Sunday, October 13th

The last few days have been uneventful. This Staybridge is really nice and seems like a great place to spend a week. There's a nice pool and fitness center, free breakfast in the morning, lots of nice common areas we can sit in and read and work, and our room has more space, comfy beds, a nice amount of daylight, good lamps, a good kitchen with plates and silverware and pots and pans, and a nice desk and couch. A long stay here wouldn't be too bad. Hopefully we won't need it, but things won't be too bad if we do.

The dogs were getting antsy this afternoon, so we looked for a dog park and Ankeny Dog Park looked really nice on Google Maps. The dogs got super-excited when they saw where we were going, and then we saw we needed a pass and there was a coded lock on the door. We thought it would be best to not hang out at the entrance with our dogs so eagerly anticipating going in, and one of the other parkgoers was kind enough to let us in. Then everyone got in and Monkey and Spider made some friends, and everything was good.

For about a minute. Then a lady came by with a whole bunch of dogs including a little toy dog. Monkey has a thing about toy dogs that we are really trying to rid him of, where he immediately goes and pins them down and tries to hump them, which he did with this dog. Then the dog's mom started kicking Monkey, which escalated things, but we were able to pull him off after a few seconds. We tried to ask her if her dog was okay, but she immediately went into full Karen mode, demanding to know if we had a pass, saying not to ask how her dog was doing, and then immediately getting on her cell phone to call the cops while demanding we leave, which we were planning to do anyway since Monkey had made it clear he wasn't capable of being there. Even though she was demanding we leave, she kept following us out of the park, never once putting down her cell phone to actually talk to us, and so we just had to quickly get the dogs back into the car and drive off.

That incident was unfortunate. I can understand she was upset about her dog being scared, but we could tell he hadn't been seriously hurt. We'd have happily offered to pay her vet bills if she'd actually talked to us, but she had to Karen out instead, so I guess we won't be dealing with her anymore. I wish we could have handled things more amicably, but it takes two people to do that. Anyway, it's done with and I'm sure there won't be any long-term consequences from that. We got back to the hotel, we've still got a nice place to stay, we're together and healthy, and have a nice stable place for the rest of the week. Housekeeping was able to come in and clean the room while we were out. It is so nice having regular housekeeping to keep your room nice and fresh. Things are still looking up.

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