Friday comes so much faster when you call in sick on Monday!

Well, we made it to Tulsa, found the Spelling Bee site wonderfully....didn't get turned around once. Oh, wait, yes we did...we had to TURN around after discovering Josh had left his wallet on the toilet paper holder in the Quick Trip on 71st!!!!! He's was cussin' a blue streak about me drivin' like his gramma and as calm as I was trying to be, I couldn't resist reminding him that he does this EVERYTIME we go somewhere. It's almost predictable, to the point that the kids usually ask him, after a public bathroom visit, where his wallet is!! He is so dang lucky, too. As he was panic-strickenly walking into the store, a cop was walking out with his wallet in his hand.

A few years back, we had been to Worlds of Fun @ Kansas City all day and had whipped into the first Long John Silver's we found which just happened to be on a not-so-good side of town. Josh had to do his business and did. Then we left town for the motel we were staying at about an hour away. Forty-five minutes later, he can't find his wallet and freaks, knowing exactly where he's left it. Only, all our cash and credit cards were IN the wallet and we were on empty, couldn't exactly write a check for fuel 6 hours from home.... I tried to be rational. He was irrational enough for 5 people at that point. I found my receipt from dinner and called information for that LJS location, called them, but to no avail. The wallet was no where to be found. We accused everyone of those clerks & everyone in that restaurant (in our minds), went thru every possible scenario...they took the cash and trashed the wallet, etc, etc. OH! And here's a treasure, my little husband also had his birth certificate AND social security card in there! He had set someone up for a new identity with some credit cards and cash to boot! I was SO impressed with him at this point, but saying so would only have caused WW3 so I shut up.....mostly. We called and cancelled cards (not the first time for this either!) and applied for new documents, shopped for new wallets, none of which impressed him in the least (the wallets, I mean. He has an unnatural attachment to this particular wallet...)

Then, one day I couldn't get in touch with Josh on his job location and I got worried. I'd left him message after message and he hadn't called back...not like him at all. So, I checked his messages to see if anyone else was frantically trying to reach him or if it was just ME he was avoiding.... and there was a message from a man in Mulberry, Arkansas saying he'd picked up a wallet in a bathroom about a month earlier and was trying desperately to get in touch with its owner. I couldn't believe it! Mulberry happened to be on Josh's way home that week, so he drove over and got his wallet....the man was a trucker for Walmart and had picked it up and took it with him, afraid to turn it in to the teenagers working the front counter that nite. Every dollar was in it and Josh tried to give it all to him for his trouble (he'd had to call the DMV in Colorado to try to get a number, I guess he really had a time trying to find us since we'd moved back to Oklahoma....) but he wouldn't take it. Sometimes, people amaze me. Kinda' like Josh not learning from past experiences.... :). Oh well, life is more exciting this way, I reckon.

Anyway, poor Matthew got out of the state bee on the first round. He was #7 and two little girls had just gotten out before him and I think he was so nervous he just didn't know what to do. "Meticulous" did him in! I stayed for two more rounds and I was floored at the words these kids could spell that I had NEVER heard! He felt bad cuz we'd all driven up there to spend a whopping 15 minutes, but I'm still proud of him for even making it that far. There's always next year and besides, it was fun watching Josh squirm all the way back to that Quick Trip to find his wallet!!