The mysterious missing box

Shortly before leaving Virginia, I put all of the important paperwork for my corporation, the one which runs the D3sports.com network of Web sites, into a cardboard box. It was in the kitchen in the spring as I was working on the taxes, and sat there afterward, as we got packed up and headed out.

Move to Minneapolis. I had kind of thought we had the box among the stuff that we left out of storage and drove out with us. But no dice -- we searched through our unpacked belongings many times, for months, checking and rechecking every cardboard box. It contained the rest of the business checks, paperwork dating back years, receipts, the whole nine yards. I looked through our storage containers as much as I could for this mysterious missing cardboard box without luck.

Buy a house, move to Bloomington, unpack the storage containers and get everything out of mom and dad's house. Still nothing. If we have this box, we officially have no idea where. In the meanwhile, we've closed down and opened a new corporation and checking account, so business can continue.

Well, Neil and Alicia are getting ready to sell their place and are looking or some temporary storage, so they came over to help us organize our garage and set aside some space for them. In the process, a bunch of things came inside. In looking through them in my office this morning, I opened a plastic storage container with a lid that had a bunch of files in it.

Bingo.

A year and a half later, mystery solved. Guess we changed the box it was stored in, throwing off the entire search.

Something old

Sometime about four years ago, my wedding band disappeared.

In all honesty, the ring was large when it arrived, although at the fitting the samples in that size fit snugly. So when I would play ball, or wash the dishes, or take a shower, I would take it off so as not to lose it.

After a couple nights of it falling off my hand while I was asleep, I started taking it off at night as well, and one morning, I couldn't find it on my nightstand.

This wasn't the first time, so while I looked briefly around the bed, I didn't go too overboard and got ready for work. But as days went by, it still didn't turn up. Cate couldn't find it either, and Elizabeth hadn't seen it. I chalked it up to the newly mobile 2-year-old boy in the house and expanded my search to the recesses of his room, the heating vents, etc.

But no luck. And I went without a wedding ring for nearly two years, which bothered me, at least a little.

When time came for me to leave for NBCSports.com in Connecticut, I figured it would be bad for for me to go empty-handed. With our 10th wedding anniversary coming up, I bit the bullet and got fitted for a new plain gold wedding band. I didn't tell Cate because I wanted it to be a surprise. On the day I left, I opened the box and showed her the ring, at which point she told me she'd forgotten I wasn't wearing one.

Two years without a wedding band proved irrelevant.

Well, today I was trying to figure out how to get our recliner out the door and into the POD, turning it on its side and upside down in the process. When turning it upside down, I heard things rattling around inside it, so I felt around and came up with a kid's sock, four pencils, a hair clip, an eraser and some other random small items. After I figured I'd gotten everything, I went back in one last time.

And found the ring.

And Cate had wanted me to take the recliner to the trash! I might not have been so copious about digging around inside if that were the case.

So while this doesn't 100% exonerate Robert, it's a pretty good sign. All forgiven.