Wait! Those are mine, too.

I've never lost anything before, but this winter I lost a couple of, well, four things.

The night before taking the girls skiing earlier this year, I gathered the gear: Coats, hats, gloves, goggles, snow pants, lunches, snacks, ski passes, poles, boots and ... skis?

My newest pair of skis was in the shop, so I had planned to use my old, durable, kinda beat up skis. But they were nowhere to be found. I hadn't used them for three weeks, because we'd been in Utah and I'd left them home. So I asked Bettie to help me think back. She'd last seen them outside, next to the car after our last trip. I had this image of them in plain sight in the back of a pickup in our driveway. Either way, somebody had stolen them right from my driveway!

I rented skis for a couple of weeks before getting my new skis back from the shop. So I took the new ones up to ski with Isobel again. (Really fun, by the way, and both of them are getting pretty good and, most important, having fun at it.) At the end of the day, we returned their gear to the rental shop, made it through the usual end-0f-day meltdown(s), battled our way to the car, slid down some scary roads and got home safely. We brought in our wet stuff to dry and relaxed for the night.

The next morning, we got in the car to go to church and -- "Where are my skis? I didn't bring them in last night, did I?"

No, I didn't. My $1100 setup was still where I'd left it: Leaning up against a ski rack outside the rental shop with a WWE lunch box and some crappy ski poles hanging from the tips. My excuse: After renting for two weeks, I wasn't used to carrying skis back to the car. Add that to the madness of getting two cold, tired girls ready to go and stressing about driving down a steep, windy road in a blizzard and, it wasn't so hard to believe ... right?

I called the resort. They checked the lost and found: No skis had been turned in the day before.

So, and don't tell anyone, I skipped the first half of church to drive back up to the ski resort in a still-worse blizzard to make sure they weren't still where I'd left them: Leaning outside with some crappy ski poles hanging from the tips.

I felt empty from my chest to my toes all the way up there. My backup skis have already been stolen. And now I've left my good skis, you know, outside with a WWE lunch box hanging from their tips. Got to think about it for an

When I finally made it up there -- after spending an extra 25 minutes watching 14 cars give up on the road and turn around, only to slip into a snowbank, get pushed out and finally slide their way back to Santa Fe -- I looked at the rack outside the rental shop: No WWE lunch box, and no skis like mine. They'd already told me they weren't in the lost and found, but I had to double-check. I knocked on the door, went in, and said, "I left some Dynafit Manaslu skis leaning up ... with a WWE lunch box hanging from the tips yesterday. ... and there they are." He checked and verified that they had been turned in the day before. And then I said, "Wait! Those are mine, too."

Apparently, the guy who stole my old skis out of my driveway had skied on them at Ski Santa Fe and left them there! (Because there is no way I left TWO pairs of skis at the same ski resort within a month. And definitely no way I could have left that first pair when I didn't have the I-guess-I-got-used-to-renting excuse. And certainly no way I wouldn't have noticed they were even gone for three solid weeks.)

So now me and my four skis are happily reunited. And all I lost were the crappy ski poles. Probably the same serial thief that took my skis.