Dog-Related Disaster Averted

The other night I got home from play practice (and there may be a blog here soon about what it looks like when two middle-aged women bend over and slurp together into a microphone to make the sound-effect for a giant amoeba) and had eaten my supper and had just settled down on the couch with my laptop to see what was happening in the world and maybe do a little e-bay search for Coach leather backpacks, vintage, which is sort of a hobby of mine, when the dogs started arguing fiercely about a bone.
I quickly set my laptop down on the coffee table in order to grab my smallest dog, Zeke, before my next-to-the-largest dog, Buster, ate him, but my husband beat me to the quickly-escalating violence and picked up Buster. Unfortunately the dogs were attached via Buster's teeth and Zeke's forearm and as I tried to pry the teeth from the forearm, Zeke dropped like a rock and hit the coffee table, sending a glass of water flying across the table, dumping its contents onto my laptop.
You knew this was coming, right?
And here's what you have to know- my laptop is my baby. I treat it as gently as I would a real baby, always handling it with kid gloves, never leaving it plugged in when I leave the house so that if a storm should magically spring up while I'm gone it won't get its little logic board zapped, and never, ever leaving it near a glass of anything.
This is not my first laptop and I have learned all of these lessons the hard way.
But in the heat of the growls and biting and barking, I just set it down right next to that glass of water and that was all it took for the unintentional water-boarding to occur.
Being as I have four dogs and only one laptop, I immediately grabbed it up, ignoring the smallest dog and raced to the kitchen to get a dry, clean cloth to begin some sort of futile rescue on it. My husband followed me, grabbed the computer and held it upside down and began to shake and pound on it as if delivering a sort of clumsy CPR and Heimlich maneuver to a choking child. I watched in horror, quivering and trembling as water poured out of its precious keyboard, and all I could think was, "Dear Lord, he's killing it."
At that point, I remembered the dog and went to check on him. He appeared to be fine, although he did have a few small puncture wounds in his leg. Big deal. He's always getting beat up by Buster and he's always lived.
My laptop, however, had never had anything poured into it and of course it had gone all-blank-screened by this time. No vital signs at all.
I removed the battery and very gently and with very low heat, attempted to dry it out for about an hour with a blow dryer. My husband and I set it up in front of a fan and a small space heater, put Neosporin on the dog's leg and then we all went to bed, exhausted from the emotional distress of watching a laptop possibly die, knowing we'd done all we could and that only time would tell.
The next morning I was in a state of high anxiety but I waited until I'd read the paper and had some coffee and my husband said the laptop was as dry as it was going to get before I put the battery back in and tried to start it up. With my husband watching anxiously over my shoulder, I held my breath and hit the "on" button and I've never been more thrilled in my life to hear that sweet Mac chime and see it start to boot, just like normal. Before we knew it, everything had sprung to life- my desktop and all the icons- and I ran it through a few tests and tried to type and go online and everything, everything worked. Its magic was intact.
Phew.
So here's what I'm saying- no matter how careful you are, unforeseen disasters can occur and if you're lucky and these disasters involve water and not something like, oh- rum and coke, and if you have a beautiful little machine like say- a MacBook, a little water down the keyboard won't kill it and you will live to blog again.
And by the way, Zeke is fine and isn't even limping and we've thrown all the bones away.
That's him in the picture above which I took with the nifty camera that comes in the MacBook and which still, as you can see, works fine.