"Stella By Starlight"

This is another instrumental song that had lyrics added later. I'm not sure that this one suffered for it, and I did enjoy singing it. The range is broad, and in a good place for me. It's jazz and easy listening combined; the words are just place fillers, but nicely placed for their fit in my mouth.

Last night it was a computer malfunction and not lack of will that resulted in no posting. 'Master, I grow weary of this [old computer]. . .' Though the very nice people at the Apple store waxed nostalgic over what a fine old machine this. . . was. Thank goodness for my new and huge hard drive, which makes this lovely thing not totally obsolete. I pray that it's not planning to finally, ultimately, die any time soon.

Still, the lesson is: back up, back up, back up. You would think I would get that, it's a basic tenet, learned relatively young considering that I grew up firmly in the computer age. To be fair, I actually had just started to back up the things that aren't backed up automatically (thank goodness for BackUp and iSync): my photos, movies, text files. It would have made sense, also, to get a new surge protector, since that's what I originally suspected as the cause of this current problem. It turns out to have been related to the dead clock battery, but still. . . These preventative things are very useful though. It would have helped very much if I had gotten tags for our dog, for example.

On Sunday I had friends over for our bimonthly crafting group. My husband was going to drop our daughter off at a birthday party, and then run some errands, including dropping his bike off for a tune up. The dog was out while he was loading the bike up, and he didn't realize that the dog didn't come back in when he did. It was an hour before my friend, Maria, noticed that Buford, our beagle mix, was nowhere in the house.

We all went outside and called for him, somewhat frantically. Kaaren and Maria walked up and down the streets. Kaaren has brought him back from his 'walk-abouts' before, she knew where to look first. Maria is very animal friendly, and has had some luck retrieving other lost animals. My friend, Michael, and I drove up and down the neighborhood streets in his car, looking for Buford, calling him, asking every other pedestrian about him, telling them what his name was and where we lived, just in case. Everyone was very nice, but no one had seen him.

In my head was the picture of my daughter holding Buford that morning. She's so afraid that he will run off. I was grateful that she was at a party, out of the house, and I was already planning how to delay telling her that her dog was gone. She would be hysterical for hours, I knew.

Michael and I finally found someone who had seen him, though I kept finding it difficult to believe: this woman, walking her own dog in our neighborhood, had seen him, or heard of him, over by our local Home Depot, one neighborhood East. Buford would have crossed two or three very busy main roads to reach this location. I didn't want to think about that, but we drove over and circled their parking lot. No sign of him.

I called my husband, who had the cell phone, thankfully, and asked him to come home to help look. Kaaren called the local shelter where we got him, and where his chip is registered to. They had run out of forms to update linking the chip to our address, and I had been planning on completing this process later this month when I picked up his next supply of heartworm medicine. He did have tags at one point, too, but they kept falling off, and I asked my father to help us attach them a bit better when we visited them a few months ago. He misplaced the tags, and after finding them, forgot to bring them when he last visited. Such is the trail of many mishaps: long, composed of tiny mistakes and bad luck.

My husband came home, and went out on foot. I dropped Michael back at the house, telling him to get some lunch (I had had such a nice lunch planned!), and I drove out in our car to continue the search. Kaaren was manning the phone. I found Maria and had her hop in to help. We drove north one neighborhood farther, past the Home Depot and south one neighborhood down. I realized that there was little chance of finding him if he had truly gotten this far out. I kept reminding myself that he had a chip, he would probably make it back to the shelter, he was a friendly dog, likely to be found.

We went home. And the shelter had received a call about him! Someone at Home Depot had seen him, a neighbor of theirs possibly even had him. Maria and I jumped back in the car and drove over. We waited for what seemed like a very long time at customer service to talk to the woman I had spoken to, but she could only point us vaguely in the direction she presumed the neighbor's house to be. Meanwhile, Maria had wandered over (to forestall an Animal Control truck from taking Buford away), and there he was: safely in the neighbor's gated yard.

This kind woman had given him some water. He didn't even seem glad to see us, and kept pulling at his lead--longing to continue his advenure? I thanked her again and again. We got him into the car and home, a half hour before we were due to pick my daughter up, an hour and a half after we had realized that he was gone. My day of crafting and gossip with friends: lost.

We made a promise among us to not tell my daughter any of this, there was just no point in rocking her world's foundation of safety and security for this. Maria promised to record it all in the book of things we hadn't told her: along with the dead bird found in the music shelf, and the fact that the Marisol doll that she had saved up for for an entire year had been sold out when we placed the order (thank goodness for eBay).

I was utterly exhausted for the rest of the day, and could accomplish nothing. Today I drove past the Home Depot twice: I still cannot believe that he made it there in one piece. He seemed exhausted yesterday, but otherwise unchanged. I can't say that I love him more, but I am going to get him new tags. And I'm going to back up my photos.