Lost and Found

This school year has been exhausting. I agreed to teach a math class for the first time since I arrived at South Pasadena. The class is Honors Math Analysis, and, although I've taught both math analysis and Calculus A, B, and C, I never taught 1/2 and 1/2 before. Adjusting to the level of students at South Pasadena, and getting the pacing of the class correct, not to mention writing all the quizzes, tests, and practice pages from scratch has taken an amazing amount of time. This is my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

In November, I went out back to repot one of my house plants. I had on gardening gloves. After my gardening, Charlie and I began dinner, and I realized my small gold ring was missing. I reconstructed where it might be. To leave out most of the details, Charlie found the ring at the very end of one of the fingers of my gardening glove. Then in January, I had gone to the teacher's lounge during my prep period and was grading up a storm. The air conditioning in that room is always on 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was really cold. I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed that the gold ring (yeh, same one) almost fell off. I then went to my class room and spent the last hour of school straightening out lab supplies. When I got home that night, Charlie and I sat down to have a cup of coffee and I noticed my ring was gone, yet again. We retraced my school steps, and it really seemed to be missing. I even took the unprecedented (and disgusting step) of going through all the paper towels dumped into the bathroom trash. The next day, still hoping against hope (I really like this silly ring) I began looking in all the boxes I had gone through. To my absolute amazement - I spotted my ring at the bottom of a large carton filled with smaller boxes of slinkies. Charlie and I went for a walk that afternoon straight to a jewelry shop where I had the ring sized. No more drop-offs!

Then came yesterday's step-walk. Charlie and I walked to a local bakery. We walked down Garfield, along Mission, I stopped at Rite-Aide for balloons. We then walked down Fair Oaks to the bakery, along Monterrey up Milan, Mission, then Garfield to home. When I got inside, I realized my scarf was missing. What is this??? I really was too tired to re - walk the whole thing so we drove our walk backward. I went back into Rite-Aide - Nothing. At that point, I began to rationalize why I didn't care about the missing scarf, yeh right. As we turned onto Mission, I spotted the scarf lying on the sidewalk across the street! I leaped out of the car and grabbed it. I'm hoping that will be our last missing pieces re-trace. I like the walks - not the searches.