I don't care what you say, it's not my fault

My husband has been losing his wallet lately. Okay, twice in the past 2 months. This simply has to stop. Here's the wondrous thing about marriage. What we have is ours, not just his and not just mine either. Ours. So when one of us misplaces our wallets, both of us need to get new credit cards and new ATM cards. Both of us need to be hawkish about watching the credit card statements and such. So when he lost his wallet three days before I left for San Francisco, I was understandably annoyed. (read "pissed off")

The last place he remembered having the wallet was Rite Aid. He paid for something and then we went directly into our car. We thought that he dropped it in the parking lot. I contacted every store in the shopping complex and asked if anyone had turned in a wallet. No such luck. To put a cherry on top of the whole 3 days of preparing for a trip to San Francisco, my son lost his retainer. Great. And to put all the planets into alignment at once, I was PMSing. Dude, it is amazing that I didn't commit murder or start eating puppies I was in such a bad mood. We ended up throwing caution to the wind and didn't cancel our credit card. ATM was canceled so I had no access to cash on the trip. We changed the credit card when I returned from SFO. This turned out to be the right thing to do because the wallet did show up eventually.

I hired some landscapers to take care of the lawn. With Hubby's punishing work schedule lately, yard maintenance (which has never been all that diligent in the first place) has gone to sh*t. The day that Hubby lost his wallet, he played with the girls in the backyard. When the landscapers cleared the knee high growth that was our "lawn," they found Hubby's wallet.

That was last week.

It's like that movie, "Highlander," when they say, "There can be only one." My husband can't have more than one wallet in his possession at one time. Some kind of cosmic thing.

So two days ago, we went to the grocery store after dropping Princess off at gymnastics. When we got to the grocery store, my husband announced that he had misplaced his wallet. He remembers picking it up but when buckling Lil'T into her car seat, he thinks he put it (this is the part that isn't funny to me yet but might become funny in a couple of weeks) on the roof the car.

Are you kidding me?

But here's the best part. He says to me that maybe he didn't put it on the roof of the car. Maybe he put it down when he was putting on his shoes. The reason why he didn't put it in his pocket is because (this is the part where it all becomes my fault so brace yourself) the shorts I bought him don't have pockets. Yeah. My fault.

So we get home and he can't find the wallet. I'm envisioning combing the sides of the roads we drove. I'm thinking that we should cancel the credit cards and ATM cards AGAIN!!! Luckily, he doesn't have to get another license because the recovered wallet still has a valid one in it. To make matters worse, he had taken out about $100 in cash because we had the babysitter coming the next day. Kiss that good-bye immediately.

So we get a phone message on the answering machine from a lady in the next town over. She says that she found a wallet in her newspaper recycling bin and can't figure out how it got there, but if this is Mr. Haddon, please call back. Miraculously the wallet was undisturbed. All the money was still in there. All the cards were still there. Hubby gave the woman a small reward to thank her for her trouble. Here's where it gets weird though. She lived nowhere near where we drove. Not on the same road, not even in the same town. Totally strange. The best I can figure, somebody who was taking a bus probably picked it up and then decided not to bother with having to return it to us directly so put it in these nice people's recycling bin.

I'm still watching our credit card statements and making sure that no erroneous activity is going on -- but if the stranger who picked up the wallet was going to steal from it, wouldn't s/he have taken the cash out of it first?

So, here's the bizarre thing. My husband blames me for the losing of his wallet. You already know how it is my fault that he put it on the roof of the car. Here is how it is my fault that he lost it in the yard. The shorts he was wearing that day have the pocket on the wrong side and the pockets are shallow. Because I bought him the shorts, it is my fault on both counts that the wallet got lost.

Never mind the fact that if I didn't buy him clothes, he'd still be wearing what he wore in college. Threadbare and all. He's got this one pair of shorts that has the butt completely ripped out of it yet somehow it still manages to be worn from time to time.

Grill me up some puppies, will ya?

Update: This is a quote from Hubby, "Those shorts are still good." See what I live with?