lying awake, intently tuning in on you

I don't really feel like blogging tonight, but I figure that Vidya will be annoyed if I don't give her a mention, since she visited me tonight. Hi Vidya! She stopped by for awhile and had a cup of tea on her way back up to San Francisco from San Jose, which was nice. Tea with Vidya and breakfast with Terry this morning were the only social functions I attended all weekend; I'm trying to stave off an impending cold, and so I didn't make any major plans. I also should have done a lot of work, but I couldn't motivate myself, and so I ended up thoroughly cleaning my apartment; the only remaining mess is a bunch of clothes in Rubbermaid tubs that I don't know what to do with, a situation that will be exacerbated tomorrow when I finally get a shipment of stuff that I had left in Ireland last summer. That shipment will include a bunch of clothes and books, which are the two things that I already have in overabundance, so my troubles will begin anew then.

I actually cleaned my apartment partially in a last desperate search for the emeralds that my parents gave me last Christmas, and I have determined that they are nowhere to be found. I wasn't going to tell my parents that I lost them because I didn't want to upset them, but I'm hoping that if I force myself to stop looking, they'll magically appear. In an effort to stop myself from continuing to search the same places over and over again, I'm going to list all of the places I've looked:

1) My medicine cabinet, linen closet, under-sink area, and makeup cabinet (and all bags and containers in those locations)
2) Closet shelves, clothes drawers, and every single purse in my big plastic bin of purses
3) Underneath the bed (I even pulled up the mattress and box springs, which was fine because I wanted to change my bedskirt anyway)
4) Underneath my bookcases
5) Underneath my couch cushions (this did, however, net me a pen, a watch, and some loose change)
6) The shelf in the hall closet
7) All of the decorative boxes, bowls, and knickknacks in my bedroom
8) My suitcases and backpacks
9) My car's center console and glovebox
10) My file cabinet at work

Essentially, this list is meant to serve the same purpose as all of the star stickers that I covered my room in when I was looking for my passport last spring--although the passport ended up being in the lining of my purse, and I've checked the linings of all of my purses, so that won't help me this time. Honestly, at this point I have to assume that they were a) stolen (it's possible that I left them on my desk at work overnight, since I have a bad habit of fiddling with jewelry), b) left in the pocket of something and then lost in a washing machine, or c) put away someplace safe that I now cannot remember. I'm hoping that it's c and that they'll turn up eventually; clearly wherever I put them last wasn't someplace that was unusual enough to prompt me to remember it, but it also wasn't where they belonged. Sigh. This is driving me crazy, though, and making me really sad, so I just need to calm down and forget about them for awhile, in hopes that they'll appear of their own accord.

I don't have anything else to report, so I think I'll go to bed early so that I can get up early and go to work. Luckily, I have a three-day weekend coming up (thank you, Martin Luther King!), so this week shouldn't be too awful. Goodnight!