Lost and found

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When I'm stressed or worried, as I am now, I lose stuff, and forget stuff. So this morning, I lost my keys. I looked upstairs and downstairs (I was staying at my sister's house after a family party in Philadelphia; my house is a one-level 1969 ranch house that does not have stairs), in my coat pocket and in my handbag, and in my shoes, and in my suitcase; and under the furniture, and even in the car. No keys. My sister's dog, who loves me, followed me around the house, looking puzzled. Is it a game? Do I look inside the shoes, too? Is she taking me for a walk? Does she have bacon in her pocket?

Then I remembered that I have a Tile, and I rejoiced. Problem solved! I'll just open the app, and it will point me toward my keys, and then I will have my keys, and they won't be lost anymore!

Tile helpfully told me that the last place my keys had been seen was on the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia. I was at my sister's house in Phoenixville, and if I hadn't driven my car there from Philadelphia, then I might have been fooled into believing that my keys were inches away from the murky waters of the Schuylkill. But I knew that the keys weren't in Philadelphia, because my car, which I had driven back to the suburbs, was sitting happily in the driveway.

Bluetooth, I thought. I bet the Bluetooth is off. But it wasn't. It was on. But the Tile kept telling me that the keys were last seen on the Schulkill River Trail, and that that would be a good place from which to commence a search. So helpful. The high-tech equivalent of "where did you have them last?" Yes, that's what I'll do. I'll go to Philadelphia, and start from there, working my way outward in ever-widening circles, gradually covering the entire world, until I find my keys.

I remembered, after one more desperate sweep of the house, that the boys and I had stowed our overnight bags in the cargo hold of the car, so I looked, and there they were. Thankfully, the car hadn't locked. 15 minutes later, a Tile "we found your keys" notification popped up on my phone. I was shocked at the temerity of this useless piece of Bluetooth-dependent plastic's outrageous claim that it had "found" the keys, when it was I who had hard-target searched for them in every farmhouse, outhouse, doghouse, and henhouse in the county.

"Bitch,  you didn't find anything," I snapped at the little gray square dangling from my keychain. "You would have been more helpful," I said to the dog, who looked insulted.

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I suppose that keychain and henhouse should be written as two words, because Blogger is flagging them for spelling. So now I have keychains taking credit for finding themselves, and computers telling me how to spell, which is particularly galling, because my spelling skills are outstanding. And I'm really good at finding stuff, too. You have to be, when you lose stuff as often as I do.

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It's Monday now. This might be it for the week, because I think that work is going to take over my life for the next few days.

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And now it's Wednesday. Work has in fact taken over my life, but I have a few minutes while I wait for the chicken to finish cooking in the Instant Pot.

I was going to just leave this post as it was and call it a day. In fact, I should have written it in one sentence: "I was really depressed and anxious, and then I lost my keys, and then I found them." The End. But that's not how I roll, or write.

I read the sentence "I write every day" on a blog that I follow, and that was inspiring enough that I wanted to be able to say the same thing about myself. So here I am, writing again.

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On Friday, the very day after writing about writing every day, I didn't write a thing. Actually, that's not true at all. I wrote all day long on Thursday, but not here. It's very early Saturday morning now. My four-year-old nephew stayed overnight last night, and he woke up before dawn, as four-year-olds tend to do, especially when they're excited about hanging out with their teenage cousins. He's playing now and waiting impatiently for the boys to wake up. "Can we wake them up now?" he asked me a minute ago.

"Later," I said. "They need to sleep for a little while longer."

"OK," he said. "How 'bout five minutes?"

I'll hold him off for as long as I can, but I have a feeling that two teenage boys are about to wake up a lot earlier than they want to.  For now, I'm going to end this heated mess with a piece of valuable advice: Don't run an iPod Nano through the washer and dryer, even if it's a little dirty. No good will come of that. This advice might or might not be the outcome of personal experience.