The CRIDDERS

This past weekend Yara and I went to visit Raechel and James and, among other things, saw The CRIDDERS holiday show. Read on for all the wonderful and fun details.

Friday afternoon Yara and I headed out on the train. Interestingly, Amtrak had reserved Yara her own seat, so we had lots of leg room. The train ride itself was actually both interesting and annoying. For one, about 20 minutes out of Albany the train was delayed TWO HOURS by a broken down freight train! And across the aisle was an older couple, sitting in two separate rows, and they talked the entire trip. Loudly. In fact, shouted probably is a better description. But if that wasn’t bad enough the lady was constantly eating from a bag of chips and shaking it in Yara’s direction. But right as I was getting to the breaking point of annoyance, I happened to meet a deaf man which I thought was an incredible coincidence since the whole purpose of my trip to CT was to see a sign language performance. Anyway, he was very friendly, if a a bit inebriated. He was very excited to see that I knew sign language and introduced me to his girlfriend, who was also deaf and equally happy to see me sign. In fact, they practically carried me off the train in gratitude for chatting with them when we reached our stop. After safely meeting up with Raechel and James we headed off for food at Red Robin. I’d never eaten there before and it was quite good, but man are the portions huge! My fish sandwich was so big I couldn’t even fit it in my mouth and instead had to nibble at it. They’re also quite generous with their steak fries, and even more so with salt on the fries. Still it was pretty yummy, especially since I was so hungry. We finished up there and headed off to their house and bed.

Saturday, we took Yara, Yancy and Frankie out to the pen for some playtime. I just can’t get over how much Yancy has grown — she’s huge! And as you can see from her paws and head, she’s got a bit more growing to do yet. Frankie didn’t play much, but the girls had a good time romping around. I was happy to see Yara being nice with her playing as lately she’s been getting a bit full of herself since she’s bigger than all the dogs she routinely plays with. Yancy still does the crazy fall/rollover thing when she plays, but again it’s good to see her being submissive especially given her size. Here’s a quick video Raechel got of them:

After that, Raechel and I made cupcakes to decorate into lambs while James made apple cider donuts and quiches for dinner. We went and picked up another friend of Raechel’s, Erwina, and then us three began decorating the cupcakes while James fried the donuts. After a quick dinner, we four plus Yara and Yancy piled into the Prius and headed off to The CRIDDERS performance. The show itself was very awesome, though I wasn’t able to see much of the actual signing even though we’d sat fairly close. After intermission we found out there was reserved seating for the visually handicapped, though, and so we sat right up front which helped a bit. But with the changing lights and all it was a bit rough on my eyes. Still it was a beautiful show and I definitely want to go again next year! Raechel and I both forgot cameras, but I took a few pictures and videos via my cell phone. They didn’t come out too well, but you can get the gist of it. One video I took was of the entire (and very funny) “Twelve Days of Christmas” but Flickr truncates playback to only a minute and a half (even though the entire video is there). Anyway, the dogs were both very well behaved during the show. Raechel and I both got asked many questions and I couldn’t help but get a kick out of everyone’s surprise that the bigger dog was actually the younger of the two! We were especially popular with a trio of little girls who had some rather random questions for us, but were very good around the dogs and quite pleased that we each gave them a turn to pet them.

Oh, one funny thing happened when we were headed outside to relieve the girls. As we were meandering through the crowd, Yara got distracted by something and I verbally corrected her with a sharp “uh-uh!” right as an elderly woman was bending down to pet Yancy. She jerked her hand away at the sound of my voice and turned to someone and sheepishly said something to the extent of she wasn’t supposed to do that as we passed each other. I quickly said that I was correcting the dog, not her, but yes she probably shouldn’t pet them when they’re working. All this happened in the span of about ten seconds as Yara and I followed Raechel and Yancy to the outside doors. It was quite humorous.

The next morning we took the dogs out to the pen again to play in the freshly fallen snow from the day before. This was quite a treat for Yancy, who at ten months old hadn’t yet been out to play in snow before. All the dogs seemed to think eating it was the best part, but they did run around a bit. And Yancy and Yara played as per usual. Yancy actually got nice and soaked since she kept rolling around on the ground! James had the shepherds chasing snowballs, which was pretty amusing since they would run after them even though they couldn’t see where to fetch any of them from! Poor little Frankie started to get cold and so we cut the crazy playing short so he didn’t freeze.

Afterward, we obeyed the natural order of custom for my visiting and went to Nita’s for brunch. The four of us sat at this huge booth with Yara and Yancy lying underneath and still Yancy managed to be spread out all over! I had this omelet special that had, among other things, home fries in it! Hadn’t realized that when I’d ordered it — thinking the home fries would be with it — but it was actually quite yummy. And of course, we had the obligatory stuffed crepe . . . well, what we could finish of it. Erwina had to catch a bus from UConn after that so we headed there and walked around a bit until her bus came. Then Raechel and I visited the Husky statue and took some photos of the girls before heading back to the house.

We spent the afternoon watching Star Trek and decorating the rest of the cupcakes. We had some pizza and veggies for dinner, as well as some donuts and cupcakes for dessert. Mostly we just chatted about books and science fiction shows and our plans for the next few times I’m planning to visit and books and Fidelco and crazy Time Warner issues and, oh yes, books. Raechel and I exchanged a couple books to read, which I’m quite excited about even though I’ve amassed a veritable ton of books to read.

Monday morning before my train back to Albany, we had Yara and Yancy play in the pen again. They weren’t nearly as interested in playing as the day before and mostly wandered the perimeter of the fence sniffing and gorging on snow. Raechel did get another short video of them being a bit playful, though:

And then it was back to the train station and home for Yara and me.