This morning I enjoyed a couple unique experiences, the first involving a spider floating in full retracted dead position upon the surface of the backyard waterbowl, who turned out not to be dead, and the second demonstrating a rather exceptional ability to find things I hadn’t even lost yet.
Maybe you saw my video a little while ago of a jumping spider I found skating along the surface of the backyard birdbath’s water. Well, this morning during my chores I found a spider of indeterminate species floating in the dog bowl, legs fully pulled in. Fishing it out with a dead leaf I looked for any sign of life but found none, and left what I thought may very well be its tiny little corpse sitting on an adjacent brickwall. Checking back a few minutes later I saw it still hadn’t moved — even when I flipped it over on its back. Oh well.
Then I came back outside about a half-hour later and wouldn’t you know I found it upright and nestled into a nook in the brick, having just needed some extra time to revive. Yay:
For my next trick, I ventured into uncharted territory within the space/time continuum to find something I hadn’t even known was lost: my truck keys. That’s right I went back into the past to rescue something before I discovered it missing in the future. Dood. Let that soak in for a bit.
It was when I went out this morning (after the spider rescue) and down to retrieve the newspaper. Coming back up to the door I glanced entirely randomly at the following section of the edge of the landing at the top of the front steps:
More specifically, my eye somehow caught the partially hidden shiny thing in the center, indicated by the arrow, like so:
Said shiny object turned out to be the key to my truck’s steering wheel lock, and with it unseen is my truck’s key. Now, I’m not sure how the keys got there, but the last time I was in the truck was Tuesday, a full three days prior. So that’s how long they’d been sitting there. My only guess is that while coming up from the garage, the connector opened that allows me to separate the truck keys from my house keys and they dropped there. Whoa.
No big deal? Au contraire. With my propensity to compulsively obsess over things I can’t find when I need them, I invite you to imagine — had I needed the keys before and/or not chanced to spy them in the grass this morning –Â how search crazy I would have become when I discovered my keys weren’t where I normally keep them. I literally would have spent hours turning the house upside down and inside out in the mother of all fruitless searches, because despite looking everywhere they could be (as well as in dozens of places they couldn’t physically be), I nevernevernever would have looked along the edge of the walkway at the south side of the house.
So in resting my amazed appreciation at being able to go back in time to find something I hadn’t yet misplaced, I pay homage to “Diehard’s” Hans Gruber: “You asked for miracles, Theo. I give you my Lucky. Keen. Eye.”