MIA

Posted by admin | February 5, 2019

The other day, I was putting the dogs to bed like normal. Zailey hesitated before going in her kennel. At the time, I didn’t think much of it other than it was a bit odd. Then my wife was wondering where the cat was. We hollered for Jynx to no avail. For some reason, Zailey’s hesitation came to mind, so I checked in her kennel. Sure enough, there was one dog and one cat in there. They just stood there looking at each other like, “What do we do now?” I let the cat out and didn’t pay much mind to it from there.

Then about a week later, the cat was missing. He wouldn’t come to our calls (though that isn’t too surprising). What was the weirdest was that the cat hadn’t come down for supper so his food was sitting there untouched. For whatever reason, I needed to go upstairs. I looked at all of his usual haunts - his bed, our bed, his litter box, and even where his grass and breakfast/lunch is kept. He couldn’t be found. I then looked in Zailey’s kennel out of desperation. Sure enough, he was there napping away. I told him he had supper to eat and that got him moving, though he should have been able to hear my wife and I tell him that from hollering for him.

One day I was getting the car worked on, so I walked to a nearby McDonald’s and got a bite to eat. I then worked on the outline to Flaming Curse. This was the day after I had written the rough draft to the outline, so I had a bunch of holes to plug and general improvements to make. Heck, I’d forgotten to complete one of the plot lines, so I closed that out. The story was fortified into something even better than what I had.

After thinking about it that evening, I got another idea for the story. It was a minor tweak, so I just thought I would go in and make it. Just so you know, any time I write these days, my work is backed up on the cloud in addition to being saved on my laptop. I’ve also got my work computer set to get another backup of my work. At that time, I also had a home desktop that would have gotten the backup as well. So, I should have had four copies of the changes that I made in McDonald’s and there were quite a few changes. Guess how many copies actually survived. If you said zero, then you would be correct. Looking at the logs of the document changes on the cloud, no changes were recorded that morning. I had to redo it all in addition to my tweak. I was a bit miffed.

I think the reason that no changes were saved was because the McDonald’s WIFI wasn’t as reliable as I thought. My laptop is set to download the file from the cloud, which then overwrote the copy that was on there. Since the document never made it to the cloud, the redundant copies on the other computers never got updated. So, what I now do is that every time I don’t have a connection or I think I’m on an unreliable connection, I make my phone into a hotspot and sync my laptop to the cloud before shutting it down.

When something goes missing whether cat or file, it can be aggravating to track down. But at the end of the day, the cat was found and files can be recreated. Everything was fine.