Since Elizabeth has become mobile and often wants to play with the same things she sees Andrea and I using, I’ve become much more careful about where I put certain things, especially if they’re delicate or I use them frequently. I have two shelfs in our big cabinet in the office area off our kitchen where I keep most of my daily-use and fragile items, like my mobile phone, wallet, keys, camera, Garmin Edge GPS bicycle computer, and Hipster PDA.
Other things have other homes. The chest strap for the heart rate monitor (HRM) that goes with the Edge — when I finish a ride or a run, the strap will usually be pretty salty from sweat, so I wash it off and hang it up on a towel rack in the bathroom to dry, then I put it either with my bicycle helmet, or in the drawer with the rest of my biking stuff.
I’m glad Elizabeth’s curiosity helped to coax me in to this habitual behavior. I rarely spend any time these days looking for where I left something, because I always leave the things in the same place.
At least, that’s the theory. Practice isn’t quite as nice. Tuesday I woke up early to go on a run. The chest strap wasn’t on the drying rack, so I went to get it from the closet where I keep my bike helmet, and it wasn’t there either, so I looked in the drawer with my biking clothes. No luck!
I spent the next half hour tearing through the main floor of the house looking for the chest strap. I even looked in the garage with my bikes, and inside the car! Nowhere! Keep in mind this is all before 6 AM, so Andrea and Elizabeth are trying to sleep through my increasingly grumpy search. Eventually I gave up and went running without it.
Today, Andrea and volunteering for her Le Leche League group, so Elizabeth and I are doing a little bit of organizing around the house. I decided to go through my shelves in the big office cabinet, and saw the box for the replacement Edge sitting in the back of the top shelf. I pulled it out and thought, “hm, this is quite heavy, I wonder what’s in there?” As I opened it up, I remembered Garmin had sent me a complete replacement Edge 305, including a chest strap for the HRM! Bonus!
As I pulled the brand new HRM strap from the box, my eyes settled on the bottom shelf, where the old HRM strap had probably been sitting this entire time.
Several weeks ago, lost an iPod Shuffle, and found it in the same place I found the HRM strap.