The Long Search for Duke

Back in November of 2010 a much younger bava family visited a dog breeder in Bumpass, Virginia when we were seriously considering getting a Spinone. When we finally did get one eight years later Antonella reminded me of the videos we took years earlier. She asked if we all could wach them and as I often do these days when it comes to archiving my past, I froze worrying these videos were part of the Great YouTube Deletion of 2012. And, as it turns out, they were on my Youtube that was deleted in 2012. “No worries, I have backups, right?” One would hope, but the two backup drives I had and the backup folders on AWS delivered nothing. [At this point I usually curse myself for not backing up a version to this blog apart from Youtube and their ilk.]  I was searching across all video formats, though I was pretty sure I shot them with a flipcam which would be mp4. File names were going to be standard flipcam fare, but everything I found was not showing me any Italian hunting dogs from 2010. Damn, and then sets in that depression which follows the idea these recorded memories were lost. Sad bava…

But, but, but, I had a third backup drive I had forgotten about in the bookshelf that has just about all the videos I lost on Youtube in one fashion or another (except “Embedded!,” the lost EdTech Survivalist episode featuring a First Blood parody -but that was a casualty of the Blip.tv famine of 2013 šŸ™ ). Finding this stash of videos led to a good hour or two of all of us watching our younger selves playing with 10 or more Spinones and even a Bracco. It was good to find the videos, it was wild to see what time does, and it was a small victory in my unorganized attempt to hold onto memories I might have otherwise lost.

A five year old Miles, a three year old Tess, and Tommy not even a year. A small time capsule of video that captures a strangely long sense of our personal history. It’s weird when you start measuring time by intervals of twenty years. I’m not always sure why I wanna capture what I capture, but it seems to take on a life of its own that I was only initially part of. The archiving continues, and the Spinone thrive! It’s been a long search for Duke.


*The desire to get a Spinone has been with us even earlier than that, I saw my first Spinone on the streets of Brooklyn in 2001 and was smitten from then on. 

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