Lost And Found

In the carnival of madness that is my life right now, it will benefit me greatly to slow down, take a deep breath, and picture a time when tripping on boxes and looking for missing coffee grinders will be a thing of the past.

It's easy to go nuts in an environment that is upside down and sideways, where hardly anything is quite right, and everything else is quite wrong.

Living for years in a house, you get used to knowing where everything is. When you do lose something, it's usually something new or old, seldom used or not really necessary.

Now we are in a place where we cannot locate basic, very important things. Like clothes. Toothbrushes. Um, and the hard drive containing my life's collection of music.

We have the lawn fertilizer spreader, which I use once a year, but not the coffee grinder, an everyday necessity. We've located the glass top to a coffee table we'll never use again, in fact we trip over it every day, but just try to find a decent bath towel that hasn't been used on the dogs...

But my pillow!

That's what I miss the most. We have Heather's, but now that she's claimed that back, I am sleeping on a hard, compact pillow better suited to torturing a medieval prisoner or building a bunker with than putting your head down on. I wish I had the slightest clue where that thing could be stuffed right now. In a box at the bottom of the heap in the garage? Perhaps. In the basement, under the rubber Halloween skeleton? Maybe.

Rubber Halloween skeleton?

Yes, we have that. Good thing too, because Halloween is only a couple months away.

Location, Location, Location

Zach had a play date Saturday with his friend Rahul (Pronounced Ra-Hool) on the other side of town. Simple right? I left Z off at his mom's house per the request of Rahul's mom. She would pick him up there. When I talked to her on the phone, she said Zach would be ready to be picked up at 4:30pm. She said they live in a condo right off 12-mile rd, easy to find. No address needed.

I left home to pick Zach up and arrived in the vicinity of the condo complex. It was far larger than she had led me to believe. Lots of side drives and long rows of condos, each one a unique color. I wished she would have at least told me the color.

It started to rain. I picked up my phone to call her. Battery dead.

Ok, I'll just drive around and Zach will see me and come popping out the door of...whichever condo it was. I drove around until several nervous residents came outside in the rain to see who was stalking their complex.

I decided to step things up before the police were called and honked my horn once in front of each condo as I drove around again. This did nothing to better my reputation with the residents. Still no Zach. I heard sirens in the distance. I hoped they hadn't called the police.

At this point I am running out of options. I thought about the library across the street. I went there and got a terrible parking spot, ran in the rain until I found a pay phone. Only problem was, I didn't have any money on me. Library: bad idea.

My only option left was to go to Zach's mom's house a mile away and ask her where Rahul lives. I really did not want to do this, because she had a date that night and was surely either getting ready, or worse, already entertaining the guy at her house.

I showed up at the door and knocked a few times. She came to the door in a towel, just out of the shower. Ok, awkwardness was all over the place. I explained the situation and she called Rahul's mom, who decided to just come drop Zach off. So I waited for ten more awkward minutes on the porch until Zach showed up.

I never did find out where Rahul lives.