This is driving me bonkers!
Yesterday Pipocas took me out for a lovely lunch at a new place (well, new for us) called Viniera San Telmo. It had been recommended by someone from the UK who had written to me back in August, thanking me for my tapas blog because he brings people to Sevilla for tapa tours and apparently my site has been very helpful to him. He also told me about some of his favourite places here, one of which is Viniera San Telmo. And so we tried it out and it really was fabulous. Anyhow, over lunch . . .
Pipocas and I were talking about getting away for a day, maybe to Cádiz, and then she suggested that we could make it an overnight trip. I immediately thought of Bolonia and the Magical Mystery Tour we had taken our friend Craig (aka zoomer) on when he was here a couple of years ago. It was supposed to have been a trip to Gibraltar (because on a previous attempt to get into that place in order to buy knickers at Marks & Spencer I had forgotten my passport) but as luck would have it, the night before we were going to leave with Craig I discovered that my passport had expired the previous week … so it was the Magical Mystery Tour instead.
Pipocas seemed very keen on doing something similar, including stopping overnight in Bolonia, where I assured her they made the best chipirones a la plancha in the universe, as well as having wonderful Roman ruins that go right down to the beach. And she thought going to Gibraltar would be fun too. All I had to do was remember to bring my passport, ha ha.
Unfortunately … when I got back from my last trip to Gibraltar (actually my first trip, third attempt) I remember putting the passports away in a safe place. And now – you guessed it – I can’t remember where that place is! I looked in all the usual places yesterday evening, and even in a few unusual ones, to no avail. The passports remain missing. Talk about totally frustrating and annoying!
So what can I do – short of undergoing hypnosis – to jog my memory? I’ve got a week to find the damn thing, otherwise we’ll have to change our travel plans. But even if we don’t go to Gibraltar, it’s going to be great to get away for a couple of days – just me and Pipocas – on a little road trip.
(some lunch photos below…)
creamy bulgur wheat with mushrooms
grilled blood pudding with goat cheese on toast
grilled aubergine, goat cheese and tomato ‘tower’
casa azahar 
Have you looked in the freezer? I found my glasses there one time
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mmm…one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever eaten was cuttlefish ink pasta…
Anyway, my advice is to use Murphy’s Law to your own advantage (I call it ‘baiting the Murphy trap’]: give up looking for the passport, but really seriously start looking for something else important. Pretty soon, you’ll find the passport, but not the other thing. (NB — you have to be very seriously looking for the other thing, forgetting about the passport!)
🙂
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Aaak!
(Muffled laughter)
🙂
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I keep mine in my underwear drawer, under the bras.
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Have you looked in the “I would never have put it THERE!” spot? That is usually where it is found. Sadly, my mother has a lot of things she has “put in a safe place”, never to be seen again.
PS… sent you an email. Did you get it?
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Damn that food looks good!
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Hey, I think you have a typo up there… you meant to write EGGPLANT.
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Ask Gnomon. He has a history of telling other people where to find things.
I keep mine in a little hole in the wall in my bedroom.
TRiG.
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My grandmother used to do that, put things in a safe place, and then not be able to find them. It was Alzheimer’s with her. For you I diagnose chemo fog of the brain. When my sister who had breast cancer, and who is so precise she tells you it is 15:03 by her watch, can’t figure a tip…
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don’t think about it, and the location will come to you when you least expect it…
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Also, the likelihood of finding a lost object is always greater when you no longer need it… and increases if you are looking for something else.
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I’m with Mr. Anchovy. Just forget about it for awhile and you’ll either stumble upon it or the place you stored it will come back to you.
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I’m a great believer in Murphy’s Law as it applies to lost objects. So this weekend we will be conducting a thorough search for our missing memories.
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I love squid ink pasta
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Yeah, it’s too bad I didn’t know about this place when you were here, nursemyra. You would have loved it.
Not sure about ‘forgetting in order to remember’ – I haven’t given a thought to the passports since last December and have never happened upon them.
The weirdest thing is that I have a very clear memory of taking them out of my bag and thinking I should put them somewhere safe. But after that it’s a blank.
Less than a week to go now … oh, and they’re not in the freezer.
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YAY!!!!! *does happy dance*
Nog found the passports!!!!! 🙂
Okay, it wasn’t a total blank after remembering about putting the darn things somewhere safe – I also had a vague inkling that I’d stuck them under some stuff on the hallway bookshelves. But I went through all the crap there the other day … or thought I did. Still, I couldn’t get it out of my mind that they had to be there somewhere.
And so Nog, who has much more patience than I do, went through all the stacked up files and crap one by one this morning … and there they were – two passports!
I’m sooooo excited now! I mean, this will probably be my last chance to get away for ages. And I’m quite looking forward to a ‘just the girls’ trip.
For the record, my next safe place for the passports will be my underwear drawer under the bras.
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Az, darling… a place is not exactly safe if advertised it on the web…
But anyhow, I recognise the feeling – and it’s even worse when you (read I) completely forget was the search even was about… *sigh*
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I’m looking for something but I don’t know what it is any more. Why did I come into this room, anyway?
Our passports live in our safety deposit box at the bank, where the vault is heavy enough and held down with enough concrete that an errant tornado can not pick it up. Now, if only I could remember where the key to the safety deposit box is. . .
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Jim’s mother always used to say about lost objects: “It’ll be in the last place that you look.”
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Usually it’s in the first place that you looked, you just didn’t see it the first time-
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My eyeglasses are on the loose.
I must have put them at a good place when I came home Friday, because I didn’t find them when I was leaving home yesterday afternoon to do the food shopping. Had to take the other pair, the ones I use for movies, theatre visits and such. Then of course I couldn’t read labels, so I had to take off my eyeglasses to read – and even so it’s not that easy without the proper ones *sigh*
I usually put my eyeglasses at the dinner table, my desk or at my night stand. All three are places where the cats like to be. Prisse is my prime suspect – he is very dexterous and has the habit of nicking things from my night stand and relocate them.
…’cause it can’t be me, can it?
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Ha – remember the cat burglar? Are you sure they’re not in the freezer?
“Why did I come into this room, anyway?”
Otherwise known as woking. 🙂
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They’re not. I’ve checked.
In the meantime I found them. They were under the sofa in the living room. I did certainly NOT put them there!
However, I might have put them on the sofa table Friday evening, and then “somebody/ies” – read cat/s – did the rest.
They are in one piece, so all is good.
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A repeated plaintive cry from my childhood was “I put it somewhere sensible!” Still happens, actually.
Sometimes you run across something and you think “That’s a stupid place for this to be. I’ll never find it there.” And you move it. To somewhere sensible. Where you will find it.
And then, when it’s time to go looking for it, you remember where you moved it from but not where you moved it to!
Grrr!
Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
TRiG.
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