Winter Fun

Some days I just have to laugh at myself.

This is Day 6 since the Big Snow started to fall. We have somewhere between 2 and 3 feet on the ground, but the plows have been through most places, and the roads look ok, so I thought I would go venture out and pick up my glasses at Costco. It seemed like a good outing, entirely on major arterials once I got out of my neighborhood. I just had to dig my car out first.

I went out with a shovel, determined to get the car out of its snowy cocoon. I put my keys on the garbage can so that I wouldn't drop them, and dug and shoveled for about 15 minutes until the back was pretty well cleared, enough that I could start the car and not get carbon monoxide poisoning. Then I went to clear the driver's side so I could start the car and let it warm up and thaw. I grabbed my keys and shoveled once, twice...

...and dropped the keys.

The snow was all shoveled so there was no obvious hole where they went. I looked under the car and couldn't see them...looked beside the car...then started going through the piles of snow beside the car. It's perhaps worse than looking for a needle in a haystack, with that much snow to look through.

I didn't find them, though I looked for over an hour, and had help from my neighbor. The keyring held 4 keys: my car key, which I have no copy of (it's electronic, I lost my other one down an elevator shaft 4 years ago), my house key, which I have no copy of, my apartment key to the Portland place, and the key to our classroom at the hospital. My landlord came over and let me into my apartment and will get me another copy tomorrow. My car I'm just going to have to have rekeyed. All told, that will end up costing a few hundred dollars, and won't get done for at least a week--which is fine, I don't really need to drive anywhere for at least that long. But what an asshat thing to do.

Once I got inside and took a hot shower to thaw out (and looked to make sure that I really don't have another car key), I had to just let it go. What can you do? You really can't unlose your keys. They might turn up one of these times, when the snow melts in..April? May? I'll look again tomorrow morning, but the keys seem to have fallen into a black hole. It's not the end of the world, just a little annoying, and I'm lucky that I don't have to go to work this week and I'm in walking distance of the grocery store, which is all I really need while I'm on winter break. I can take a taxi to the train station, or could even walk if it got that bad. It's a little expensive and inconvenient, but it could be much worse.

So, I'll be confined to about a 1 mile radius for at least another week. Sweet!