Minimal protection

When Bob called last night, he said he'd gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to go hunting, and when he went outside, he saw 25 or 30 shooting stars. I said I hadn't seen any, but that I had gone out; I said I wished on something, but I think it was an airplane.

He said, "That's okay. That works, too."

Every time I read something like this description of a fire in an apartment building, I start thinking: "Should the cat carriers be somewhere other than the basement? Like in the bedroom closet (of course, there's no room for them there)? Should I put everything back in my purse at night when I go to bed, like the cell phone and my Visor?" (Normally I take them out when I get home from work and they stay on my desk until the next morning when I sync the Visor and unplug the phone from the charger and put them back in my bag.)

It's the same thing when I read a thriller about someone breaking into a house and the victim shuts him or herself into the bathroom and calls the police on their cell phone. Unless Bob is out of town, my cell phone is downstairs either on my desk or in my purse. Come to think of it, though, that's right--if Bob is out of town, I generally take it upstairs with me in case he calls after I go to bed, so that's good. If he is in town, then he can protect me. Okay, good. That's handled.

But my purse--I don't take it up to the bedroom with me, I leave it downstairs on the kitchen counter where I dump everything when I get home from work.

I don't know. I know you can't live your life in fear about what might happen. It's sort of like when I'm reading a vampire novel, it always makes me go upstairs to my jewelry box and put on my silver cross. Just, you know, the minimal amount of protection. You do what you can do.

I was backing up Bob's laptop a few days ago and he suggested that I take the back-up to the office with me "in case the house burns down." I thought that was a good idea, and when I backed up my computer, I took the CD to work with me, too. Both back-ups are on my bookshelf. I'm sure nothing will happen, but you never know, and it's cheap insurance.

Every night when I stop writing, I upload the latest installment to the website, then back it up onto a zip disk. So it's three places--the server, my hard drive, and the disk, which goes to work with me. And I save obsessively, because there's worse feeling than to have the computer freeze up, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.