I may doodle only a couple of times each month but when I do I simply MUST have my drawing pens and pencils. They are an extension of my very essence during that time. If they don't turn up soon I will have to replace them which will be inconvenient and expensive and will pretty much guarantee that I find the original set shortly after replacing them. It will be the airline tickets all over again.
About 15 years ago Jayson and I bought plane tickets to Florida to visit his family and do the Disney World thing. This was back before e-tickets. You could buy plane tickets online but they sent you an actual ticket that you hold in your hand. We bought our tickets several months in advance so we could get a good price. Once they were delivered, I put them in a safe place since we wouldn't need them for quite a while.
About a month before we were due to leave, Jayson asked if I still had the tickets safe and sound. I was sure that I did but I couldn't remember exactly where that safe and sound place was. He and I literally tore up our little house searching for those tickets. This was early in our marriage when Taylor was only about 4 years old and plane tickets were a huge expense for us. We couldn't find them. And believe me, we looked everywhere.
I was extremely upset and felt awful for losing those expensive tickets. My sweet husband wasn't very happy about it but he never yelled at me or blamed me in any way. At least not out loud. After an unfruitful search we decided we would have to go ahead and replace the tickets. We could have waited a while to see if they turned up but we were afraid we might not be able to get the same flight if we waited too long. I think it cost us $75 per ticket to replace all 3 but we coughed it up and did it.
When the new tickets arrived I put them in the top desk drawer and told Jayson where I put them so we wouldn't have to repeat the lost ticket nightmare.
A few days before we were due to leave, Jayson and I were lying in bed talking about the trip and he said something like, "You know where the tickets are, right?" The giant hands of panic gripped my throat as I tried to remember where I put the tickets. I was pretty sure I put them in the desk drawer but I hadn't actually seen them in several weeks.
I bolted out of bed with Jayson on my heels and threw open the desk drawer. The force with which I opened it caused the contents to shift to the back of the drawer then slammed up against the drawer front. I picked up the envelope and with a sigh of relief handed it to Jayson so I could take a breath and regain my composure.
I will never forget Jayson's next words: "Uh honey? These are the original tickets."
Yes, I had just found the tickets we paid to replace and now we couldn't find the replacements. We knew we couldn't use the original tickets because they were voided when we replaced them so not finding the replacement tickets was not an option. Jayson stuck his hand inside the desk drawer and reached up toward the bottom of the desk top. He pulled out another envelope with our replacement tickets inside.
The ticket envelopes were getting snagged on a piece of wood that was attached to the underside of the desk top. So technically it wasn't my fault that I kept losing them. The poorly designed desk was hiding them from me. Totally not my fault.
I would like to say that I never lost anything important after that but that would be a lie. Fortunately I usually manage to find the temporarily misplaced item before too much damage is done. For example, our sweet dog Snappy died just before Christmas. We had her remains cremated and the doggie funeral place gave them back to us in a lovely urn.
About 5 years ago our other dog Pongo died while we were living in Louisiana. We had him cremated as well but there was no doggie funeral place so we got his remains back Cajun style: in a gallon size ziploc baggie wrapped in a paper sack. I was traumatized by having to see his remains which really didn't look any different than what you'd find in the bottom of your fireplace except that they were unusually heavy. Dense, maybe. Anyway I knew I needed to get an urn for him but the whole idea of having to transfer him from his baggie to an urn just turned me inside out so I never really seriously looked for one.
When Snappy died and I saw her nice urn I made a decision to start seriously looking for an urn for Pongo's remains. But...I couldn't remember exactly where those remains were. I knew they made the move from Louisiana to Texas with us because the movers asked what was in the paper sack while they were packing. I explained to them that it was our dog and I assured them that was the only dead body they would come across. Most likely.
Experience taught met that Pongo's temporarily misplaced remains would eventually turn up so I didn't worry about it. I even found a lovely old copper coffee canister to use as his urn. It sat in a closet for several weeks until I found his remains one afternoon while digging through some stuff I had stored in Harry Potter's room (the room under the stairs). Of course then I remembered putting him there several months before. Safe and sound. Fortunately the canister was large enough so that I didn't have to actually take Pongo's ashes out of the baggie. I just put the whole ziploc bag, still sealed and taped shut, into the canister. He was a perfect fit.
So...FYI, the ashes of one 60 pound dog will fit into a container roughly the size of a coffee canister. Just in case you ever need to know that.
None of what I just said has anything to do with the mystery that was just solved. Over the past year I have pretty much doubled in size like a nice yeasty bread dough. I am also unusually tired and lack more energy than I usually lack. Being narcoleptic I am sleepy 24/7 but tired is not the same as sleepy. At least not in my world. I live in a constant state of sleepy but I'm not always tired, or at least I didn't used to be. Lately I seem to have zero energy and everything I eat goes straight to my already ample caboose. My eating habits haven't changed and I still exercise the same amount I always have which is not at all. I thought these things were probably just more benefits of the perimenopause hell I'm in.
Turns out, my thyroid is out of whack again. I usually have it checked at least once a year but moving during this last year got me all off schedule. My new doctor said my thyroid levels have dropped significantly over the past year and I need to get back on a thyroid replacement. I've taken thyroid pills off and on for about 15 years but I haven't needed them in 6 or 7 years. My last doctor said my "thyroid is trying to go out," as if it was an old air conditioning unit. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it needs help. It's been a while since it's given me any trouble so it never even occurred to me that it might be the cause of my weight gain, lack of energy and even my perpetual state of hotflashiness. This would have been good to know 30 pounds ago.
So I'm adding one more pill to may daily regiment which includes 8 others. I feel like this is entirely too much medication for someone as youthful as me but bad things happen when I try to eliminate one of them. So here I am a tired, middle aged, forgetful, yeasty-assed, pill popping narcoleptic whose body organs function like a 1973 Pinto. Don't you wish you were me?
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