> Then we found the old one...in the couch.

Isn't that always the way it is? You always find whatever you lost just after you replace it.

> > Here's a word of advice to everyone: clean inside your couch once a year...

In 1980, I was six years old. My parents and I were just coming home to our house in Woodbridge, VA, and since their hands were full, I got handed the keys as we were walking through the door. It was literally no more than a few seconds -- my parents put whatever they were carrying down and went to retrieve the keys from me. But I didn't have them. And I didn't know where they went.

We looked for them all over the place, and the confusing thing was that the geographical area in which the keys could have been lost was only a few scant feet in diameter. There was the little bit of space just outside the front door, and the little bit of space just inside the front door, and that was it.

But the keys could not be found, and they gave up looking.

Shortly afterward, we moved to Germany, where Dad would start a three-year assignment on an American military base there. We took maybe a third of owner household possessions and left the rest in storage. Following the three years in Germany came two in England, then three more in Germany, and then we finally returned and lived in Virginia for my Dad's last two years in the army. At that point we got our stuff back out of storage, and it was like Christmas again, because there were things my parents forgot they had (and certainly I wouldn't have remembered).

So in 1988, we unpacked a lot of household possessions, including the armchair that used to sit by the front door in our house in Woodbridge. And we found the keys.

We still think it's amazing to find something so infamously lost after that long a time. But it's confusing as to why they weren't found right off -- my parents both rooted through that armchair and groped around inside.

S "much better at not losing things now" am