Ok, I looked one place where I actually should have started my search for the summer PJs, and what do you know, there they were! So the system isn't what is broken, the memory of what the system IS is what failed me!
My one dear friend who I IM with almost daily gave me a suggestion for how to store my financial records. She said that she gets file boxes, and stores everything for the year in a different box. This is an excellent idea, so I bought a bunch of boxes, put my financial stuff for each year in a separate box, labeled the boxes, and stored them neatly away.
In our state, to get a license plate renewed, you need your personal property receipt from the previous year or two to get the license. Our licenses are cheap each year compared to many states, because we pay this personal property tax separate from the license fee. But you need this little piece of paper to prove you paid it, or NO LICENSE RENEWAL for you! So, last fall, when I needed the paper, I searched and searched for days on end looking for that receipt. Where I thought it should have been it was not. But my faulty thinking was overlooking the fact that I had a NEWLY IMPLEMENTED SYSTEM of storage for my financial records. I had looked and looked for where the document could have been filed, and I OVERLOOKED the box marked 2007 about 20 times before it dawned on me that's where the darn piece of paper should be stored. Yes, there it was, right in the correct place, right where my smart friend told me to put it.
I then turned on my best friend, and blamed her for making me do a very logical filing system, which my pea brain could not remember for two minutes. Being the good friend she is, she apologized for being so reasonable.
My brain still was on autopilot from years past, where this important document could have been stored anywhere, from the refrigerator door held on with a magnet, to being buried in any one of 20 piles of important papers that needed filing. My dear departed sweetie had an extensive filing system, one that filed instructions for making bat houses, to exotic instructions for making a worm farm (yes, he actually had a worm farm), to instructional pamphlets on many, many do-it-yourself home projects, energy saving tips, and old seed catalogs. These we could find. But other papers, like the mortgage papers, the personal property and real estate receipts, things that were rather important in the grand scheme of things--no, there was no filing system for them. We always hunted for days for that personal property tax receipt. Good thing the state gave us a month's notice before we had to get the license renewed, so that we could mount our search for the vital document that would keep us legally driving on the road.
And did we learn from that experience? NO, it happened year after year. I finally got into the habit of demanding the document after he did got the license, and I put it somewhere that I could remember where it was, because his method of finding things was to stand in the middle of a room, bellow "I can't find that @$^%# whatever" he was looking for and the expectation was that I would drop whatever I was doing, and go on the frantic search seek, find and to hand to him what he was looking for. Being the good and faithful wife that I was, I always followed the drill, and was constantly on a search for something or another that was misfiled, or not filed at all.
So, now we have a system, and if followed, it should work well for us. I found the PJs by following the system, the personal property tax receipt is filed carefully in its 2008 box, and here's hoping that next September my brain can comprehend where to look for it and find it.
P.S. My smart friend took my idea of storing her summer clothes, using large compressable bags. Guess what, she can't find her summer clothes! We are two girls, born the same year, and not only are we sharing a brain, but with only half a brain apiece, we are not functioning very well! God help us all! She needs to remind me where my receipts are, and I need to remind her where the clothes are stored. We're both in trouble.
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