Tonight my editor Sam sent his blog writer out with the camera.

My apologies. This evening Mrs. Dada and I went out to a potluck dinner in honor of Pastors for Peace who chose El Paso as a stopover on their way to Cuba. They are carrying medicines and impossible-to-find supplies of items made scarce by our own government's seemingly endless blockade of Cuba.

My editor Sam sent me out with the camera, a couple of "Dada's Dally" cards and lots of hope of learning more about this group's incredibly adventurous mission: to go to Cuba, to deliver those supplies in defiance of U.S. prohibitions against citizens attempting to do so.

This is the 19th trip to the island since these missions began 17 years ago. Hopefully, it will be just as successful in achieving their goal as the previous 18 have been.

But more to the point, as we pulled up outside the El Paso Unitarian Universalist Community Church, this evening's host of the Pastors for Peace group, I discovered the same bus Mrs. Dada and I encountered two years ago this summer on Interstate 10 just west of Blythe, CA. So intrigued were we back then, I slowed down as we passed it while Mrs. Dada took pictures of this most curious vehicle.

Tonight, sadly, we weren't so lucky. Two reasons. First, I started photographing our "old friend" the bus and another accompanying bus parked just across the street from the church. Both appeared loaded with supplies. After the fifth photo or so, the camera stopped working. That's because I forgot to put the memory card into it before leaving the house, a fact I'm still sheltering from Sam, my editor.

At least I had a couple of photos on the camera's internal memory of the buses outside. It was then I next discovered Mrs. Dada hadn't brought her Olympus with her this evening, something she usually never goes anywhere without.

"Well, even if I can't capture some of the incredibly courageous people undertaking this government defying adventure, at least I have the pictures of their buses," I thought.

In short, when we returned home I quickly plugged the camera into the computer and "Presto! Bingo!" there were the great images of the buses. That's when the second sad thing happened. Unconditioned as I am of saving to the computer images stored on the camera's internal memory -- I was so engrossed in the pictures -- as I closed them after viewing, I was actually somehow deleting them! "Poof! -- Gone!"

Perhaps there's redemption in the morning. Perhaps not. But if I leave the house early enough, I may just capture images of those two buses before they leave with their 16 passengers headed to their next stop, San Antonio, TX, then on to Mexico, then Cuba.

But pictures or not tomorrow morning, I'll have more to say about this evening's incredible potluck with a wonderful band of very dedicated and daring people. And maybe, just maybe, if I can retrieve some photos in the morning before they leave, my editor Sam won't even know of my goof earlier tonight.