Midnight Has Been Found

Just a quick update: Midnight has been found. Coincidentally, he was missing for one month. Congratulations to Midnight's owners!

His blog has more details here: http://www.helpfindmidnight.blogspot.com/

Help Find Midnight

We've learned of another missing dog, named Midnight.  See his blog here.  Right now his owners are feeling a little desparate.  There have been no sightings in 10 days, and apparently a dog-fighting ring operates in the area near where he was lost.

They are having a flyering event this weekend.  Sarah, Lucy, and I will not be able to make it, but if you want to help, details are on Midnight's blog.

You can download a copy of his flyer here.

Lucy Update, Pictures, and Deflyering Efforts

Lucy has settled in pretty nicely. Her energy levels are surprisingly high already, though not quite what they were before her walkabout adventure.

We found a tick on her. So now the list of ill effects Lucy has suffered from her month-long vacation in the District wilds includes two items:

• Lost 15% of her body weight (8 lbs.)
  
• A tick. One.
  

Sooooo, yeah, we think we're pretty lucky.

Also, I posted to Picasa some pictures taken since she got home. You can view the gallery here.

And lastly, we have been trying to take down all the fliers we put up over the course of the last month. It's going to take a few weeks of course, and we might miss some as we go. So we're asking for two favors from people:

1. If you see any fliers, take them down (and please let us know where you took them down from).
   
2. If you're free next Saturday, 3/14, come down and help us deflyer some areas. (Noon, at Carter Barron Amphitheater parking lot.)
   

And once again, thank you everyone who has so generously helped us in the course of this ridiculously difficult month. Special thanks to Steph, Lisa, Daphne, Donna, Nancy, Laura Totis & Chewy the Wonder Dog, and Maurice & Pollie. Thanks as well to everyone who posted fliers for Lucy, including Michele & Dave, Jill, Catherine, Alycia, Will the Wonder Lawyer, Fran, and Katie. HUGE thanks to everyone who spotted Lucy and took the time to call us. I'm sure I'm forgetting others, and to you I apologize. There were so many who contacted us, encouraged us, wished us well, and helped us, that I doubt I can remember to thank everyone individually. But know that your contribution, however small, helped us enormously.

Bah, More Help Needed

We are going to spend the next few weeks taking down all the fliers we posted during our Lucy Search Extravaganza.  We could definitely use help doing it, though.

We'll be out there this Sunday, and next Saturday if anyone would like to join us.  This task should be a lot more happy than the previous gatherings.  We will also probably bring Lucy along for part of it (how long we keep her out there will depend on her stamina), so if you want to meet the dog who spawned such an effort, come on down.  We will plan to meet at noon at the Carter Barron Amphitheater parking lot again (it made for a good meeting place the last few times), so anyone who is willing to help tear down some fliers, please come on by.

Also, we got a call from the DC department of general services (or whatever it's called) today.  They're going to fine us $75 for every poster, but at least they're giving us until the end of the month.  (I still don't know how they can fine us for posting on utility poles, but we were planning on taking them all down anyway, so hopefully it's a moot question.)  So we could definitely use help with this.  Even if you can't come out this weekend or next, whenever you see a Lucy flier, please take it down.  Much obliged.

Doing Fine

So the vet thinks Lucy is in remarkably good health, all things considered.  Normal temperature, normal heart and lung action, normal everything.  She lost 8 pounds (was 55 lbs. before going on walkabout, now 47 lbs.), and we won't receive word about internal parasites until tomorrow.  But otherwise, Lucy is well.

Lucy is Home!

Sarah nabbed her this morning around 6:30.

She went to check on a trap we set out last night, and saw Lucy inside the grounds of the embassy next door.  So she laid down near the place in the fence where Lucy could squeeze out, put out some chicken, and waited.

Lucy eventually came over to sniff, and as soon as she realized this body was one of her people, she ignored the chicken and commenced a thorough licking of Sarah's face.

The rest is fairly unimportant.  She's home.  She's incredibly dirty.  My white dog is really a gray dog right now.  But she seems completely unscratched; I haven't found a single wound on her.  She's skinny -- she definitely lost weight, but not nearly as much as I would have thought, for having been lost a month.  (To the day today, it is one month.)  She drank roughly half a gallon of water after getting home.  I'm not exaggerating.  Maybe more than half a gallon.

Now we're waiting to get a vet appointment to get her checked out.  Great day in the morning my Lucy is home.  What a good feeling.

We Saw Our Own Damn Dog

Yep, you read that correctly.  Sarah and I both saw Lucy today.  We don't have her in our hands yet, but we were close.  So very close.

Let me back up a little.  I promised to give more details about this embassy sighting, and it leads directly to today's excitement.

DC Animal Control called me last night to say that a stray dog, white, same collar as Lucy, was spotted behind an embassy on Massachusetts Ave.  The dog matched the description of Lucy on the lost dog report they have, so someone over there put two and two together, and called me.  Apparently, two Animal Control officers responded yesterday, but the dog ran away from them and they didn't want to give chase because the area is near the Rock Creek Parkway.  So the plan was for them to call me today before they headed back out, so I could go with them and try to coax the dog out if it turned out to be Lucy.

The plan went slightly awry, but that was harmless error.  A nice Animal Control officer named Ted went to the area today, the dog wouldn't let him get anywhere near it, so he called me.  Sarah and I came down, met Ted at the Metro station, and he took us over to the area.  

Behind a row of embassies on Massachusetts Ave. is a strip of land; it runs down a steep hill, then levels off briefly before running into an offshoot of the Rock Creek Parkway.  It is not a terribly large area, and a dog in there has nowhere to go until late at night when traffic on the parkway dissipates.

So.  We traipsed around a bit with Ted, calling Lucy's name.  Within about 10 minutes, I caught sight of a white(ish) tail moving through the trees, away from me.  Shortly after, Sarah, lower down the hill, saw Lucy.  Thus began the most frustrating afternoon in recent memory.  To shorten a long story, in the course of the next hour and a half, we each saw Lucy, quite clearly, 4-5 times.  Each.  The nearest I got was probably about 30 feet away.  We made eye contact, she turned and went the other way.

I tried calling her name and issuing commands, like "come;" I tried talking quietly, sweetly, whistling, making play noises, using her various nicknames, all for naught.  Clearly she has gone into whatever survival mode they go into when dogs have been on the loose for a few weeks.  She doesn't seem to really recognize me or Sarah, and treats us as she treats all humans:  things to be avoided.

So that's the bad news.  She's completely unresponsive to me or Sarah.  Which is so incredibly frustrating, because we were so close, and we kept seeing her.  But the good news is that she clearly has made this area something of a home base.  Her tracks were all over the place, and readily visible thanks to the snow and mud.  We could see the track she had worn along the top of the hill, behind the embassies, and down the hill and back around.  There's a loop she has worn into the ground.  She has been here for days, and hopefully will stay here until we get her fuzzy butt into a trap.

I'm still a little stunned.  I can't believe I saw her little Goose face so close, and she wouldn't even respond to me.

In any case, we set out some feeding stations, and set up a trap.  There is pretty much an entire rotisserie chicken there (minus the bones of course), plus about 5 pounds of dog food, a few cans of cat food (which is really stinky, so attracts dogs well), and a few bowls of water.

SIDENOTE:  Sarah came up with a brilliant idea.  Because it's supposed to go down to 11 degrees tonight, we were worried about all the available water freezing, and Goose not getting anything to drink.  So Sarah bought some of those adhesive, muscle pain relief, heating pads (click here to see what I mean), and stuck them to the bottom of the plastic water bowls, so the heat would keep the water from freezing (hopefully) for 12 hours.  Fine work, Sarah.

The hope is that at the very least Lucy will get some good meals, and some solid nutrition in her body.  Hopefully she'll think that this area is just brimming with free food, so there's no reason to move on to another area.  And eventually, as we reduce the number of feeding stations, the only place she'll find food is inside the trap.

PLEASE NOTE:  If you are anywhere near this area, please DO NOT go there in search of Lucy.  Do not try to approach her, do not try to do anything anywhere in the vicinity.  The worst thing that could happen right now is for well-intentioned people (including myself) to drive Lucy out of this area and into the unknown.  As long as she's sticking to this spot, we want her there.  We'll eventually get her into a trap.  So for everyone wanting to help us locate Lucy, please avoid this area of woods behind the embassies on Massachusetts Ave.  Consult the map if you need to be sure.

Media Exposure

OH, one more thing I forgot to mention in my last post.  (Two things, really, but somehow conceptually related in my mind.)

Jule Banville posted an update to her previous article about Lucy.  If you haven't read the original, go here.  And in case you were unaware, the City Paper also published this article in their print edition, last Thursday.  If you're in the DC area, go pick up a copy before they disappear, and before the new issue comes on this Thursday.

For the new article, click here.  This one is also well written and enjoyable.  (And we especially appreciate the mention of our flyering party this past Saturday.)  Jule, if only I sat on the Pulitzer board . . .

Second, I received a call from a Washington Post reporter.  She is doing a story on the Find Toto service.  Three people in her office, including one of the editors, had received Find Toto calls regarding Lucy, so that led her to me.  Even though the article will focus on Find Toto, I'm hoping it will mention Lucy prominently.  She even asked me for a photo of Lucy.  This would, obviously, be great exposure.

And as I've said before, when we eventually find Lucy, it'll be because someone who knows her story calls us, or happens to coax her into their house with a hot dog.  So disseminating the information is really our highest priority here.

Weekend Activities

First, a big thanks to Will, and Michele & Dave, for coming out to help us on Saturday.  In particular, I want to point out that Michele and Dave drove down from Baltimore just to help us hang fliers.  That's remarkable, and shames me and my paltry generosity.

And of course, thanks also to the usual crew (Lisa, Daphne, Donna, Nancy, et al).  It's wonderful and amazing how much more gets done than when it's just Sarah and myself.

So fliers were hung.  Helicopters were flown.  Woods were hiked.  

The extraordinary National Park Service chopper pilots were specifically on the lookout for Lucy this weekend.  We appreciate this greatly.  Now, with the snow on the ground, I imagine spotting her will be more difficult by a power of ten, but at least the weather is predicted to warm up this week.

At least the snow allowed us to see tracks.  Unfortunately none of them belonged to Lucy.

I also hiked clear across Rock Creek Park to get an idea of how Lucy might be traversing it.  The bad news is that there are a million ways for her to cross the park, and no bottlenecks where we could place a trap.  But this also means that it's entirely feasible for her to cross back and forth in a day, possibly multiple times.

We also started getting some harassing phone calls.  Probably a group of teenagers just being punks.  "I have your dog.  I want $10,000."  "I found your dog, it's dead."  And so on.  What I don't get is where's the entertainment value in that?  I mean, if you are a cognitively challenged jackass, I guess tricking someone into believing you might be funny, but they couldn't even pull that off.  So why keep calling back?  Even if they're just mean and enjoy upsetting people, they weren't getting very far with that either, so, again, why keep calling back?  I don't get where this becomes fun for a person.

Ah well, in any event, this coming week we'll try to stake-out some of the Lucy sightings during trash nights.  We'll see if she makes a reappearance.  Also, there's a thing with a stray dog that was seen at an embassy, but I don't want to go into detail until, well, until I have details.  Which will be tomorrow.  But I'm keeping hopeful that this one is Lucy and not some other stray white dog with a similar collar.  That would just suck.

Anniversary

Day 25.

Incidentally, today is the 5th anniversary of Lucy's adoption.  Or maybe tomorrow should be.  See, the quirky thing is that we adopted her on Leap Day of 2004 (Feb. 29).  So I never quite know whether the anniversary should be the 28th, or March 1st.  Maybe Lucy will come wandering up to our front door tomorrow, and that'll settle the matter.

In any case, we had gone to an adoption clinic at the Pet Smart in Wilton, NY.  The SPCA of Upstate NY had a bunch of dogs, at least several of whom had been rescued from a kill shelter in Tennessee.  (A volunteer had rented a van, driven down to TN, and then drove back up to NY with as many dogs as she could fit in the van.)  We weren't particularly planning on adopting a dog that day, but we were testing the waters with an intention of getting a dog in the near future.  Steph had wanted to go see a dog named Nitro; I think she had seen him on Petfinder.org.  While she was looking at Nitro, I looked at the kennel next to his.  I saw Lucy's face and felt a little bit like I had found my way home at the end of a long night.

We took her for a walk in the parking lot, where she dropped a gigantic steaming poo.  After I picked it up, we looked at each other and said, "She just kind of feels like our dog."

So, without having set out to do so, we went home with a dog that Saturday.  And of course, at some point during that first week, I think we each had several "Oh god, what have we done" moments, but things settled.  Eventually.  (Sometime remind me to tell you the story of the feather pillow.)  We managed to train her, she reciprocated by training us a little too.  She has unabashedly butt-wiggled her way into the hearts of virtually every person she's met.  And since that Leap Day, she has inhabited a substantial place at the core of things for me.

Another Maybe...at least

Day 23-24.

Circumstantial evidence makes me think this one is surely Lucy.  Unfortunately the man who spotted her can't be certain.  It sounded like he got a little bit of a view of her markings, and they seemed consistent with Lucy.

He saw her on Blagden Ave., between Allison and 17th Streets.  Hey, you know what's between Allison & 17th on Blagden?  18th Street.

Of COURSE she disappeared a few minutes after the man saw her.  And since I happened to be out at that time (around midnight) checking traps, I drove over to Blagden about 20 minutes after he saw her.  No dice.  Her ninjary is strong.

But the good news is that there is a definite pattern here.  That stretch of Blagden is definitely on her route.  I just wish we had a clearer picture of what the whole route is, so we can predict where she'll be next.

Did You Call Me Today?

This afternoon, around 3:30, I received a call from someone who seemed very excited, and claimed to have found Lucy.  (It sounded like the dog ran off before the person could get to her though.)

I could not hear a lot of what was said, so am not sure I heard the name of the street properly, and we didn't have time to get into any details before the call was dropped.  The caller's number was blocked on my caller ID so I have no way of contacting this person.

If it was you, please call back so I can ask some more details about where you were, or at least email us at Info@LostLucy.com.  Thanks!

New Sighting! Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

We had a sighting today, shortly after noon. A woman saw a white dog that looked very much like the one on our fliers, on the 4700 block of Linnean Ave., heading north. If you're familiar with our map of Lucy sightings, you know why this is significant.

That block runs between Davenport St. and Chesterfield Pl. Lucy has been spotted on both Davenport and Chesterfield (one was likely, the other a "maybe").

The woman wasn't positive that the dog she saw was Lucy, but given the location and the fact that she thinks it was the right dog, I'm chalking this one up as a sighting.

In other news, the new issue of the Washington City Paper came out today, and everyone should go out and grab a copy before the next issue replaces it next Thursday. Turn to page 17, in particular. It's a great article, and well written by Jule Banville, but it also just looks great in print. Plus the photo of Lucy is HUGE. (See the crappy cell phone camera pic above.)

So another heartfelt thanks to Jule and the City Paper. Publicity like this is incalculably helpful.

Helicopters!

Choppers! Hueys! I can't think of a third slang term for them, so I'll repeat helicopters!

Through some good investigative phone calling, our friend and angel Donna has discovered that the National Park Service owns and maintains a helicopter whose sole reason for existence is to patrol Rock Creek Park twice a day. Donna spoke to the nice people with the Park Service, and they offered to keep a copy of our Lucy flier in the 'copter, and to keep their eyes peeled for her. Both of the two pilots who fly the park patrols will have our phone number with them in case they see Lucy wandering in the park. I've been told that they easily spot dogs from the air, and usually can even tell when the dog is with a person or not.

Donna had previously looked into having a flight school's helicopters do training flights over that area too, but they have to apply for a waiver. See, we're within 7 miles of the White House, so there are some significant flight restrictions over the area. But the Park Service don't need no steenking waiver. So that's pretty terrific. And since someone else was just telling us they should have some nightvision goggles at some point in the near future, this Lucy search is becoming more and more like a Tom Clancy novel. I wish Lucy could comprehend everything that's going on because of her.

So a big THANK YOU to the National Park Service and the kind helicopter pilots who will be looking out for Goose.

(Note: Lucy's nicknames are legion. Goose is just one of them.)

More Fliering on Saturday Feb. 28th!

Hello all,

We're having another event on Saturday.  We haven't had any sighting since Saturday so we want to expand our fliering in case Lucy has moved into another area.  Please join us if you have some time.

Meeting Time: 12 p.m.

Location: Carter Barron Amphitheater parking lot.  (See a map)

RSVP at info@lostlucy.com so we know how many fliers to bring.  If you have tape and/or a staple gun bring them along!

Hope to see you Saturday!

Sarah

Possible Sighting

We got some fliers posted yesterday, which is great.  We're grateful for the help of the volunteers who came out and gave up part of their Saturday to help us.  But the bigger news is the possible sighting.

The person who saw the dog did not get a great look at it, but he did say it was a white dog with some black markings on its back.  It was on one of the hiking trails in the woods behind Upshur St.  The reasons I bumped this up to an actual sighting from a "maybe" are that we know Lucy has been in and out of that patch of woods, it would explain where she was for the few days since our previous sighting, and there's sock evidence.  Oh yes, sock evidence.

Not too far off one of the trails in that area, about a week earlier, we had set up a scent/feeding station, along with a motion-sensor camera.  We laid out a t-shirt and a few socks, unwashed and stinky the way Lucy likes them, scattered some food around there, and set up the camera.  The camera snapped a lovely picture of empty air, and all the food was gone the next day.  We never replenished the food when we retrieved the camera, but we left the laundry.

Shortly after the sighting yesterday, Sarah found one of the socks in the middle of the trail, nowhere near where the station had been.  And it had Lucy hairs all over it.

Now, obviously the hairs could have been on it when we left it out there; neither of us can remember for certain.  And several possibilities could explain how the sock moved.  So we're not getting our hopes too high.  But I think the sock hadn't had any hair on it, and the wind and rain of Wed. and Thurs. would have taken most of it off anyway (and the wind couldn't have blown the sock down the hill and up and around the path to where it was found).  And this is what Lucy does.  She takes a sock out of the laundry basket and carries it around the house a bit until it falls out of her mouth, or she sits down with it between her paws.

If you know Lucy, you can probably picture her running around the woods with one of my socks dangling from her mouth.

So, in the end, we moved one of the traps over to this area, just outside the woods, hoping she'll emerge right nearby.  Here's hoping...

17 Days and Counting

So today (almost over now) was Day 17 of the Missing Lucy Saga.  I keep thinking that I don't know how to keep up this level of effort until we find Lucy.  Every other aspect of our lives has had to take a back seat, and some things are suffering for it.

Example:  we haven't gone grocery shopping since this began.  I found the remnant of a Boston lettuce in the fridge tonight that had grown its own fur coat.

And then I realized that after tomorrow, we will have only endured for exactly half as long as Ravi did in his search for Rocky.  The only response I have in me tonight is two words:  Wow.  Dude.

On the good news front though, we've had a mad rush of help from some incredibly giving folks this week.  It still feels a little bit like a blur, but in the last 24 or 36 hours we've got two traps set up (and a rotation of people helping us monitor them), a flier party in the making, and some other behind-the-scenes things that would have taken us much longer to do on our own, if we had managed to do them at all.

Sarah and I give our heartfelt thanks to the whole bunch of you.

So yes, be vewy vewy quiet, it's Lucy season.  Not just one trap, but two now lurk, waiting to spring shut on a certain ninja dog.  (I can't stop having the rather comic mental image of her prancing past the open traps, oblivious to the goodies inside, though.)  However, it has now been over 72 hours since our last sighting, so I'm concerned with the potential irony of having gotten traps set up where Lucy seemed to be spending a lot of time, only to discover that she has migrated again.  We'll see.  But that's the point of tomorrow's flyering blitz.

Which brings me back to that.  As seen in the previous post, we're organizing a Flier Fun Day in order to have almost as much fun as one can have with packing tape and the smell of colored ink.  The hope is that we post fliers in neighborhoods that Lucy might wander into, so that people are already aware she's missing when they see her.

The most common reason that the owner of a lost dog will go several days without sightings is that the dog moved on into an area without any fliers.  So, we hang fliers.  And then hopefully the phone calls start rolling in . . .

Flyering Effort Saturday - Volunteers?

Right now we are planning a little flyering blitz for Lucy on Saturday.  We already have a few volunteers on board, but the more the merrier.  Therefore, we're calling on anyone willing and able to help out.

The plan is to meet at the Carter Barron Amphitheater parking lot at 1:00 PM on Saturday.

If you plan to join us, please send an email to Info@LostLucy.com so we can plan accordingly, and especially so we can contact you in case of a change in plans.

Lucy Story in the Washington City Paper

A quick shout out and thank you to Jule Banville and the Washington City Paper for posting a story about Lucy on their site today.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/02/19/lucy-the-ninja-dog-is-still-lost/

For those not in Washington, D.C., or those simply unfamiliar with the City Paper, Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_City_Paper

Emerging Pattern

This morning I received a call from someone who saw Lucy at Davenport St. & Linnean Ave. yesterday (Tuesday, 2/17) at 9:00 AM.

So drawing a short timeline looks something like this:

• Last week, on Blagden in Crestwood.
  
• Saturday night, at Blagden & 18th in Crestwood.
  
• Monday afternoon, just off Linnean in Forest Hills.
  
• Tuesday morning, just off Linnean in Forest Hills.
  
• Tuesday afternoon, at Blagden & 18th in Crestwood.
  

Ninja Dog is just crossing Rock Creek Park, hopping between Forest Hills and Crestwood.  We're on to you, Lucy.  Your days of ninjary are numbered.

Back to Blagden

It is Day 14 -- a full two weeks have transpired since Lucy decided to go on walkabout.

We had a solid sighting again today, at around 4:15 PM at . . . wait for it . . . 18th St. & Blagden Ave.  In other words, at exactly the same spot as her previous confirmed sighting on Saturday.

We got there only about 20-25 minutes after the sighting, but she was gone.  In fact, the kind lady who spotted her was turning the corner onto 18th St., went up to a utility pole to check the Lost Dog sign, (yep, definitely Lucy), and drove around the block to come back down and get Lucy.  When she rounded the block, Lucy had already disappeared.  I begin to suspect she's a ninja dog.

So the good news is that it seems like Lucy passes through this part of Blagden frequently.

We are already formulating plans for your ultimate capture, Ninja Dog.  Be on your guard . . . 

Weekend Activities

So the good news is that it appears Lucy is at least frequenting Crestwood, if not largely residing there, at this point.

Day 12 -- Sunday, 2/15/09

After Saturday's sighting, we spent Sunday posting fliers in Crestwood, and Forest Hills, and grilling some cheese bratwursts.  (Lucy loves cheese, and of course meat products; we hoped that a few hours of the smell drifting over the neighborhood might entice her into the open.)

In the afternoon, Laura Totis and wonderdog Chewy came down to track Lucy's comings and goings.  This time around produced a more solid result.  Chewy found several good tracks.  In the end, partly due to the geography and human traffic, we had a good idea of some of the areas where Lucy wandered, but did not have a lock on a nesting site.  Which is to say, we got some good leads, but no target location to set a humane trap.

After another of those incredibly long and tiring days, we went to bed with a solid plan for the morning.

Day 13 -- President's Day -- Monday, 2/16/09

Sarah and a couple dedicated volunteers set about posting fliers at major intersections along commuter routes going several miles out from Lucy's latest sightings.  Meanwhile, I treked up into the woods south of Blagden Ave., following the trail where Chewy caught part of Lucy's track.  Up on a big hill, I set up a scent station (a few pieces of laundry that smelled like us), with a motion-sensor camera set up to capture the fun, should any animal (or say, a particular brown-eared pain the butt animal) show up at the site.

Something definitely tripped the motion-sensor, but unfortunately the camera takes 5-6 seconds to wake from standby mode, and the creature was gone before the shutter snapped a photo.  We'll never know if it was just a racoon, or hiker, or Lucy.

I also hiked all the way through the woods, to our front door, hopefully leaving enough of a trail of my own scent for Lucy to follow home.

In the afternoon we received a call, placing Lucy over in Forest Hills, just a short trip through Rock Creek Park due west from Crestwood.  But no luck.

Still, the whole weekend engendered some hope, since it seems that Lucy has spent a lot of time in this neighborhood.  Sarah even spoke with a gentleman who had seen her 4-5 days prior, right along Blagden Avenue somewhere.  And since we didn't have any fliers posted in this neighborhood until last Thursday, that explains why we went a week without sightings.

President's Day Flyering

I'll update later regarding yesterday's activities, but first wanted to post about our efforts for today.

We're meeting at 1:00 PM at the Carter Barron Amphitheater parking lot.  We're hoping to put up fliers at the major intersections of the major commuter arteries in the District.

For anyone who feels like joining us, help is appreciated.  But obviously it's President's Day, and only three hours before go time, so most people probably have plans for the day.  Fear not!  You can still help.

After today's efforts, we'll post about what streets have been flyered, and then post a list of the main commuter routes that we'd still like to cover.  At any point this week -- driving to work, taking an evening constitutional, walking your dog in the morning, whatever -- if you print a couple fliers and post one or two big intersections that would be great.  More details to follow.

New Sighting

The relief feels pretty big.  The only thing better would be to have gotten her home tonight.

Two very nice people spotted Lucy on the sidewalk on Blagden Ave., and within five minutes pulled up to a corner where a Lucy flier had been posted by Lisa (THANKS again Lisa).  We're pretty confident this time that it was in fact Lucy.

We searched the neighborhood for a few hours, but no Lucy.  However, this gives us great hope.  Tomorrow we will be hanging some more fliers, and Chewy will be tracking again.

Fingers and toes and eyes crossed...

Massachusetts Ave.

This morning we employed another Find Toto blast a little bit northwest of here.  It has sparked quite a few calls, mostly from well-intentioned people wishing us well in our search (thank you very much).  There have been a few possible sightings mixed in, though.  All have involved quick glimpses, or views from afar, etc., such that no one has yet been certain that the dog was Lucy...nor certain it wasn't Lucy.

If we assume the most likely of these (maybe) sightings are possible, then the emerging pattern would be that Lucy is traveling up and down Massachusetts Avenue this week.  Take a look at the latest three dots on the map.  This theory has enough holes to...you know, let really big things through the holes...but we've seen nothing yet to cause us to definitively rule it out.

So off we go to finish the former plans we had at the Zoo, and then we're heading up Mass. Ave. to hang some fliers.  Here's hoping...

...and then there was one

Finally just confirmed the Pennsylvania shelter does not have Lucy.

Two "Unlikely" Sightings

We have had two potential sightings that are longshots:

1. A young man on a bus traveling up Massachusetts Ave. into Bethesda got a quick glance of a white dog, roughly the right size, with a "husky-type tail."  He couldn't see any more detail, and though he didn't see any people around the dog, couldn't be certain the dog was alone.
   
2. A shelter in Montgomery County...wait for it...Pennsylvania took in a dog they described as a border collie / dalmation mix.
   

Number 1 is absolutely feasible.  It would be just under 4 miles, straight up Massachusetts Ave. from her previous few sightings.  She would have had several days to make the trip, and Little Falls Branch Park, where the teenager saw the white dog, would be the second significant park Lucy would have come across traveling up Mass. Ave.  It would make sense for her to at least stop there for a bit.  If the person glimpsing the dog had been able to get a slightly better view, I'd be happy to label this one at least a "maybe" sighting.

Number 2 is nearly impossible.  But hey, I read The Incredible Journey.  The shelter is about 165 miles away by car, but Google Maps' nifty walking directions tell me it's only 142 miles walking.  I don't know how they determine such things, but Google also tells me it's 1 day and 23 hours walking time.  And Lucy walks faster than me.  So, clearly, it's her.  Oh, and the shelter supposedly picked up its collie/dalmation on Tuesday, so Lucy would have had at most 3 days (possibly only 1 day) to get there.

For those of you unaware, we had just moved to D.C. a month earlier, from Albany, NY.  So several (including us) have joked that maybe Lucy is trying to make her way back to Albany, thinking that her "real" home is there.  And Google's walking directions from here to Albany go right by Perkiomenville, PA.

Like I said, nearly impossible, but you never know.  It's worth running down.  I'm the irrationally optimistic guy who buys a lottery ticket and thinks he might actually win.  I sit at a blackjack table and am genuinely surprised every time I lose a hand.  (I suppose the official term is "sucker," but I prefer to think "optimist.")

Visiting Pandas

In talking to a very nice National Zoological Park Police officer today, we learned that when Lucy was spotted inside the Zoo last week, she was sighted near the giant pandas.  Which makes sense.  Doesn't everyone who comes to the National Zoo go see the pandas?

I wonder if she tried to get in to see the baby gorilla...

Otherwise still no significant news.  No sightings today, and she is not in a shelter.  (Many thanks to Lisa, by the way.)

We'll keep on with the current plans, and will probably find new neighborhoods for posting fliers.  A number of very generous people have offered their time, and we appreciate it greatly.  Especially after we get another sighting, we may take you up on it...

Quick Shout Out

This is coming to me second-hand, so forgive me if I've gotten something wrong. But a friend forwarded my Facebook post to her cousin, and as a result, I'm told we have a group of congressional staffers obsessed with finding Lucy.

Sweet!

Special thanks to Jess and Sonia.

No Sightings for Two Days

So we haven't had any calls in the past two days.  Hard to formulate a focused plan to direct our efforts without any locations to check out.

But we did engage the Find Toto service, and have alerted Home Again, the service connected with her microchip.

Incidentally, several people have asked me whether Lucy has one of those lojack tracking chips in her.  So let me clear this up.  The microchip they embed in your dog's skin is just an RFID chip.  That is to say, it is not a GPS transceiver, it does not track your dog's whereabouts in any way.  It passively sits there, wating for someone to pass a scanner over it -- which is exactly what the shelters and vets should do when they pick up stray dogs -- at which point the chip gives the scanner whatever info is encoded on it.

In short:  the microchip inside your dog's skin will, when scanned at the shelter, tell the shelter the owner's information.

But something else that is very nice about most of the microchip providers is that, like Home Again, they offer a lost pet alert service.  In our case, Home Again contacts all the vets, shelters, and rescue volunteers in their database, within 25 miles of the location where you lost your pet.

Also, today, we made some business cards on the Staples website.  These should be much more useful to hand out to people than the strips of paper with our phone numbers that we had been using.

At this point, with no recent sightings (and honestly, being none too sure about the Monday sighting), I'm wondering if Lucy has wandered completely out of the District.  We've started contacting shelters outside D.C., in Maryland and Virginia, but there's a ton of ground to cover out there.  And for all we know, she's still only 10 blocks over, hiding in an alley.

I just hope she's got some shelter from the rain and wind tonight.

The First Week

Day 1 – Wed. 2/4/09

    I got the call in the late afternoon, while at work.  The landlord had people in the apartment, and when they were leaving, Lucy squeezed past, out the door, and took off down the street.  They gave chase, but Lucy is very fast, even by dog standards; two-legged mammals stand no chance.  She was last glimpsed running up Lamont, then taking a left down 18th Street, (just a couple blocks from home), in Mt. Pleasant.

    Sarah and I came home from work early and immediately began walking the neighborhood calling her name.  What’s funny in retrospect is how sure I was that we’d just find her that evening.  She’d be sniffing a dumpster in one of the alleys or wandering through someone’s yard, she’d hear us from hundreds of feet away and come running.

    It was a little late in the evening when I started to think this might stretch into a second day.  I made 15 or 20 posters and hung them on my block, and just around the corner.  She couldn’t have gone much farther than that, really, right?  My main concern was the cold.  It got down to about 15 degrees that night.

 

Day 2 – Thurs. 2/5/09

    Luckily, we had been planning a trip for the weekend, and were scheduled to be off from work Thursday and Friday.  So we just spent Thursday hanging some more fliers and walking around calling Lucy’s name.  We searched the woods behind the neighborhood, the alleyways, and every street in the neighborhood.  Then repeated again and again.

    We had given up for the night and were trying to rest when we got a call at 10:40 or so from someone who had seen Lucy around the intersection of 16th and Harvard streets, at around 9:30.  She was running (you’re going to find this is a pattern with Lucy sightings) down Harvard, toward the National Zoo, way too fast to catch.

    So off we went to put in another few hours in the cold (temps in the low 20s), walking all over creation, driving too, calling her name.  No luck.  Called it a day around 2:00 AM.

 

Day 3 – Fri. 2/6/09

    After the previous night’s experience I finally realized that Lucy could, and probably did, leave the immediate neighborhood.  We revamped our fliers, got color copies, then began posting them more prolifically around our neighborhood, and around the Harvard St. area.

    A contractor working on a house in our neighborhood had seen a white dog in the alley across the street.  He didn’t get a great look at the dog, but this sounded promising.  No luck.  We’re beginning to sense the pattern of always being a few steps behind Lucy.

    Phone tips started rolling in, but they were mainly regarding sightings from the previous two days.  Sarah tried barbecuing the heck out of some smelly meat in the back yard, in an attempt to attract Lucy with the smell.  No luck.  We cooked the meat well past inedibility.  I ate it anyway (do not judge me).

    Another of Lucy’s favorite people came into town that afternoon with her boyfriend expressly to help us search for Lucy.  We had just gotten a phone tip from someone at the Zoo.  So we converged there.  Again, no luck.

    We did learn, though, that Lucy had been in the Zoo at least briefly on Wednesday, not too long after she got out.  This day, she had been seen around noon, and ran away toward the Connecticut Ave. entrance when some zookeepers tried to approach her.  Terrific.  Now she might be in a whole new neighborhood (Woodley Park or Cleveland Park), one with which she is wholly unfamiliar, and one which we had not even considered exploring to hang fliers.

 

Day 4 – Sat. 2/7/09

    We started the day checking out the Zoo, in case Lucy hadn’t actually left, and had been gated inside all night.  No luck.  Our friends, following a potential tip, walked through Rock Creek Park north of the Zoo, plastering fliers and talking to people.  They also hit quite a few neighborhoods around the Zoo, and in the end, hung about 200 fliers that day.

    In the mid-afternoon I got a phone call that once again forced me to adjust everything I thought I had figured out about Lucy’s movements.  A woman sounded very confident that she had seen Lucy, next to a big mosque on Massachusetts Ave., at Belmont Rd.  Still thinking like a human, I thought, “Good lord, that’s way too far south of our neighborhood, that can’t really be Lucy.”  But the woman sounded sure, so off we went to check it out.  Of course, we discovered just how plausible it was that Lucy had been there.  The area straddles Rock Creek, and there are several convenient entry points from the park.  A couple trails lead up to the streets from there, and if she had been traveling within the park, Lucy would only have had to go about half a mile south from the Zoo to reach here.

    Crap.

    This blew all previous theories of her whereabouts, and forced us to look at a really large swath of territory to search:  the whole of Rock Creek Park.  We looked, we shouted her name, we postered.  No luck.

 

Day 5 – Sun. 2/8/09

    Sarah and I decided to head down early, and start hanging posters all along both sides of Rock Creek Park, down to the Potomac.  If she pokes her head up long enough, hopefully someone will spot her and see a poster.  That’s the hypothesis.

    More (probably wrong) tips, more fliers, more walking, more talking to people, more walking, more shouting her name, and more walking.  At the end of this day, I estimated (conservatively) that we had walked 40 miles since Lucy disappeared.

Day 6 – Mon. 2/9/09

   This day we were fortunate to work with Laura Totis and her wonderful tracking dog Chewie.  We started down by Massachusetts Ave., and began what for an out of shape guy like me was an arduous 7 hours of hiking through (and over and around and up and down) Rock Creek Park.

    Toward the end of the day I got a call from the Rock Creek Park Police, notifying me that we had about three hours (until 6:00 PM) to remove all the signs that we had hung in the park, or the RCP Police would have to take them down then fine us PER SIGN.  Fun.  Thanks guys.  I know you’re just doing your jobs, but come on, give a heartbroken guy a break, will ya?

    So I had to go undo a lot of the hard work that we and our friends (mostly Steph and Rich) had done.  I had no way of knowing how much the fine would be, nor how many signs had been posted between the four of us.  If we had a hundred signs and got fined $20/sign… *shudder*

    So after all that, and while Laura, Chewie, and Sarah ran down a possible Lucy sighting, at the end of the day, we had nothing remotely conclusive about where Lucy might currently be.

 

Day 7 – Tues. 2/10/09

    Back to work.  It’s pretty frustrating to go back to work after all this.  It’s hard enough to be productive and not spend all your day thinking about your dog, but the whole mess is compounded by having dragged your sorry fat butt (okay, going to only speak for myself here, MY sorry fat butt) for probably almost two marathons’ worth of miles and not had a sound night’s sleep in a week.

    No solid sightings reported today.  No one tells you how hard it is to just sit around, waiting for someone to call with a sighting.  Actually, that’s not true, I think someone told me.  But you don’t really understand until you’re sitting at a desk in a suit thinking, “I should be out there looking or doing something.  I should be out there.  I should be out there…”

Hello World

We're just getting started with the Lost Lucy blog, so bear with us while we add content in between our jobs and looking for Lucy.  For now, you can find important information at the following site regarding our dog, Lucy, where she was lost, where she's been seen, and how to contact us if you see her:  www.LostLucy.com