A short update for Saturday evening. Raven is still lost. We checked the area shelters, etc. but no result today.

I'm thinking of this day just passed as a day of preparation.

A few people sent us some great tips on how to better execute our search task. One of them was to create really large florescent posters with large short headlines of no more than five words, and then our letter-sized poster in the center to provide the picture. So we started work on building these things. This involved purchasing materials, building stencils and starting to mark up the poster boards. We tried to do it freehand but we are not artists and the stencils really make it more legible. Shortly, we will post these hard to miss and easy to read from a speeding car posters in key intersections so as to reach more people.

The posters will read: "Lost Dog - Reward - Sick!!!" This communicates the key concepts, including that raven needs medicine, in as few words as we could come up with. There isn't room or attention span to explain things on these posters.

The second preparation we did today was to contact a "pet detective", again on the advice of a kind person who shared suggestions with us. So - tomorrow morning bright and early we will be out with this woman and her two scent dogs and see if we can't find the scent trail that Raven left as she bolted from the pool on Wednesday.

Our detective suggested to us that we hold off posting the large posters until we had a better sense of where Raven might have gotten to - which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do - posters will work much better if we can get them in an area where Raven is now. So when we have data from the search tomorrow, we will use it to target our further postering.

We had some more time in the day, so on the advice of a friend's friend who had an intuitive hunch Raven might be North West of the origin point, we went out to the Pruneridge area just West of Lawrence Expressway. We put up some of our standard posters there but no one had seen her. Many sympathetic people but no information.

On the way home we were passing by Saratoga Creek which is tucked behind a sound wall on the side of Lawrence Expressway. And as I had wanted to search there, I had Monica drop me off and I walked the length of that open trail, again talking to people and postering and calling her name. No luck, but many nice sympathetic people, some of whom took posters to distribute to their friends. This creek is a big dog walking place, it's easy to see, as it is secluded (what passes for secluded in this area of the world) and beautiful. There's water there and it is nearby the origin point. I thought it reasonable that Raven might have gotten there and then camped out, but no such luck.

And that was the day, pretty much. Our baby girl Sofia is crying for the attention of her Daddy, but I don't have the luxury of spending too much time with her at the moment. Maybe in a few days....

More as I have it. Please keep the suggestions coming as they are really helpful. And the supportive stories of pets that have been lost and found are inspirational too, I might add. It's nice to know that this sort of painful limbo can have a pleasant resolution.

Mark