Losing It

In the past week or so, I have misplaced or temporarily lost:

house key: mislaid for 4 days after I took it off the keyring to take it running.

office keys & church key: missing for 40 minutes until I determined I had dropped them in a friend's yard (during that 40 minutes I managed to lock my car keys in the car and had to have the apt manager let me into my apartment to retrieve another car key, because this all happened during the aforementioned period when the house key was AWOL. And yes, this is a separate incident from the week before, when I inadvertently left the same keyring on my desk at work and we had to have Seminary outside the next day).

floor fan remote control: this was missing for several months. I found it Sunday, and have again mislaid it, less than 24 hours later.

Visa card: apparently missing since Saturday, though I didn't discover its absence until I tried to buy something at the bookstore today. I retrieved it from the Kroger service desk tonight.

Kroger Plus card: probably gone forever. It was last seen in the company of the aforementioned Visa card, but the Kroger manager claimed no knowledge of it. Probably not a big loss, provided I can have my accumulated month's purchases transferred to my new card. If I spend $17 at Kroger this week, I'll earn a $0.10/gallon gas discount for two visits in September.

Dare I ask what's next?

Cliffhanger

So sorry to keep my faithful readers hanging. The presentation (a training session at a school inservice conference) went well:

• The pimple didn't erupt.
• If I said Texas instead of Tennessee, no one called me on it.
• I slept later (not longer) than I meant to, but it wasn't a problem.
• The room was full. I didn't have enough handouts, but now I know for next time.

Like many other things in my life, I spent waaay too much time preparing for what actually transpired, but it's water under the bridge now.

Easily Persuaded

It turns out that I needed the print copy of my latest audiobook, The Distant Echo, for more than just the fact that one cd has some unplayable tracks. The story is set in Scotland, and the narrator reads with such a heavy Scot accent that many placenames and proper nouns are undecipherable to my ear. So it's nice to have the print copy to refer to. The danger, however, is that when I look up a passage, I'm tempted to keep reading beyond the point to which I've listened.

Since I've been listening, however, I've started talking to myself with a Scottish affect, saying such things as "Where are me keys?" This is not a new phenomenon. When I listened to The Last Town on Earth, a story set during the 1918 influenza epidemic, I started with a bit of fear whenever someone near me coughed. During the epidemic, that could have been a deadly sound.

I think I had better not read something like How to Commit the Perfect Murder. Who knows where I would end up!

A Prayer on Presentation Eve

Please help me to not oversleep. Or perhaps that should be, please help me to at least get a couple of hours in.

Please, keep me from saying Texas when I mean Tennessee.

Please make sure there are more than 2 and less than 40 people in my session.

There's a nice blemish about to pop out on the side of my nose. Please delay it for a day.

148 Days to Go

It's only August 5 and I'm already feeling nervous because I don't have my 2009 appointment calendar purchased yet. I'm afraid to think about the deeper implications of that.