A-Z extra post by request: The Umbrella rant.

U is also for…

A few people mentioned that they wanted to see my ‘angry rant about umbrellas’ that I said I wasn’t going to write last week for U, so here it is.

I’m not angry at umbrellas. I’m angry at myself for forgetting umbrellas and leaving them behind. Not always – I do relatively often take an umbrella when I leave my apartment in the morning and actually still have it with me when I come back home. But over the long term, it seems like I never keep an umbrella with me without leaving it somewhere.

I lost a good sturdy full-size umbrella on the 31st of March. I remember having it when I got to Williams Cafe on the Hamilton Harbourfront for the Hamilton Script Frenzy party, and I suspect that I lost track of it when switching tables so that one of my new friends could plug in her laptop, since it had battery issues. I asked at the counter the next time I went there, but nobody had turned it in to the lost and found.

And a little black umbrella with a telescoping shaft went astray last Thursday, actually – or at least, I assume that it’s gone forever. I remembered having it with me when I was walking home from work – the weather was fine by then, so it was sitting on my work bag. The next time I actually thought about it was when I was getting ready to leave on Friday morning, because the forecast was threatening rain again.

That umbrella I actually lost, and then got back again, in San Francisco last November. I realized a few minutes after getting off a tour bus that I had left it behind, and called the Super sightseeing tours office, but they had closed by that point. I was able to reach somebody the next morning, though, and a driver dropped it off with the hotel desk, which was very nice of them.

A year or two ago, when I was walking long distances in the evening in order to get exercise and lose weight, I got into the habit of carrying little umbrellas when the weather was threatening, because getting caught out in a sudden summer thunderstorm was not fun. I actually had two umbrellas in a row break in the wind instead of getting lost, and I felt obscurely proud of that.

Friday afternoon, after work, I went into the Wal-mart and bought two more umbrellas, one big long sturdy one, and another smaller with the telescoping handle. We’ll see how long they last, and if they get lost or actually broken.

The rant, such as it is, endeth here.