So I got home yesterday, and my wife tells me, "I'm sorry, I washed your thumb drive." My DSL/qemu pendrive was sitting on a shelf in the laundry room in a small puddle.
I managed to pull the ends out of the little aluminum extrusion, let it air dry for a few hours, and after plugging it in, it booted! I dd'ed the contents to an image file in case I suffer a more catastrophic failure (should have done that when I got it.)
