A blog can function as a virtual record of daily life, at least if you’ve blogged for 5½ years like I have. Many is the time that Don or I will question when something happened and I’ll say “I’ll check the blog!”

So, an interesting thing happened while I was in Hartford. I was doing some work on the blog; checking old posts, editing a bit, that sort of thing, when I saw something amiss.

I collect egg cups, as you all know by now, and I often highlight them around Easter. I came across the most recent photo of them on a shelf and something looked off. I had a feeling that one of them was missing. I wasn’t sure which one was missing, so I went back in time via my blog posts to the previous Easter.

Aha.

The photo on the left is from last spring. The one on the right is from the year before. The pink arrow is pointing to the egg cup that was missing: a hard-to-find Little Boy Wearing a Cowboy Hat egg cup made in Japan more than a few decades ago.

I racked my brain. Had I seen it lately? No. Where had it gone? I had no idea.

This is not an easy egg cup to replace – this sort of figural egg cup is getting harder and harder to find. How could it have suddenly disappeared? I regret to say that for a second or two, I wondered if someone had absconded with it. But then I regained my senses. I mean, why would anyone take a little egg cup? Ridiculous.

I called Don and asked him to look around the floor in the guest room, where we had previously hung these shelves before we moved them to our bedroom. He couldn’t find anything. Since I was away from home there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.

But it bugged me.

I had planned to look for the egg cup when I got back home, but Scout got sick and I forgot all about it. Cut to a few days ago. I went upstairs to look at the shelves. No cowboy. I went into the guest room and looked everywhere. Nothing. When I ‘lose’ something, I often say to myself “Nothing is ever lost” and I wait for some sort of clue to emerge from the recesses of my mind.

Wait a minute. I suddenly remembered hitting my head on the underside of that bottom shelf, which resulted in several egg cups crashing to the floor. One of them broke and I had to glue it together. At the time, I gathered all of them up and put them back on the shelves. Was that the clue? Could the egg cup have gone missing then?

And, as if guided by the Lost Item Guardian Angel, my eyes went to the bed – the end of the bed, which is a foot or two away from the shelves. I got on my knees, lifted the dust ruffle….and there it was. Just under the bed – a few inches under it. Nestled against a storage box. The Little Boy Wearing a Cowboy Hat had been sleeping. For several months.

He’d been there all the time.

Here he is. Did you have a nice nap?

Thank you dear blog. You alerted me to the fact that one of my egg cups had gone missing. I put out an APB and he was rescued. Now he’s back on the shelf where he belongs.

On another note: my friend Dawn recently posted a photo of a Stick Bug, or a Walking Stick Bug. I hadn’t seen one in years. Look what I found in the garden the other day:

I made Don go get my camera so I could keep track of where he was in the meantime. Every time I got close with my camera, he would freeze. He knew we were there. The moment I moved away, he would continue climbing up that zinnia. I got several shots of him, then my attention was diverted by a bumble bee flying into a morning glory blossom. When I looked back, he was gone.

By the way, I’ve spoken to you all about Dawn before. She designed the watermarks you see here, as well as my signature. She offers her design services to bloggers and her prices are very, very reasonable. If you need something for your blog, I urge you to contact her. She is incredibly professional and her work is lovely. She is a busy wife and mother, devoted to her family and, boy, is she talented! I recommend her highly. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dawn over the past few months and she is the best.

Happy Thursday.