back from my trip. How'd it go, you ask? Well...it was okay, I guess. Our play didn't win. We got "first alternate." Which is sort of a joke, of course, since there's no way anyone is going to decide not to go to nationals. The adjudicators raved about the acting, they loved the costumes, the directing. I was named the "queen" of enunciation by one. (Yeah, that doesn't set you up for ribbing by your friends, does it? Hee.) They didn't feel, however, that our incredibly minimalist production really set up the play the way it needed to be. I completely agree, but since that is something over which I had no control....well, I'll just say no more. We did win acting awards, both my fellow cast member and I, and we won a costume design award. Which is very funny, though also kind of cool, since we costumed ourselves from our own closets.

My pet sitters did a good job of looking after the critters. Pudge went to stay with my parents, and my mother told me he sat in a doorway and cried for the first two hours. Damn it, Pudge, break my heart, why don't you? He did get better, though he was basically my mother's shadow the whole time. She actually pulled out the hide-a-bed in the living room, so he could sleep with her, and Rosie, their cranky old chihuahua, could sleep in the bedroom with my dad. Too funny.

Poor McBeady was frightened out of his skin by both my mother and the friend who checked on the cats each day. He was inside the little "cave" where he and Dolly sleep, and neither of them realized it when they reached inside for the food bowl. Apparently the old boy can move pretty fast when he wants to. Hee. Dolly prudently watched the intruders from the safer vantage point of the yard next door. Both of them showed up for dinner last night right on time, and seemed to forgive my absence pretty quickly.

The cats inside the house were not all so forgiving. It took several minutes for most of them to come out and greet me, and it was several hours before I ever saw Timmy. Little scaredy cat! He seems back to normal today, however.

As do I. It didn't take too long to wade through the stack of stuff on my desk at work, I'm all unpacked, and sleeping in my own bed last night was surprisingly restorative. Which is a good thing, since I now have to deal with all the things I'd been putting off until I was through with the show. I need to plant flowers, and weed. I need to take my car to the shop to find the source of the strange new noise it's making. I need to wrangle McBeady into a cage and take him in to be neutered. And I need to take one of my own cats (like Dolly and McBeady aren't "mine" at this point--ha) back to the vet AGAIN to see if we can't figure out once and for all why he seems to be losing weight. (Gah. Diagnosing cats is so frustrating. We've done all these tests, which show nothing out of the ordinary, he eats like a horse and seems to feel fine, and yet he's losing weight. Double gah.)

So, there it is. And so it goes.