"Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

One of last night's happenings was going to Our Town which happens to be Alan MacVey's final show after 26 years of directing Bread Loaf's plays. It's the end of an era with tonight's performance.

It's not a lighthearted show, but it's all about how we cannot recognize how beautiful life is until we lose it. Which is pretty beautiful, eh? The play was beautifully done, complete with scenes inside the theater and out, wedding cake at Emily and George's wedding reception (aka intermission), ghosts emerging from the woods, and a lot of tears in the audience. Sigh.

That stood in pretty stark contrast with Middlebury Brewfest which looked more like this: 

  

 Except it was actually a lot more fun than those fake laughs make it seem. I definitely laughed until I cried which was reminiscent of Marble Brewery on Josh and Kate's last night in Santa Fe. Brewfest felt a little bit like the saying goodbye event which made me sad, but we still have Kate's-day-after-her-birthday event, and the yurt takedown, so I'm not getting too sappy yet. So Brewfest resolved itself into avoiding the pile of dog shit that was mashed into the ground, eating food truck hamburgers, and trying to fling beer chips into each other's glasses. Good stuff! There was also this gem though:

Awwwww. That's the Santa Fe crew plus Sean who is the best addition I could imagine. Plus, how stinkin' cute does Bry look in that picture. :-)

I'm gonna miss this gal. Oxford???

 Other news:
Yesterday there was a wedding at the Spirit in Nature trails. We walked there yesterday morning and weren't sure if the wedding was actually taking place or if they were just decorating in The Sacred Circle, so we avoided it, fearing that Nitsa would bound up to the bride and groom in the middle of the ceremony (sound familiar, Mom). Anyway, it was clearly happening yesterday afternoon as we headed in to the Brewfest. That would be a beautiful place to get married. It's got to be up there with Otter Creek kind of beautiful! :-) I'm thinking their reception was at the Ripton Community house where we saw music last month. What a lovely way to wed!

Still no movement on the easement for our land, and the owners have said that we cannot camp/leave the yurt there on our way home, so we have to go all the way to Carlton. Since we now have agreed to deliver my professor's car and guinea pigs to Ann Arbor, perhaps we can stop and see Molly at the rents' house though! That will be fun!

As we were leaving for Brewfest, we pulled the air mattress off its platform in order to dry out our sheets and all of a sudden Bryan kept saying, "Oh my God, Oh my God!" Then I heard a lot of squeaking and got the dogs the hell out of there. Lo and behold, a momma mouse had decided to give birth underneath our air mattress. The air mattress has a sort of bubble texture to it, so there is plenty of room for a mouse to wiggle in their and build a nest quick. I don't know when she got in there, perhaps when we were walking the dogs??? Or in the night? We HAD heard something on the roof of the yurt in the night, but I have a hard time believing she got in there while the dogs were in the yurt. Gross, bu we know she wasn't there long because we did the same thing with the mattress yesterday. Anyway, there she is, totally exposed, perhaps in the middle of giving birth, and we had to figure out what to do with her! She grabbed one baby in her mouth and was trying to crawl off the bed when Bryan put down a box. She calculated for a second and ran into the box. We took her outside to the shed and let her down. She took the baby and went under there. We came back in to the little squeakers who were seriously soooooo tiny and got them in the box too. We took them out there and hoped and hoped that she'd come back for them. I think she did. I'm hoping we didn't just deliver them into another animal's den and that they are happily surviving in a new nest out there. Needless to say we were late for meeting Josh and Kate. It's always something up there at Mooslamoo. That morning it had been waking up at 6:30 to a ten-year-old boy screaming obscenities at his parents as he walked down the campground loop in front of our yurt. That's a fantastic way to start a day! Today it's mouse babies.