THE DOG ATE MY BLOG

THE DOG ATE MY BLOG.
AND THE CAT WAS IN ON IT.

The Author has a dog and two cats. The dog is an 80lb Rhodesian Ridgeback mix named Sunny. The cats are a male named Dudley and a female named Shakti. Sunny is about two years old, with a short sand colored coat and the jaws of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil. A gnawing, crunching, chewing engine that leaves behind her a wake of slobbered-up plastic pieces, dog-toy shavings, and dog-biscuit tailings. Imagine a volcano that erupted daily, sending out tornadoes. That is the level of havoc wreaked by this otherwise good-natured pup.

Like all dogs, Sunny is as guileless as Gomer Pyle. She tongue bathes everyone she greets. She sits on laps and sleeps in bed. But with equal love and intensity, she grinds modern technology and manufactured products into recyclable pellets. Her tastes range from designer Oakley sunglasses to DVDs to toothpaste tubes. Sunny’s masticating mania is well known through expensive lessons. Anything the Author wants to spare from a spit-shredded fate is kept locked away, encased in a titanium shell, or stored high in the air and away from her dresser top surfing tongue.

That third defense option has now been breached. Dog non-consumables must now go under lock and key or be hidden behind the titanium curtain. Friday night, or early Saturday morning, Dudley the cat jumped up onto a five-foot high dresser to sleep. Dudley found some of the Author’s possessions where he intended to bed down and scooted them off the dresser and onto the floor. Among these formerly safe possessions were a comb, a set of keys, and the Author’s flash drive.

The comb and keys were spared. The flash drive was crunched into subcomponents. For the nontechies, a flash drive is a portable computer storage device. They are basically portable computer memory chips. The devices are about the size of a dog biscuit, plug into a port on a personal computer, and can store huge amounts of data and programs. The Author stored web posts, web post research, technical stuff and a couple pictures of his dog on his flash drive.

The flash drive also stored the next three posts for this blog. All in all, over two hundred documents and a couple hundred hours of research. The value of the flash drive was about $80. The value of the documents? No man can say.

A NEW FLASH DRIVE. AND FLEETING THOUGHTS ABOUT A NEW DOG.

The Author replaced his flash drive with a similar model. The march of technological innovation, or the cutthroat nature of Chinese manufacturing, had dropped the price of a new flash drive to $60. Some of the former flash drive’s documents were backed up elsewhere. Some are now just distant, electron-depleted memories. And a few, like the dog’s pictures, appear not to have been worth saving.

But the Author quickly made peace with the cat and the chip-crunching canine. He went to the kitchen, dipped into the 55-gallon drum of dog biscuits, and feed a few short-lived morsels into the gaping maw. And then headed out to buy a bigger safe. And a few more sheets of titanium.

PETS, IF MUZZLED, ARE WELCOME IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!