Other than my mind, I don’t lose too much stuff, but one thing was a very cool, first edition “board” game (actually a silk-screened scroll) called “Privateer”. High quality material, wood tokens with real paint, etc etc.
No longer available. Long, weird story about the guy who invented it, went bankrupt and insane, legal issues, blah blah blah.
You can get the later editions, which are crap. Plastic sheet, plastic tokens, Junk!
Best drinking game ever!
I “lost” a wallet. I actually know where it is, just can’t get to it. Bottom of a lake. A deep lake.
Timely thread. I spent a loooong time today looking for my computer mouse. I was using the computer on the couch last night. This morning…mouse is gone. I took all the cushions off the couch, opened it up (it’s a sleeper), moved it to look under it, all around the floor and under the other furniture. Gone. Computer is there, cell phone is there, everything else I had with me last night, but no mouse. Very weird.
So many things over the years. The ones I miss most:
An antique necklace from my great-grandmother. It did have a faulty clasp - my bad for not taking this to the jewelry store when I first noticed it. Probably was somewhere in my house but could never find it. Little if any material value but great sentimental value.
My childhood Pooh bear. It was, again, somewhere in that house but disappeared. I suspect it was tossed.
Despite my status as an only child, my parents have lost nearly all of my school photos and report cards. These are people who throw nothing away by choice; the last time I went looking, I stumbled across the complete collection of my parents’ 1960s paycheck stubs. All I can figure is that maybe the childhood-abilia is still buried somewhere in their masses of basement boxes or else got pitched when a prior basement flooded.
I was working on my motorcycle, somewhere around the swingarm area, dropped either a nut or a bolt (don’t remember) and it never reached the ground. This is a naked bike, so no plastic extras or bags. It was like the Twilight Zone. Another time, different bike, I was at a drive-up atm and dropped my debit card between the tank and the fairing. I first tried bouncing the bike, then doing sharp stops, then pulled off to the side and took off the fairing. No card.
A 35mm film version of a Simpsons cartoon short. From my projectionist days.
It originally was shown before the film “The War of the Roses”
I remember searching furiously for it a decade or so back when I had a friend who was a big Simpsons fan who I know would have appreciated it more than me.
It has been in a box somewhere for eighteen years. Some day I’ll find it.
I had a particular CD I had lost for ages. I couldn’t just buy a new one because they had changed some of the tracks and only offered the reissued version. I had the empty jewel case taunting me but no CD. Then, about six year ago, I came across it while going through some stuff in with some other stray CDs in a binder or double-stacked in jewel cases. I thought “Ok, I gotta remember where this was”.
Needless to say, I probably lost it again and have torn through all my CDs, taking each disc out of its case to make sure it’s not double stacked, etc and still haven’t seen it since that day.
That’s what’s really aggravating - when something has been lost for a while, then you find it, then lose it again. My wife lost the spare key and key fob for my car. We usually kept it in the junk drawer in the kitchen. It was gone for probably a year or more. I think she finally found it in an old purse that she rarely used. She put it back in the junk drawer, and about a week later one of us went looking for it and it was gone, and we haven’t seen it since.
I go through about 2 boxes of pencils each year. I never leave my shop or my office but they disappear. I should have pencils laying everywhere, on every bench but no such luck.
Guitar picks. It is aggravating. I’m convinced that musicians like Neil Young, who doesn’t use a pick, just said “the hell with it” and worked around it.
It got to the point that I bought one of these and made dozens and dozens of guitar picks from credit cards and iTunes cards and such. They aren’t as good as real picks, but I always have handfuls of them.
I can’t recall mysterious disappearances so I offer several non-mysterious annoying ones.
When my car recently bit the dust and I decided it wasn’t worth fixing, I gave it to the shop for salvage value and went to take all my things out of it. One item I retrieved was the case for my favorite Norah Jones CD, but no CD. The CD was inside the player but the car at that point had absolutely no electric power, and there was no easy practical way to get it powered or get the CD out. So my favorite Norah Jones CD went to car heaven along with the car.
For years I’ve had this beautiful corkscrew, the folding kind that waiters carry, but so exquisitely well built out of finely machined stainless steel that it was a joy to behold and a pleasure to use. Don’t remember where I got it but I have never seen its equal for sale anywhere. One day it just vanished – poof! I spent hours looking for it in increasingly unlikely places. This would be like the other disappearing objects in this thread, except I finally found it – underneath the fridge, far towards the back, hiding amongst dust bunnies. How it ever got there I have absolutely no idea.
My iPod Classic. It was when my mom was in the final stages of her illness and I’d taken Amtrak back to Altoona to see her in the hospital (I’d end up going back within the month for her funeral). On the way back to Lancaster, I was listening to music on it on the train and ended up having a nice, flirty conversation with a good-looking guy who was (originally) sitting on the other side of the aisle. He got off (the train) at Harrisburg and I went on to Lancaster. About two days later, I realized that I didn’t have the iPod in my bag. I never did find it. I don’t suspect the guy I was talking with, but probably someone came through the car after I got off the train and picked it up. I miss that damn thing sometimes…
Clever idea, I have used scissors to make them. Those bread bag clips work in a pinch too. The credit card material isn’t quite hard enough, they don’t have quite the volume with an acoustic guitar. They do work though. I bought a batch of 50 el-cheapos of different thickness, the thin ones break, I lose the medium that I prefer, and all that’s left is the 1.0 millimeter thick picks, which are awkward.
I was thinking maybe a lanyard or gluing them to my body.
Sold a specialty performance car part on Craigslist, so I had $400 in nice crisp $20 dollar bills. I sold the part, the dude leaves , and I’m in my garage with $400. But I needed to run an errand, so I just stuck the cash somewhere out of sight, where I could get it later and deposit it.
That was about 4 years ago. Have not seen it since. Garage was locked up, so no way it was stolen. Besides, I had some very portable expensive items laying wide open in the garage that would have been taken by a thief, like a almost brand new MacBook Air.
I’m sure the $400 is still there. I’ll find it sometime, so nice bonus for future me.
In 1991 when my parents moved from upstate New York to West Virginia a large part of my mother’s recipe collection went missing. Two recipes in particular were sorely missed: “Early American Pancakes” and “Lime Sweet Pickles”. The pancake recipe finally turned up about five years ago at my sister’s house (she didn’t know she had it). The pickle recipe is still missing. I have tried similar recipes from other sources but they don’t taste the same at all.