Ask The Audience: Lost And Found

I had a ring that I loved and purchased almost about 8 years ago. I hadn't seen it for 4-5 years and expected that I had lost it somewhere for good. Then it showed up about 6-8 months ago randomly in my mom's house about 6 months ago. then I misplaced it once more, and it resurfaced recently again. It's like I lose it but it wants to be found.

I have lost three significant pieces of jewelry in my life, but luckily found them all.

When I was in high school, I lost my class ring about 4 months after my parents gave it to me. I was helping my father dig and lay stone in a new leach bed, and thought for sure it was gone forever. But after he dumped a pile of stone later in the day, I was raking it out, looked down, and there it was, good as new!

I've also lost a diamond earring only to find it perched precariously on the edge of the shower drain...three days later.

And last but not least, I lost another earring of sentimental value while moving, don't ask why I was wearing them during that, I don't know. Well, my mother found about a month later in her car...but she wasn't helping me move when I lost it!

My boyfriend gave me a lovely pair of earrings.

One day, I was picking out earrings to wear and I thought "wouldn't it be terrible if I lost them?"

I looked . . . and there is only one earring in my jewelry box. Don't ask me how only one ended up in there but I was/am totally bummed out.

I put my colored pencils (the expensive set for college art class) in a certain spot, in moms house, just behind the china hutch. In, oh, 1994.

The hutch is gone, the room has been
re-carpeted, the attic has been cleaned, etc. etc.
No pencils. I hold out tender hope that if they ever move, I may find them. Tender, because after all these years, I doubt it.

I've also lost my driving glasses in the car, and found them in a spot I *know* I checked, after I asked the house-spirits or what-have-you for them back. That does help, sometimes.

a couple of years ago i broke my tailbone and was on vicodin for a few days. after losing a few things and finding them in odd places (like a sweater stashed way under a bed, and the tv remote in the freezer), my roommates told me i wasn't allowed to do anything except sit and watch tv or read while i was "high" on vicodin.

If we ever lose something someone in the family usually hollers out - "It's with the ladle!"

My mother was ladling up soup for dinner. She set the ladle down, served the soup to two people. She came back into the kitchen and the ladle was gone. vanished. You could see the spot on the spoon rest where the ladle had been. She had only used it to scoop up those two bowls of soup.

Every time I use a ladle I laugh and wonder if it will be there when I get back.

I really wish I still had my grandmother's cross. It was on the living room bookshelf, and then it wasn't. That was 3 moves and 15 years ago. :(

We lost our marriage license on that same bookshelf in our previous apartment. (I should probably get rid of that bookshelf someday before it eats again.)

@ Tracy - Here's how I got plumbing backup stink out of some important papers: I put them into a box (plastic with a lid would be best, but cardboard lined with a trash can liner will work) and "tossed" them with enough Arm & Hammer Cat Box Deodorizer to cover them well on all sides. I then left them in there until the smell was gone (about a month).

I haven't tried this on photos, so I would be really careful, and check the pictures often to make sure the mixture isn't reacting with the emulsion - it probably won't on newer prints, but who knows what it might do on old photos or polaroids.

Alternatively, you could put the photos in an album with plastic sleeves and try what I do with used books that have a cigarette smell - put dryer sheets in between the pages and wrap the whole thing in a plastic bag for a few days.

I've also had success with putting smelly things into a plastic bag along with a Method fragrance disk (the grass-scented one seems to work fastest, but they all work eventually), just be careful not to let the fragrance disk come into contact with your object (i.e., put the disk into a paper envelope first) because there are volatile compounds in there (which make it work) that can damage paint and plastic if left touching.

You can accelerate all of the odor removal methods by adding mild heat (like from a sunny window).

Good luck with deodorizing your photos!

@ Mom of three: LOL! (I actually do use scrapbook paper -- but for macro photography backdrops behind small items.)

when i was a kid i lost a toy rabbit in the house somewhere that never turned back up.
I once found the remote control to the tv in the freezer.

A few years ago I moved and I packed rather hastily. When I sarted to unpack my frozen food I noticed that a pork loin roast was missing. I knew I had it when I left! 2 years later I found it in a box in my attic with all of my pictured from my kids growing up. Talk about gross! How it got there is beyond me! To this day all my pictures smell like rancid meat. I want to put them in a photo album but I cant stand the smell. They still sit in the box, minus the pork tho.

I am convinced that objects disappear into a separate dimension when you are looking for them. Happened to my keys a couple of days ago. I looked all over the house, and finally found them where they were supposed to be. And I had looked there! And, as for the shoes, am I the only one who sees one shoe by the side of the highway? This happens several times a week. I think I have to change my medication.

About three years ago, I checked out a Lady and the Tramp book from the library. It disappeared. I turned the whole house upside down looking for that thing, I mean, I went through bags and bags of papers and magazines that I was saving to recycle, went through boxes (we had recently moved) and couldn't turn find the book. I paid the library $15.

Two years later, I'm walking through the basement (which had been rearranged and sorted through many many times) and what is poking out of a box? That book! I couldn't believe it! I took it back to the library. I couldn't get my money back, of course. I really didn't want the money, I just wanted that book out of my house and back where it belonged!

Look in the trash. When my son was very young he threw his shoes away so he wouldnt have to go to school

We had a musical stacker toy that completely vanished. I rotate toys and had put it away only I forgot where I put it. Oddly enough one of the rings showed up but the rest of it stubbornly refused to surface. I felt sure that it would turn up when we moved recently, but no go it is still missing.

We lost our Coleman camp stove right out of our garage. One day it was sitting on the shelf in the garage, the next day it was gone. That was over 20 years ago and we have never seen it since. A metal baking sheet disappeared from the garage at the same time (our daughter, now 25, used to use the baking sheet in the car for a hard surface to draw on). Somebody, somewhere, is cookin' up a mean pot of chili on that stove!

Dang, that's where I left that silly thing. Laid it down to clean it and when I turned around it was gone. In it's place was some scrapbooking paper...

LOL

the sword thing is the most bizarre story, ever. EVER.

I have a reverse story to tell. I had something inexplicably *appear* in my house.

First, let me tell you that I am in the process of remodeling my kitchen and living room, and am doing it all myself as I can afford to buy stuff. So I designated an unused bedroom as a "junk" room to receive items that need temporary storage as we work on the remodeling.

For about four months, the door to the closet in that room was completely blocked with heavy stuff that took both of us to move. That closet contains seldom-used office and craft supplies, and directly before we blocked the door, I went in there to verify I wasn't closing in something I figured on needing soon, so I know what condition it was in before we blocked the door.

One day I needed to get some picture frame matting paper out of the closet, so I asked my husband to help me move stuff around so I could get to the door. He was standing right behind me when I opened the door and confronted, directly in front of me, a three foot long sword, leaning up against the bookcase on which I keep my office supplies.

A sword???!!! I asked my husband if he had put it in there. No. Neither of us had seen it before or had any idea how it could have gotten in there. No one else had access to the closet, and as far as I know, no one has ever come over to my house carrying a three-foot sword. I think I would notice a detail like that. ;o)

It was also filthy when I found it, like it had come out of somebody's basement or attic, not like the rest of the closet, which is pretty much spotless since it is seldom accessed. My husband cleaned the sword and sharpened it (it turned out to be real, not a stage prop) and it's now on display as an art piece. I wonder if somewhere in the world someone is vainly searching their attic or basement, scratching their head and wondering what happened to their sword...

Crap, about 9 years ago. Geesh!

We lost a tv remote. (I know, big surprise there) We found it 5 years & 3 moves later, in a couch.

Funny you wrote this. About 6 years ago my boyfriend, now husband, gave me a wood Asian box with all kinds of drawers. It closed up and locked with a neat fish lock and key.. Well, I lost
the key and thought I knew I would find it when my parents moved...well, never did. Never could open the box. JUSt 2 days ago I found it in a bowl of screws of my dads!
There wasn't anything in the drawers :(

I lost two pairs of shoes - both had been left on the back step to dry. I was convinced my husband somehow threw them out, only to later find out from a neighbor that something similar had happened to hers. Short while later, we discovered our mutual landscaper had quite the shoe fetish...

We couldn't find my 3.5 year old's cup for 3 days. We looked everywhere. We joke that I have cup-dar - as I can ALWAYS find their cups... I just sense them.

We finally gave up - and then we found it in the back yard. Considering he wasn't outside there the day it went missing, he must have opened the screen door and thrown it out there.

(Pssst. Check the underwear drawer - it's always in someplace weird and unexpected)

The shoe is on top of something - bookshelf, fridge, etc.

The most recent lost/found thing is my camera. It was found hiding on top of a bookshelf, with some headphones wrapped around it.

Ivy,

I always kept my children shoes in the trunk of the car. When we left the house, they could put them on, and when we got home, they took them off, I put them in the trunk. They could have shoes at home to wear for fun, but one pair always stayed in the trunk. Shoes DO NOT, repeat DO NOT get lost, KIDS HIDE THEM. Yes, they do that on purpose. It's the only thing they can control and they do it on purpose.

We once lost a cordless phone. Pretty sure DS age 2 at the time put it in the diaper durby. That phone cost $130, but there was no way in you know where I was going to go through the trash and see which one of the sausage tubes of poop contained that phone. Even if I had found it, I didn't plan on sticking it to my ear. Two moves and 15 years later and it has never shown up. He says he's pretty sure it went in the diaper durby because he was fond of putting things in the trash in those days. YUCK!

I'm a minimalist. If (when) I lose something, it winds up exactly where I left it. The only variable in this straightforward situation is when my toddler decides to relocate things. Then, it's anyone's guess.

Oh, and when we'd found the rings we'd moved again. So they were lost for two moves.

We moved in Nov of 2005 and when we unpacked we could not find my husbands Oakleys or our wedding/engagement rings. We believed that someone who helped us move had stolen them (we had learned after the move they weren't really friends and were psychopathic liars). My engagement ring was my grand mothers so I was really frustrated.

The next September we finally filed a renters insurance claim because we'd looked everywhere. We bought new glasses and rings and all was right in the world, well sort of, that 50 year old ring was still gone but it was better.

The following fall I was digging chalk out of the super thin front pocket of a rolling carry on back that my two year old had put in there. At the very bottom I felt something odd. I was beyond shocked and excited and overjoyed when I found my engagement ring and wedding band. We never found the other items but we found the most important one. I was able to pay salvage for my old ring and keep it and the new one.

I'd totally written it off so this rocked my world.

An ironing board. We seriously lost an ironing board. The husband and I *both* remember seeing it in a specific spot after we moved into a new place, and then could never find it again.

A set of keys that we did not have a spare for. I had to have the car towed to the dealership. The keys have never turned up. I had arrived home and played with the kids in the driveway and realized they were missing before I went inside the house. Craziness.

I lost my car keys once when my son was about 17 months old.

We found them 3 days later in the back of the bottom of the fridge.

Socks....those have never been found.