The weekend started out well. I passed my qualifying exam "with flying colors" (my adviser actually used that phrase), so the only hoop between me and my PhD is conducting an experiment and writing a thesis. (Sadly, that hoop is a doozy). We made some phone calls and got the number of unknown RSVPs down to 8. We unpacked a vast number of boxes in our new apartment and actually managed to find space to put a bed. And we cleaned out almost all of my old apartment.

That's when things went horribly, horribly wrong.

All summer I've been working on an embroidery project: two interlocking wedding bands, one silver and one gold, with our initials inside and the date of our marriage beneath. It's meant to be the ringbearer pillow at our wedding, which is in a little under two weeks. It's a bit more than half done after hundreds and hundreds of stitches (the pattern is about 12 inches by 8 inches) and uncountable hours of work. It was kept in a blue plastic grocery bag, since I have so many of them.

I brought it to my old apartment yesterday so that I could do some embroidery after we finished cleaning. Last night, after clearing the place out and going to dinner, I couldn't find it -- not anywhere in the old apartment. We drove to our new apartment and combed through all of the suitcases and boxes we'd just brought back -- not there. And we realized that, during the cleaning process, we'd thrown innumerable blue plastic grocery bags down the garbage chute of my big apartment building.

So, with a boxcutter and a flashlight, we were down underneath my vast apartment building at 3 in the morning, trying to find the outlet for the trash chute. That found, we sifted through an entire day's worth of trash for a building with about 75 apartments. We opened every bag that could possibly have been ours (and we did find several bags that we had thrown out, near the bottom of course), and we moved them to another dumpster. We eventually disassembled a discarded floor lamp and used it to pole through the unbagged trash at the bottom of the dumpster. No joy (except on the part of the maintenance man, who found our plight amusing when he arrived sometime later).

Filthy, frustrated and exhausted, we trudged back to the new apartment. I made one more desultory check through the boxes and bags that we'd upended on the floor. And lo and behold -- a blue plastic bag, sitting clean and pristine on the floor of the new apartment, was the bag we were looking for -- and we had BOTH checked it already. The embroidery was nestled in among kitchen towels and ice cube trays; my fiance had packed them in the bag without noticing its contents.

So the evening had a happy ending, but there were a couple of take-home lessons:

1. My embroidery is now in a cloth bag that can in no way be mistaken for garbage.
2. It will probably be months before we use any plastic bag for anything without shaking it out six ways from Sunday.
3. In any fiasco like this, the situation is much improved when all parties are partly to blame (him for packing it up and forgetting about it, me for not having kept it more carefully). Dumpster diving is waaay worse when you're also picking at each other.