In the morning, I’ll be heading over to Lafayette Square, the park adjacent to the White House to take part in the Families Belong Together Rally.

I am the great-granddaughter of an illegal immigrant and the daughter-in-law of a refugee who came to this country as a girl. I know the great lengths people will go to in order to reach the United States. And I also know some of the things they’re escaping from.

Jenny’s story is not mine to share, but I will say that she arrived here as a 13-year-old girl who could speak three languages, including English. I cannot begin to imagine how great her trauma would have been if she’d been ripped from her mother’s arms after landing on our shore, separated from her family indefinitely, or held in a cage.

Tomorrow, I rally on her behalf and on behalf of every other family who comes to this country seeking a better life. Refugees do not come here for a vacation. Parents do not drag their children across hundreds of miles of deserts just on a whim. They come because they face unendurable, dangerous situations in their homeland and because once we claimed to be a country that didn’t believe in letting children suffer.

Please join me tomorrow in D.C. or at a rally near you to send a message to this administration that refugees and immigrants deserve to be treated humanely and that we as a nation believe that families belong together. I’m not positive what extraordinary steps will be necessary to reunite families ripped asunder at this point, particularly of very young children, but I believe we should do everything possible to make it happen. The soul of our nation depends on it.

Jennifer Hudson sings the Bob Dylan classic, “The Times They Are a-Changin'” with a choir from here in D.C. (Everyone keeps listing it as the D.C. Choir, but I can’t find any such thing on the internet.) to conclude yesterday’s March for Our Lives.

800,000+ in D.C.

This will be a busy weekend without a lot of down time for us. Saturday, as many of you know, is the March for Our Lives here in D.C. There are also sibling marches all over the country, from dozens across New England to all the way out in southern California and everywhere in between (and also around the world, from Mozambique to Manitoba, Canada). In other words, there is likely one near you. You can join us to call on your legislators to make it so there is not one more death in our country due to gun violence. It’s never been more possible than today, but we need your voices demanding your elected officials’ votes.

While that doesn’t start until noon, D.C. teens have decided they would like residents to come together independent of the national rally, so they’ve planned a rally starting at 9 a.m. on the other side of town. Painfully early, but I understand and it’s a good cause.

Saturday night is Earth Hour, the annual call to cut down on electricity by turning yours off, no matter where you live, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Rudi and I usually spend the evening by candlelight, talking or knitting and playing the guitar (me the former; him the latter), but who knows what we’ll end up doing this year.

Sunday is the farmers market, followed by the annual get-together for our baseball season ticket holder group, where we pick the games we want to go to. A bunch of us are friends, so we might go out for food or drinks afterwards. I also want go to the library; hopefully I’ll have finished A Gentleman in Moscow by then, since it’s overdue.

And in between all that? Life. Laundry needs doing and we really need to do some cleaning. We have a couple dvds that are due back to the library that we haven’t watched yet. I’d like to check on the garden and to wind some yarn and to eat some actual vegetables. And it would be great to take some books to one of the Little Free Libraries around the area. And sleep. Which I think I’d better start doing now.

How about you? What are you doing this weekend? Marching with your kids or your grandkids?

It was a weird weekend. Friday night Rudi had to work, so I told him that morning that I’d make lasagna for supper. I did, in between watching Agents of SHIELD (I did not love the reveal in this week’s show, although it wasn’t anything I hadn’t been expecting).

I slept in both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday I’d meant to get up a little earlier to take advantage of the morning sunshine and to get up to one of the other farmers markets where my favorite King Cake baker was going to be, but alas! I did get going early enough to take the soiled duvet to the dry cleaners and to stop by the bagel place (where in a true Saturday miracle there was not a single person in line when I was passing) and Starbucks for a cup of tea to take with me to the library. I had seen an advertisement for a free play reading, so thought I’d spend the afternoon watching live theater.

If you’ve never seen a staged reading (and I hadn’t until a couple years ago), it’s different from a play performance in that the cast is essentially just reading from the script at microphones at the front of the room and someone (in this case, the playwright) reads the stage directions so you can imagine the action. The play, You Should Run for Congress, by John Krizel, was a sweet story about a former Hillary Clinton field organizer in Wisconsin who, once back in D.C., convinces one of her best friends that he should move out to Fairfax, Virginia, where he teaches high school social studies, and run for the House of Representatives from that district.

It was a very D.C. play, where many of us spend a lot of time poking fun at the nearby ‘burbs and where many of us know people who’ve helped work, if not run, political campaigns around the country. I did not agree with the final takeaway of the play, which is that you need to have grown up in a place in order to know it well enough to represent it, but I definitely agree that you shouldn’t move someplace specifically to run for office. (In D.C., that should be interpreted as you shouldn’t drop out the Democratic Party in order to run for Council as an “Independent.”) But, the play was funny, had a lot of good lines (which I might have Tweeted out if I hadn’t been knitting while watching) and solid actors, and had the solid endorsement of being a very fast way to pass two hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

During the week, a coworker and I were discussing hot chocolate and she asked if I’d tried a shop near our office, which had opened back in the fall. I had not, so after the play ended and I’d checked out my books, I headed downtown and bought myself a cup.

That’s the milk chocolate version, which is accented with cardamom, I think, and homemade whipped cream. It was really good, some of the best I’ve had in D.C. I’m not sure they’ll beat out Baked & Wired, simply because of the difference in the cost/size value, but if you’re going simply on taste, Café Chocolat may, in fact, have the edge. Plus, you can buy other chocolates while you’re there.

Today, on the other hand, was filled with sloth. It was raining when my alarm went off, so I simply rolled over and went back to sleep. I did eventually get up, around noon, and head out to the farmers market. I bought a few things and then returned home through the chilly drizzle, put on lounge clothes and curled up under a blanket on the sofa where I’ve done things as varied as listen to an audiobook, play games on my phone, call my folks, take a nap, and eat supper. I did wash laundry and dishes are still on my to-do list, so I have taken care of a few of the things I should have.

I hope you had a nice weekend, regardless of whether it was more like Saturday or Sunday.

I did not watch the State of the Union speech tonight. I could imagine what was going to be said, imagine how little it would matter, and imagine the sort of person who would find it inspiring. I am not that person and I suspect you are not either.

So, instead I’ll offer you this clip from the 2014 film Pride, about queer London youth and Welsh miners coming together to offer each other support in the 1980s. Because maybe that’s the sort of union I’d like to hear more about, and I suspect I’m not alone.