Lost but Not Found

Yesterday my daughter lost her keys. That's BS. She didn't lose her keys but someone did take her keys. The problem is that the someone who most likely took her keys is only about three feet tall and three years old. It went like this. Yesterday she was the volunteer Mom at the pre-school's Valemtime's Party. It involved a lot of your basic loss of brain power because you're in the orbit of 25 little kids who are all jacked up on sugar. Anyone who has spent any time around these munchkins knows that in a very short while your grip just keeps slipping away until you put your keys down on the table, turn around to help a little kid do his shoe up, turn back to the table to grab your keys and, guess what...they're flippin' gone. Yep, gone. The keys were probably taken by your basic little J.D. You know, juvenile delinquent. This is a three-year old who is close to getting kicked out of pre-school and just keeps compounding his reputation by various acts of vandalism and cruelty...poor little sod. Fancy being three years old and pegged as the bad seed. You know it's bad when the director of the school [I don't think they call them principals] said to my daughter, "Well, you may want to call ______________________'s mother and she could check his pockets and lunchbox and backpack and, oh, you should probably call the other 23 mothers in the class, too (unsaid was we don't want to look like we're targeting one kid)." Anyway, here it is, two days later, and Jane STILL doesn't have her keys. The one key loss that is really annoying is the very expensive car key. Duplicates have been made of all the others and lessons learned, but still...what a drag. Better than losing your wallet, but still no fun.

It would be no big deal if I lost my house key because I have only one key to a house that has, truly, 12 doors. Not 12 inner doors...but 12 doors to the great outdoors, and that's not because it's enormous. I guess that's not that odd here in California, but it struck me as pretty amazing when I first counted them. When we moved to this house, we naively thought that since it cost us about a kazillion times more than our first house, it would come with house keys. Sometimes we are SO dumb and our expectations are SO high. When we mentioned this to the seller the wife glibly said, "Oh, we never really locked the doors. Guess what I think...yep, I think they're full of it and I think they lost them and then they were too flippin'lazy to have new ones cut because, well, they were moving and didn't care any more. These people didn't disclose a whole raft of issues (like the kitchen floor being under water when it rains), but that's for another rant, another post. So, we had to have the locks changed on a half dozen of the doors (the other six remain without keys but can be firmly locked from the inside)and because we didn't want a jangle of keys on our keyring, we had the locksmith make them all the same. Roger's keyring remains very simple: one house key, one car key; mine is complicated by the three keys necessary to get into Jane's home and one key to get me into the pre-school without being buzzed through by staff.