I would take this advice, but we're going to use this car in about a week to drive to Chicago. She has Tuesday off. I'm going to send her to the locksmith. I like having two sets of keys when we travel, even if one set gets locked in the car.

Too much time in the computer industry I guess. We have redundant systems for most everything.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, I bought a pair of Danner boots. Tall, insulated, waterproof. I wore them backpacking in the Sierras, hiking in the San Bernadinos, snow camping in the Angeles Crest, durimg ice storms in Portland, everywhere a tough, warm, waterproof boot was needed. They were resoled a couple times and absorbed a couple gallons of Sno-Seal over the years. My son, who was born ling after I bought the boots, used them for a summer working in the Tahoe mountains, then got his own Danners. Thosr boots had history.

About five years ago, my boots disappeared. I looked everywhere, ranted and wept, finally concluded they’d been stolen off my porch by scumbag homeless thieves. The next few years were spent in mourning. Finally I went to Danner - which is right here in Portland Ore - and bought a replacement pair. The model is the “Elk Hunter” and in 2022 dollars they cost four hundred. I think that must have been a month’s rent when I bought my original Danners. My new boots looked awkwardly, well, new. They are a year old now and still look new. They are excellent boots, but everytimr I look at them, I am reminded of my old lost friends.

My wife has a problem, that perhaps your spouses do. She occasionally has fits of house-cleaning rage. The house is a mess, your (meaning my) stuff is everywhere, this doesn’t belong in my (meaning her) living room and neither does that, and so on, shriller and shriller. During these fits, she can go into a “cleaning coma”, where she puts the offending object anywhere that it can be out of sight. She could stuff the Hope Diamond behind the refrigerator, or a small child into a laundry chute, and have no memory of it. I’ve often thought that this is how I will eventually meet my end, yanked off her couch, wadded into a small wet ball, and crammed into the hallway linen closet.

She opened a drawer under my closet. This drawer is five feet wide, sticks and jams, I never use it, hardly know it is there. Apparently this is where she keeps the pants she buys for me that I don’t wear, and has done for a decade. Dozens of pairs of pants. She exclaimed “look what I found!” and pulled out my old Danner boots, that she had stuffed there several years ago, along with my old and beloved Tumi shoulder bag that mysteriously disappeared a year ago. Suffice to say I refused to give her credit for finding what she lost, and suffice equally to say she denies ever placing the boots or bag there.

So now I have old and new Danner boots. I am thinking of sending the old ones to Danner to be “recrafted”, which is a service they offer. They may be a bit too far gone for that, but maybe not, I’m not going to ask them to look like new. Which then begs the question: what do I do with two pairs of Danner Elk Hunter boots?

That's me and my wife. I pretty much always know where everything is. If I don't know where something is, 9/10 times, it's because my wife has moved it from where I put it.

My wife never puts stuff down in the same place twice. Over the course of 3-4 hours, she can take her glasses off and set them down in 5 different places.

Our spouses must be related. I’m a creature of habit. I put everything in the same place and if it’s not there, I might forget to take/use/etc. She constantly moves my stuff cleaning up.

Drives me nuts, as I don’t touch or move her stuff.

That's how I lost a fortune in baseball cards. A shoebox with a full set of every Yankee team from 1958 to the mid 60's. She thought they were childish. I told her she just bought a beach house for the trash man.

If you replace, you will find it.

I lost a fenix flashlight for months. I found it cleaning out the truck a few weeks after I bought the replacement. That's happened more than once.

Looking for your Sunglasses, patting your pocket, head, and find you're wearing them.

Not your ex-wife. You are a gracious man.

Come to think of it, I'm missing a pair of boots too. I also ended up buying another pair, although I haven't run across the originals yet.

The worst part of this whole key thing is that for Christmas 2022 she gave me a hand carved wooden bowl with Odin's ravens on it, and what I hoped was a deep meaning phrase carved around the outside, but no, it's just a rune alphabet. I'm supposed to keep my keys in it, and I do, along with my watch, wedding ring and work ID. But she will dump other things in the bowl that she thinks are mine, pens, dead batteries, etc. There's probably 100 pens in this house. She keeps bringing them home from work. I've had the same pen for 15 + years. Lost it for a while but then I found it where she put it.

I guess my wife's Alzheimer's isn't that bad then. But I do have to go looking in the kitchen and cupboards for a utensil. It can be anywhere nowadays.

I have lost things in the garage. 9 times out of 10 I find it when I pull out a box of screws, nails, or anything stored that is not in a tool box. I don't lose tools in tools boxes. I leave them in power tool cases or bins of supplies.

I once found a loupe that had been missing for years in a box of misc wiring. I must have been reading the printing on the insulation.

My wife likes to reorganize things in ways she feels are more efficient.
Then she gets upset with me when I can't find stuff.

Maybe I'm going mad (or more mad than usual) but I found my car keys in the fridge and half a tin of dog food where the keys go :(

The wife has the day off today and is running the dogs to the vet and the groomer. I asked her to make another stop, and $115 later, we have a second key. Worse than I expected, but better than it could have been. When we bought the car it came with one key. I bought another off eBay and had a traveling locksmith cut the new one. The process to learn the new fob to the car is relatively simple. I think it cost maybe $35 total, $15 for the fob, $20 for the cut.

Fun fact. On the newer GM vehicles, not only does the car learn the fob, the fob learns the car, or at least sets itself as "paired". You can not take a used fob and pair it to another vehicle without divorcing it from the first car. That's not something you can do without special equipment, so it's easier to buy a unpaired fob, although you're probably not going to get a genuine GM setup.

With her old car I was able to take any fob and get the car to recognize it.

Still haven't found my boots, or the soup bowl. It's not in the garage with parts cleaner, I use other containers for that. I used a round cookie tin one time, found out it wasn't water tight, or the solvent made it not so. Made a mess.

The wife has also put keys in the fridge. Maybe I need to go through the freezer. Never found dog food where the keys should be, but she has tried to feed them twice. The little fat one always acts like he's starving, even if you've just fed him.

Everything in my garage is organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

In the house, I keep everything alphabetically. Like this:

Eighth
Fifth
First
Fourth
Ninth
Second
Seventh
Sixth
Tenth
Third

Yer dawg is just messin' wif your head ...

I's never trusted that dawg. In fact that's the last time I get a dawg that's smarter than me.

I FOUND MY BOOTS!

My stepdaughter and granddaughter visited last week for spring break (My stepdaughter is a teacher, not a college student)

Apparently the wife's go to place to hide stuff is a pile in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom. Normally I ignore this, but it grew last week. I moved a couple things, and there were my boots, along with a hat I've been looking for for a long time.

Haven't found her missing car key. Haven't found the missing diamond earring, but that's her problem. I've got my favorite hat back.

My favorite utility knife, with snap point blades vanished. I looked in all the places I would have put it down or had used it, and nothing. It was gone. So I went to Amazon and looked. A single one was 11 bucks, but a box of 10 was 12 bucks. So I now have a lifetime supply of them. As I went to put them up, there was my old knife.

This is how I do it. Works every time