Where's Flo?

Maybe you've seen it - an advertisement by Flo's favorite insurance company. I found this one in Popular Mechanics and I saw a couple of different ads like it in a doctor's waiting room. The thought was the same: in every ad you were asked to see if you could pick out Flo from a picture of a large crowd. Try as best I could, I never found her and I venture you might have a problem yourself.

It's something like a 'Where's Waldo' event within our family circle this past week. Our grandson Keith is in the Army and he was granted a leave to come home for a while from a deployment in Afghanistan. Nobody seemed to know when he was to leave and when he DID leave where he was. So, we watched a bunch of exchanges on Facebook asking 'where's Waldo?', or more accurately, 'Where's Bubba?'

Well, Keith finally showed up in Dallas, Texas and eventually got home to the Seattle area a few hours later. It took him three days to make it back from Afghanistan. I hope those three days were not chargeable to leave - and I hope the time going back is not chargeable either - that would make for a short visit home.

More personally, it's like my closet. The closet that Joyce would like to empty out. Or even more, the workshop I used to have. She'd ask when I was going to get rid of some of that 'stuff' and I'd say, 'One never knows when you might need that piece of wire, or when that old battered knob would fit on a door.' Now that I think of it, why did I keep the old hard drive from a computer that died years ago? It's just the old idea that someday that may have a use - but keeping a hard drive that doesn't work - or whatever?

Or the 'man thing' when I come into the living room and ask if Joyce knows where an object is. 'It's probably in the storeroom,' she suggests. But where? What box is it in? Or could it have been left somewhere we used to live? Or could it have been thrown out? Or sold in a yard sale? (Our children are still talking about a yard sale over thirty years ago where they say I was willing to sell anything or everything for a price - maybe including pets or kids.)

So, a year after our last move I still play 'Where's Flo', or 'Where's Waldo" from time to time. And like the picture above, where I couldn't find Flo, there are still things around the house that I can't find.

And is it even important anymore?

Well, as far as Bubba is concerned, it was worth the wait to know he was back in civilization and that he was no longer lost in the crowd. Some treasures pop up eventually and the make the finding a special event.