As I write this, I am about 90 percent sure my wedding ring is somewhere in or around our house. I am 100 percent sure it’s not on my finger.
That is a problem, but not an entirely unprecedented one.
I lose things all the time–like it’s a hobby of mine. In addition to that chunk of platinum, at the moment I can’t locate at least one set of headphones (they ought to be in my home office, but who knows?), a steamer basket (it’s somewhere in the kitchen, just not anywhere I’ve looked) and a Metro Smartrip card (which I thought I’d left at my mom’s house, but it wasn’t in any remotely obvious spot there, so maybe it’s around here too).
A wedding ring is worth immensely more, in monetary and sentimental terms. It annoys me greatly that I haven’t been able to find it since last week. Which, in turn, meant I had to travel without it earlier this week–and that bothered the hell out of me.
(If you saw me at PR Summit and wondered why I wasn’t wearing a ring and yet kept salting my conversations with references to my wife, there’s your answer.)
So far, I’ve established that my ring is not in the kitchen or dining room (where I remember taking it off, annoyed at how tight it felt in the typical D.C. heat and humidity) or near my nightstand (where I would have normally left it). I thought it might have rolled into the heating/air-conditioning vent in the floor in either room, but opening the ductwork in the basement revealed nothing but stray chunks of plaster. Did I put it in the pocket of the shirt I was wearing, which I then threw on the next morning to do a little gardening, at which point it could have fallen out? I haven’t seen any sign of it outside.
At least the house is getting cleaner as I inspect and tidy up each possible resting place.
(This kind of thing doesn’t happen when I travel, because I only allow myself to put things down in certain spots in a hotel room: the desk, the nightstand, the counter next to the sink.)
At some point, we’ll be able to slap tiny Bluetooth tags on important items, which our phones will be able to locate in seconds–and our phones, in turn, will be able to do more of the jobs now held by separate, easily-lost cards. But that’s not helping me today.
The longer I fail to find this thing, the greater the odds of it being carried away by the dust bunnies indoors or the real ones outside. (Our neighborhood has been overrun by rabbits, to the occasional delight of our toddler.) But if give up and buy a replacement–of course it’s not insured, because I usually don’t take off my ring–that pretty much guarantees I will stumble across it at home the next day.
I keep hoping that some flash of insight will cause me to remember the precise point where I put my ring down. Maybe the act of posting this confession will spark that–or, more likely, it will lend some comfort to the other poor slobs who can’t believe anybody could be so stupid as to lose something like this.
Update, 9/2/2013: My old ring still hasn’t shown up, so I gave in and bought a new one. It’s not platinum like its predecessor–the price of that has gone up like crazy since 2003. Instead, it’s made out of tungsten, which is a lot more affordable, much more scratch-resistant and (this is important too) a much nerdier metal.
