Hide and seek

It occurs to me that I've been hiding lately. Keeping to myself, bunkering down at home, generally wanting to cocoon myself at home and not some out for 40 days and 40 nights, as it were. Let the apocalyptic flood come, but I'll be safe in my ark. Speaking of being safe in an ark, I was very pleased to learn today that my friend's wife's family, who likes in Ocean Springs MI weathered the hurricane safely. Apparently they still have their house and their well being, which is truly a blessing. That picture they show of the bridge that was wiped out going into is only a few miles away from their house, so very lucky indeed. Speaking of lucky, K is out of town this weekend, so I have our (hers now) smaller dog, Nacho, for the weekend. I had let both Baxter and Nacho out this morning while I took a shower, but when I came back downstairs to let them in, they were not there. Somehow the gate had come open, and they wandered out. Panic quickly setting in, I began to run up and down the street shouting their names. Eventually I began to circle the block, doing a full loop before I ended up on the street behind our house, and there they were, busily investigating the trail of a raccoon. The guy who lives in the house two houses back found them in his yard, and had kept them corralled there while he tried to get ahold of either me or animal control. I introduced myself, but in the relief of the moment I've forgotten his name already. My heartfelt thanks goes out to him however, as I was concocting all sorts of doomsday scenarios of what could have happened to Baxter and Nacho, none of them good. This reminds me of the time, as a child, that my friend (from above) and I ran away from my parents house because my mom was serving milk for lunch, instead of koolaide that we knew we could get at his house. Our plan was to walk to his house, several miles away, and across a fairly busy road. We actually made it about 2/3 of the way there, which is probably about 2 miles, before my mom finally found us. I can only now begin to imagine what was going through her head at the time. Ready or not, here I come!