My house smells like Sunday

I have a pot roast simmering on the stove, and my house smells like Sunday.

I don't suppose we really had pot roast for lunch every Sunday when we were kids, but that's the strongest memory I have: that wonderful salt-and-peppery smell and the snapping sizzle as  Mother seared the roast just before we left the house for Sunday school and church, and then the warm, rich smell when we came back a couple of hours later.

We pretty much tumbled out of the car and into the house to go change out of our "church" clothes while Mother readied the mashed potatoes and gravy. I have memories of salad and something green—I suppose green beans or peas or something—most of the time, but Sunday for me was pot roast and mashed potatoes and gravy. Anything else was just extra.

From my perch among the riches I  have, I can hardly imagine how Mother fed a family of seven on one roast that was probably not bigger than the one in my pan—and then had enough left over to drown in a thicker gravy or simmer with a bit of barbecue sauce or chunk into a hearty soup for supper on Monday—but somehow she always did. And I remember liking the roast the second time around every bit as much as I liked it the first.

Mine won't taste as good as Mother's, I'm sure. I got started okay, but then when I had the pan too hot, I hit the wrong stove button to turn it down and inadvertently turned on a different burner instead. Fortunately, nothing burned except one side of the roast, and maybe simmering it a while will sort of even that out.

And I've never been able to replicate her gravy quite the way she did it, so we're likely to have something closer to "au jus" than what I remember, but that will be okay.

I'll like our potatoes better: Number One Son and I will leave the skins on (no instant potatoes in our house!) and leave them a little bit lumpy (so they don't feel like they came out of a box). I remember Mother pulling potatoes out of the pan and whipping them up with her old yellow Mixmaster to get them light and fluffly, and one way I've always rebelled, I guess, is that I exalt the lumps that boast the "real," hearty, original potato.

And I have no clue what we'll scrounge up for the "green" on our plates, but I know we'll have to find something. I've never really glommed onto the fancy new "food pyramid" or two that have come into vogue in recent years, but I still try to keep an eye on the "basic four," so our protein and starch will obviously have to share space with at least one vegetable.

I'm not dragging out Mother's old gold-rimmed china for dinner tonight, and I won't be drinking tea from her goblets. It won't be quite the same on my stoneware and plastic cup, but I can tell from the smell wafting from the kitchen that our meal will be just the ticket on this slightly chilly evening.

And I'll go to bed in a house that smells like Sunday.

Shrek’s dad

The current occupant of the extra room upstairs is the son of a couple who have determined that their life’s mission is to serve the needs of the people of Swaziland, where 50% of the population tests HIV positive. Shrek’s dad is an emergency care doctor who is well-qualified to minister to both their medical and their spiritual needs; his wife teaches the children English, helping them develop reading skills by studying from the book of Mark.

Dad has been back in Texas for several days now on something of a sabbatical and fund-raising mission. Since the home they built to their own specifications on a piece of land large enough to breed horses hasn’t sold in the months since they left for their new life in Swaziland, he moved back into it to camp out for the next several weeks and have a headquarters for his fund-raising opportunities.

Shrek and Number One Son have gone out to visit dad several times and to clean up the “guest house” on the property so Shrek can move into it; he'll be the local caretaker until the place sells. Sunday night dad invited us out for dinner there, ostensibly to thank NOS for his help and me for boarding Shrek for the past several weeks, but likely also to give dad some company; rolling around in that big, empty house for several days is probably plenty to make him lonely when he’s used to having a wife and busy life around.

Dad is 78 but in excellent health, and he was proud to show off his cooking skills on his classy convection stovetop, quickly sautéing a salmon steak and a potful of mixed greens. The guys disappeared for most of the time he was cooking (I suspect pursuing their connections with coffin nails), so I asked dad about his story. I found out about three older half-brothers I hadn’t known Shrek had, along with several amusing stories about how dad and his wife had wound up together (although surprisingly I didn’t find out much about Swaziland).

The boys drifted back in time to eat but disappeared before time to clean up. Dad continued his story until about the time I was ready to call a halt to it, which was also about the time the boys showed back up to “rescue me” from dad’s long-winded tale. I played along and was happy to get home, whether I had been “rescued” or not.

Yesterday was my long day at the office—my class meets at 5 and lets our around 6:30—so I was expecting NOS to take care of supper for me. He called to let me know dad had invited Shrek and him back out to eat and assured me that he’d bring home a corner of his steak if I didn’t get home in time to go with them. As it turned out, I had several items to handle before I could leave the office, so I pulled into the driveway just as they were coming out the door. They piled into my car and off we went.

This time I knew about dad and the long-winded stories, and I was already tired from the day at the office, so I was all set to watch for opportunities to extricate myself shortly after we ate. I even had a good excuse: it was late, I was tired, and I needed to get my rest!

True to form, as soon as dinner was over, the boys lit out to light up, so I was left visiting with dad. This time the conversation turned to writing poetry and some poems he was proud of that his wife had written. Obviously, I really needed to see her work, so when the guys came back in, dad got Shrek to help him hook up his printer so he could print them out for me.

While they solved the computer problems, NOS went quietly about cleaning up the kitchen. He couldn’t locate dish soap, but he figured a good rinse with hot water would be at least a head start, so he happily worked on scrubbing out the stuck-on residue from the cooking pans. He also splashed out the dishes we had used for dinner, and I had dad plenty wound down to let us go.

In one of his rare shows of energy, Shrek decided he could help dad out by rinsing out the remaining dishes littered about the kitchen, so he piled up a stack of gently-used Styrofoam plates and some plastic glasses and started rinsing and wiping them. Since I was eager to go, I felt as if he took interminably long times to rinse each plate, but then he started the cups.

Keeping in mind that he hadn’t located soap, about the best he could hope for was a thorough rinsing, which by my definition entails splashing a bit of water into the bottom of the cup, swishing the cup a bit, wiping the lip, and flashing back under the water. If I have more than one or two to wash at my house, I fill a sink with  enough water to swish them out, and I often drain and refill it to rinse.

Not Shrek. He set the faucet to spray and patiently waited as it slowly filled each glass. He wiped blindly around the rim, emptied the water, then filled the cup again to rinse it. Each cup took forever, and he “washed” a dozen or more that way. (I was leaning on the counter next to a bottle of dishwasher soap. I handwash dishes at home because NOS and I usually accumulate a couple of plates and glasses and a pot that can’t go in the dishwasher; for this pile of stuff, I would definitely have cranked up the machine.)

Dad had plenty of time to print not only the poem that I just had to read but to locate, print, and tell me the story behind at least two more. He admitted he was prejudiced about their quality because they were written by the wife that he adores; I thought they were okay but certainly not remarkable. Of course, I was tired and I wanted to go home, so I might have been biased, too.

When Shrek finally had "washed" all the dishes he saw, we started making our way to the door—now already after 10 o’clock. As soon as we got out of earshot of the house, the boys started apologizing again for dad’s long-windedness.

“Dad?” I asked. “You’re blaming dad for this? Baloney!”

Huh? Dad was the one telling the story, wasn’t he?

“Yeah, but last time I was finding out interesting stuff, and I could have left whenever I wanted to. Tonight, I didn’t want to make dad feel like some woman was coming into his home and cleaning up after him, so I stayed out of your way.

“The problem is not that dad was telling too many stories. You guys don’t know how to wash dishes!”

Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad...Thursday?

If I fall asleep typing on this entry, it will be because I didn't get much sleep last night. Yesterday was weird all day long.

It started out normally enough: I got up, piled into my lounger with a big stack of papers to grade, and set about my day. Then the phone rang.

The call was innocuous: I had an appointment with a doctor who needs to be out next Thursday, and could I move to a date when he could actually be there? Sure, probably—but I have to check my calendars, both of which are on my computer, to be sure I pick a time when I don't have something else lined up.

The computer came up quickly enough, the times I had available matched times when I could expect the doctor to be there, and that problem was solved. It was annoying—I had been planning other activities around this appointment for some time—but it wasn't a crisis.

Since I had the computer up (the main reason I don't usually open it in the mornings), I took a quick look at my email; on Wednesday I had skimmed a message from a consulting client that I probably should answer before it got cold, and how long could that take?

The project is a writing manual. The client had approached me because she was a former student, and she asked me for a  manual that reflected the way I teach my classes. We had dithered over it a bit back in the spring, and I had sent her a draft that did the best I could to match my philosophy with her outline and other comments. Her response was that it wasn't exactly what she wanted, but she'd need some time to go through it and communicate her needs.

Obviously she had found the time: nearly nothing she sent back is the way I sent it, and in several places she had written that she expressly did not agree with my directions, so she had substituted her "better" way. 

At first I was pretty ticked off; after all, she had said she contacted me because she wanted to teach her subordinates my philosophy, yet her response to my draft was pretty clearly that she didn't want my ideas at all but wanted to promulgate the same bad ideas I try hard every day to combat. I was ticked off, but I had papers to grade (and students to try to teach what I consider the "better" way), so I shut down the computer and went back to work. My stomach was pretty knotted up with frustration, but I was determined to "power through."

I popped into the office to meet with students and handle some issues there, then came back home—still feeling pretty irked with my client—and checked my RSS feeds. Roger Ebert was up on the new Clint Eastwood movie about "the hereafter" (whatever, Ebert says, that is), and spent a lot of his space on the phenomenon of "psychics." Oddly, that finally eased my knotted stomach: as Ebert says, psychics pretty much start with "routine" possibilities and then follow the lead of their suckers to tell them what they need to know. 

I figure I can do that: I can clean up what the client sent me back, respond to her few remaining concerns, and then negotiate until she gets what she wants. This is a contract job, so I never considered that the document would have my name on it, and if the question comes up, I can merely stipulate that it cannot. End of that problem, and I felt all better.

For a little while. The house pest who has been inhabiting one of my upstairs bedrooms was out for a few hours to eat supper with his father, who is in town on a break from his mission trip to Swaziland—great opportunity for me to run upstairs and use the printer that lives in that room. I've had a package waiting for postage for several days now, but I hadn't gotten to the printer to be sure my postal service shipping label printed correctly. 

Shrek hadn't brought down any of several items I thought should have printed lately, but I didn't think about checking my printer drivers to find out whether the wireless connection was working; the connection is usually pretty reliable, but something about this computer and that printer means that sometimes the printer just decides that it's not online, and jobs pile up without ever printing. 

I grabbed the laptop and the package and headed up to the room where I was hit in the face by a wall of hot air that almost knocked me down. 

I've had the air conditioners off and the windows open downstairs for most of the last month because (a) the weather has been balmy and cool and I adore the smell of fresh air in the house and (b) my August utilities bill was about 60 bucks higher than any I remember getting in more than 30 years at this location. On top of that, the upstairs condenser had had a part go out that surprised me since the downstairs condenser is pretty much operating on original parts after 30 years; the upstairs one is probably less than 15 years old. The happy coincidence  of cool weather in September meant that the electric bill dropped by well over $100 for the month and had I enjoyed the fresh air.

But one step into that room explained to me simultaneously why my bill had been so high and why we had had a steady stream of condensation pouring off the upstairs cooling unit for much of the summer: Shrek's powerful computer, huge monitor, big flatscreen tv, gaming system, and gosh knows what else combined to make the room an oven, and cooling that had taken about all my air conditioner could do. I suspect he never turns any of it off.

My initial instinct was to feel bad for Shrek for having to live in the heat of that room, but then I remembered that he hasn't paid rent—either in dollars or in kind, as I had asked when he moved in—and he hasn't made any significant, visible effort to find work or to extract himself from the space for useful endeavor. Maybe if I just let him sweat, he'll get up and move. He seems to be gaining weight since he got here, so sweating is pretty clearly not causing him to waste away.

I pulled the heavy curtain back from the window, set up the laptop near the printer, and ducked into the closet to get the postal scale so I could tell the post office what my package weighed. If I had doubted that the heat was the equipment before I opened the closet, I didn't doubt it afterward; the closet was cool and pleasant. I stepped into Number One Son's room across the hall just to confirm that, and even with the window mostly closed, it, too, was quite comfortable. 

I plopped my package on the scale, dug out some shipping labels from their cubby, and logged in to fill out the mailing form. Except that the postal service wouldn't let me: the password my computer had memorized wasn't working. After a couple of tries, I gave up and clicked the "forgot password" link, which assured me the new code had been emailed spontaneously. 

Not to me, from what I could tell. I felt sort of bad about sitting in Shrek's "space," even though it's in my house, so I was growing impatient when the email hadn't arrived after several minutes. 

And then I remembered that the current email I use isn't the only one I've ever had, so I rolled back to my last email address (which opened with my old password, thank goodness), and found my temporary code. When I plugged it into the slot and was prompted for a new password, I found the problem: the old password had met the current security requirements at some time, but those had been changed, so my password had to change to match. While I was at it, I updated the email address.

Finally I thought I was ready to print, so I finished filling in the necessary blanks (the website does a fine job of managing my address book, so that was easy) and clicked the Print button.

Nothing. No indication on the laptop that I had a problem, and not a sound out of my printer. I mashed on the power button to try to restart the printer, but that did nothing. I unplugged the printer and plugged it back in, nodded along with the standard messages that that's no way to treat an otherwise well-behaved printer (or so it thought), and waited while it cycled through its warm-up routine. And waited.

Still nothing. Thinking maybe the printer had disconnected itself from the internet, I went through the connection wizard and waited.

Nothing. Back through the whole process again: mash power button, unplug, take the chiding, reconnect to the internet....

Okay, so maybe we need to try out the printer. Press the scan button. No, that's wrong; make it the copy. Printer clicks and cackles, then tells me it's out of paper. No it's not; I just refilled the tray. Pull the tray out and jam it in again. Nothing. Pull the tray out, add a bit more paper (but not much or it will jam from overfilling), snap it back in. Nothing. Open everything that can be opened, blow on it (yes, it has cobwebs in it), twiddle with anything that looks interesting, slam it all back together again. Aside from the insistence that it's out of paper (and, yes, I know I need to buy three new cartridges of ink), nothing. 

So maybe the problem was is in the computer. I pull up the printer screen and check its messages to find out that—duh—the printer appears to be offline, and it has been for weeks (which explains why Shrek hasn't come downstairs lately with anything I've printed). I tell it to delete all previous jobs. 

Nothing. It won't print, it won't delete, it won't do anything. It will, however, be deleted. Obviously, I couldn't just "delete" it and make it go away; I wound up "deleting" and "adding" it about four times before I finally got that right. But the printer still did nothing.

By this time Shrek was back from supper and offering to help. (He is, after all, trained to do at least some computer repairs, and he built his behemoth computer from parts.) First he reconned the can of air spray from downstairs and let me spray out everything I could in the system, then he took over while I went down to eat the supper NOS had cheerfully prepared for me. 

About the time I finished eating, Shrek announced that he had gotten the printer working (he found a couple of "wheels" that didn't seem to be turning and wiggled them until they started up again; I figure they had cobwebs in them, too), and by that time I had deleted and added enough drivers to think it might just work. Which it did. One little printing job took me an hour or more to do, but it was done and I could relax. 

Sort of. 

Back downstairs, I decided I'd had about all the fun I wanted for one night with the computer, so I shut it down and went back to my room, where I could pile into bed with my newspaper/crossword puzzle and forget the frustrations of the day.

Temporarily.

NOS had started a load of laundry while he was cooking supper, and he popped into the laundry room next to my room to switch the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Except that they were still in a tubful of water in the washer. And the laundry room light wouldn't turn on.

Surely this was a matter of a flipped breaker, so he shoved aside the clothes in my closet to flip it back on.

Nothing. 

That couldn't be right, so I moved him over and flipped it myself. Twice. To no avail; it just wasn't going to reset.

This is a fairly new washer/dryer set. I have the old dryer in the garage because I had passed that set to Soldier Son while he was in an apartment, and he brought the dryer back when he moved back home. But he had donated the washer to a friend's mother for letting him stay at her house while he was getting set up in a job in Houston, and I don't know whether he's supposed to get it back again or not. But this one definitely wasn't working.

Since the breaker was off, NOS figured the problem was just in the power system, so he grabbed a flashlight and made his way through the dark garage to where he had last seen a big extension cord. (We're assuming the power loop that is out operates the washer, the utility room light, and the garage light. We know it doesn't operate the dryer—which requires different voltage—or the garage door opener or the "outside" refrigerator. The light on the garage door opener isn't working, either, but that appears to be a burned-out bulb—and I don't seem to have another one in the house.)

NOS had to pull out the dryer to unplug the washer, but since it was empty, that was fairly simple. He pulled out the plug, hooked it into the extension cord, and took the other end of the cord down the hall to plug it in.

Nothing. 

The outlet he had picked was in the entryway (20 ft beyond the one in the hall next to the laundry room), so it could, I suppose, be on the circuit with the emergency breaker in the bathroom. He fiddled with that breaker until he got frustrated and decided to take a coffin nail break. In a moment of indulgence, he allowed SS's dog to go out with him. We don't trust Tank, so NOS had him on a leash.

Which broke.

And Tank took off merrily across the neighborhood.

This time, though, the neighbors across the street had their daughter's two dogs in the pen behind their house, and the racket from barking dogs was a pretty clear indicator of where Tank would be. So NOS snuffed his butt, poked his head in to let me know where he was headed, and took off across the street. I popped out to see how the hunt was going and routinely locked the door behind me when I came back in—locking NOS and Tank out when they got back a few minutes later.

NOS isn't an electrician, but he's a pretty good mechanic, so he went methodically about trying to figure out where we had power that might operate the washer, since it only needed a standard socket. The night light he initially tried for testing sockets is light-activated, so it's not really reliable for testing power, but he found SS's Marvin the Alien one, which works like a charm. He stuck it into every socket near the laundry room, and finally he stuck it into the one beside the washer.

Which worked. 

So having survived the frustration of the client's dissatisfaction, the problems with the printer, the power problems, and the runaway dog, I was ready to call it a night. I didn't fall asleep right away, though, so when I heard the washer finish its cycle, I slipped from bed to the laundry room and shifted the clothes into the dryer in hopes that NOS would be able to get a good night's sleep and wake up to clean clothes for work in the morning.

An hour later, I was still awake.

And an hour after that.

I know that I did eventually sleep sometime because of the weird dream I had. I can't imagine where I thought I was, but a few hundred feet away from me was a big building with a dome, like one of the older buildings on the campus where I teach, although something in the dream made me think it was a capitol of some kind.

I pass the building on our campus periodically, and my classes were in the building next to it when I was in graduate school, and I've been to our state capitol often enough that a building like that was no particular surprise.

The surprise wasn't the man in a trench coat walking toward the edge of my field of vision between me and the dome, although I couldn't much relate to the sort of slushy, snowy rain.

What I didn't understand at all was the "landscape" between me and the dome that looked like rows of hyphens and capital Ls:

-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--

-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--

-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--

-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L-- L -- L--

No buildings, no streets, nothing remarkable except for a shrub here and there, and hyphens.

And every hour or so, I rolled over to check the time and found out that, yep, I was pretty much still awake.

All night long.

Food fight

The Tank has always been a picky eater.

Okay, "picky" might not be the best word, but it's the best I can come up with. When Soldier Son first found him at the local shelter, Tank was pretty much skin and bones. He had apparently run away from his previous home (easy enough to figure out if you know how high he can jump and how easily he gets out of fences), and he may not have eaten much after he got to the shelter. He weighed in at about 40 pounds at maybe 4 months old, but his obvious ribs and mournful eyes definitely made him look pitiful.

When SS got him back to the apartment where he was living with a roommate with a greyhound, the guys experimented some to find that Tank seemed to be happiest with a big bowl of food always down in the kitchen floor so he could eat whenever he wanted to.

That hadn't been my routine with my little Alpha Bitch; I had heard for years that dogs will eat until the food is gone, so their person's job was to be sure they got the right amount of food during a day in one or more carefully measured servings. What had been working for AB and me was that I put her in her kennel with her day's ration of food and a bowl of water, and she downed her food sometime between the time I left for work and the time I got back home.

Not so Tank when he moved in with me several months after SS got him. I tried, honest: I got a special big food bowl for it, filled it to the top, and put it in his oversize kennel with him and a bowl of water. And a cookie, just for good measure.

For days, I came home to find food all around his kennel and a dog who appeared to be quite pleased with his handiwork. Me, not so much.

I caught him red-handed (mouthed?) one day when he was happily "sweeping" his food bowl clean with his favorite stuffed tiger in his mouth. Aside from the fact that I didn't know dogs understood the concept of "tools," I was pretty sure it was time to give up on giving him food in the kennel.

We didn't own a food bowl big enough to stay full for any length of time with two dogs in the house, so I bought two galvanized gallon buckets, filled one with food and one with water, and hoped AB wouldn't turn into a pot-bellied dog with food available all the time.

A few weeks ago, I thought I'd been caught changing dog food brands when I came home and saw that Tank had turned the bucket over and sloshed food over a good portion of the kitchen floor.

I found an adorable bucket at the local WallyWorld that had several apparent advantages over the previous one: it had a larger base so it would be harder to dump over; it was painted red, white, and blue for Independence Day; and it was on sale cheap. I snagged it and placed it in the corner of the kitchen, full of the new food. Tank turned it over.

I scrounged around in the garage for a suitable substitute and found an old plastic dishwashing pan. Out with the red, white, and blue and in with the sudsbucket. Tank turned it over.

When I took off for a week in Italy, I left the dogs at home with Number One Son, who has been hard on the job of making Tank more responsive to commands. As I headed to the kitchen on my first night back, NOS said proudly, "Oh, yeah, and Tank hasn't dumped the food since you left."

The bucket was in front of the sink, on its side—and the food was all over the floor.

Other than the dumping of the food, Tank has been fine with the rule that the food dish is community property; the buckets were a little tall for AB to eat from them easily (she's smaller at 30 pounds than he is at 60), but the washtub is just her size. And they seem to be fine with sharing "leftovers"—the last hint of food off dinner plates before they go into the sink. But Tank has been snippy about letting AB eat while he's eating, and he appears to have decided that she doesn't need to eat at all while he's around.

That hasn't been a huge problem most of the time; Tank has been sleeping upstairs with NOS since SS left for basic training, and AB has slept downstairs with me. I typically toss a puppy cookie upstairs for Tank at night, and he knows that's his signal to go upstairs to bed; AB scoots into my room to get her cookie, but then later during the night she slips back to the kitchen for "supper."

Not so much last night. NOS and his buddy Shrek had decided to go out on the town, so Tank was left downstairs with me. He's really an affectionate animal, and he got his feelings hurt when he tried to get into bed with me only to have AB snarl and snap at him and run him away. That's not acceptable behavior, so I put her in her kennel for time out and went back to bed. Tank apparently couldn't figure out why AB was staying in the den, where her kennel was, but he clearly didn't want to miss any action, so he stayed in the den with her.

AB woke up in the night and whined to go outside, so I dragged myself out of bed and let her go. When she came back in, she appeared to have gotten the message because she let Tank climb up on the foot of the bed. In fact, when I woke up later in the morning, she was gone and Tank was sawing logs on the pillow next to me.


When I dragged myself to the kitchen, AB started to whine around the food dish. Tank would have nothing to do with that and snarled and snapped at her. Why I didn't think to stuff him in his kennel for that is beyond me; maybe the drugs I've been taking for my allergies had gotten the best of me.

Instead, I rounded up an old doggie dish and filled it with food for AB. Tank ate it.

While he was working on that one, I got out a smaller dish and filled it for AB. Tank ate that, too.

He hadn't finished with the larger dish, so I took it into the den for AB. Tank followed and took it back over.

I snagged the smaller bowl, filled it, put it in my room, and shut all the doors. AB polished it off.

Tank dragged the larger dish around the den for the rest of the morning, working on it periodically as if to remind AB it was his. When she approached it, he either snapped at her or dragged the dish away.

Late in the afternoon, she went into the kitchen to eat from the washtub, and he growled her into intimidation.

I've got his number, and I'm off the antihistamines.

One more growl, and Tank gets a turn at time out, too.

Devil dog

I nearly got the pants scared off me last night by a devil dog.

I had been working away at my computer when Tank and Alpha Bitch decided it was time to go out to potty, so I opened the back door and sent them on their way. I went back to my computer, and some time later I thought it seemed odd that they had been out for so long.

When I went to the back door to let them back in, I was surprised to find that the outdoor light wasn't on. That's odd because a couple of years ago, I had a dog killed by something that had apparently come over the back fence after her, and I have been edgy about letting animals out after dark since then.

A few seconds later, my heart was in my mouth when neither of the dogs came when I opened the door, nor when I called them, nor when I stepped out on the back steps to look for them. The back light isn't bright enough and doesn't cover enough of the yard for me to have seen bodies in corners away from where I stood. Horrified by what I might find, I reached back inside and grabbed a flashlight to begin a search of the yard.

A few seconds later, I heard AB's whimper to get in—from outside the back gate.

I crossed the yard quickly, opened the gate, and welcomed her back in, more relieved that she was alive than angry that she had somehow gotten out. Hot on her heels, I heard big, soft feet hitting the ground behind her and something breathing hard and heavy as it ran. Tank nearly knocked us both over as he charged through the gate.

Relieved to see them both alive, I hurried them into the house, clutched my flashlight, and shut the back door behind me as I went to check for damage to the fence or for a hole they might have dug under it.

As I reached the front gate on the final stretch of fence, I heard something large beating its way through the iron plant that grows thick and dark outside. Terrified that it might have been the animal that killed my last dog, I flapped my arms and yelled for it to go away, and after a few seconds, it ran toward the street. It must have done an about-face a few yards away, because it doubled back to the fence with its heavy breathing, and its eyes flashed yellow when I turned my flashlight on it. The light scared it enough that it turned away again, so I barely caught sight of the white flashes of Tank's vest and tail.

Heart back in my throat again—this time I not only knew Tank had gotten out but I had tried to scare him away—I brushed the flashlight across the front of the fence to assure myself that it wasn't damaged or dug under, and headed into the house to try to figure out how to catch him.

The best trick so far has been to grab the fetch ball and bounce it on the driveway to trick him into coming to play. I grabbed the ball and the chunker, headed out the front door, and gave the ball a bounce.

AB appeared from the far side of the house, grabbed the ball  in midair and ran through the house to the back yard with it because, after all, fetch is a backyard game.

AB wasn't giving up the ball, so I ran back through the house and tried to listen for evidence of Tank's whereabouts. As Number One Son says, Tank is a hunter and doesn't make much noise when he's on the loose, but that normally doesn't stop the other dogs in the neighborhood from pitching a fit when he comes around. The street seemed quiet, and it was late enough at night that the nearby highway was quiet, too. But that didn't really make me feel better.

I grabbed my cell phone and texted NOS that Tank was out, but I had no idea where. He called back: he and  Shrek were at a bar downtown, but they could be back home in 5 or 10 minutes to help me look. He suggested some spots where Tank has shown up before (and I knew a couple of others), and told me to hang tight.

I checked the likely spots, but I didn't expect more than I got because the street was so quiet. I started on the side of the house where I had seen him near the gate and found out how he had gotten out: I had opened a low front window about a week ago to let in te crisp, cool fall air, and the screen was teetering on the garden rail that lies along the drip line under the eaves.

As quiet as our street was, I rather suspected that the two of them had initially gone out behind the house, toward the creek that runs along the back property line, and possibly as far as three blocks away, which is possible to do without crossing a single street. In fact,this time I heard occasional barks from that direction, and since the barks seemed to "move" ever so often, I had a pretty comfortable feeling that that was where he was. Or as comfortable as you can have if your heart is in your mouth and your stomach is in a knot.

I decided that late at night when sounds carry well, Tank might hear me and AB playing fetch, so I headed back in to play with her. After all, she was the good one who had come back quickly the second time, so she sort of deserved a chance to play. And playing with her would sort of keep my mind off whatever might have been happening to Tank.

I continued to call Tank intermittently as AB and I played, until I eventually gave up on the game and went to the back gate to call him some more. The barking across the way continued to wax and wane, and after a bit I heard thundering paws again. I started to open the back gate as something flashed by heading northward and I heard the soft sound of a car easing down the street.

Within a couple of seconds, I heard NOS's command: "Down, Tank! Sit!"

"You got him?" I yelled.

"Yeah. He's in my car," he yelled back.

NOS is determined to make Tank behave, and he's not cutting him a lot of slack. It took most of an hour for NOS to let him do much more than breathe without responding to specific commands. And he seems to have gotten the message, at least for the evening; no telling what will happen if he gets a chance to run again.

Devil dog.