Tuesday Tips For Living Alone - Finding Sh!#

When you live with someone, it is relatively easy to find lost items.

The steps for finding something when you live with someone:

1. You ask other person where lost item is and they swear they never saw it.
2. Look everywhere you might have put it.
3. Think like the other person (may require a brick or sledge hammer) and look where they would put it.

Voila, item found.

When living alone, it becomes much more difficult. This was the case with my dual screen digital camera last night. 

I know I keep all of my cameras in the closet in various camera bags. 

I know that the last time I used the camera was at a wedding. The front lcd puts on a show and is much less intimidating when trying to take pictures of younger children then the jagunda dslr. 

I know I put the camera cable and battery charger with it.

I know it still took me an hour to find it.

The steps for finding something when living alone are:

1. Look where you would have sworn you put it last.
2. Look where you thought you saw it last time you couldn't find something else.
3. Look where you know it should have been put but never was.
4. Go into Navy Seal mode and begin a room by room sweep of the place proclaiming, “Not here!”, at every possibility, until all rooms are exhausted.
5. Stop and tax your already malfunctioning brain by trying to remember where the hell you put it.
6. Start looking in the remote locations, that by some act of a higher (or lower) power you might have placed the item.
7. Fuel an improbability engine with thoughts like; it was raining on Tuesday and I turned a light on, the item must be in the medicine cabinet.
8. Think of the last time you had company and where you put all of the items that needed to be “moved” out of the main living areas.
9. Scour every room, looking in places where the item could not even possibly fit, seething, “NOT HERE!!!!”.
10. Randomly go through the above steps until exhausted.
11. Sit down and contemplate the meaning of woe.
12. Give up on ever finding the item again.
13. Start doing a meaningless task.
14. See lost item while doing meaningless task.
15. Shrug and forget why you needed the item in the first place.
16. Leave the item there so that next time you can go through the same steps.

I know that some of you are saying, "Just be more organized.".  Look at your own homes. Every dwelling has at least one “closet of death and despair” where unused items go to die or much worse, be tortured and left for dead.  It's that closet that you hope no guest ever opens for fear of them being buried alive or drawn in never to be seen again. Basically if you cringe with fear, when opening a closet, that is the one.

The solutions to the lost sh!# problem.

1. Next time you are going to search for something, don't! Go online or to the store and buy a replacement for the lost item. This will result in the immediate discovery of the lost item and now gives you two of them to lose.
   
   
   or
2. Change your life to incorporate a one use/disposable architecture. Realize nothing lasts and after using an item throw it out or donate it. It's easier to find an item in a 100,000 sq. ft.warehouse store than your < 10,000 sq. ft. dwelling.