Once again it’s Superbowl Sunday. I really got into it last year, buying lots of snacks from Costco for just the four of us. However, hindsight when buying snacks for only four people, I should have bought them at a regular-food sized store; we were eating those freezer treats for months.

None of us are sports fans, but I felt we should take the opportunity to join the rest of the state in a traditional rite; a moment in history.

I’m over it.

Sure, I’ll have the game on while I scrapbook some family photos. My husband will probably watch it in spurts between working on some car project, my youngest will be doing homework in her bedroom, my oldest is away at college and they don’t have TVs in student housing, nor will she even realize it’s SuperbowlSunday.

I have goals, and I don’t mean field goals. Most notably my goals are to keep track of everything I lose. As of this writing the game hasn’t started, so by talking about losing, I’m not predicting anything. There are things I misplace, most notably a user manual for my sleep apnea machine.

Last week on my website, I wrote about losing it, which elicited more comments and phone calls than I have had in awhile. People were not so much concerned about my loss, but determined to make sure I never lost it again by giving me tips on where they stash their various manuals.

As a mother I spend a lot of time looking for things I’ve mislaid. I’ll literally have something in my hand one minute only to be searching for it the next. Just yesterday I assembled a collection of pictures for my oldest daughter’s baby album, then immediately lost them. I searched for about ½ hour, gave up and moved on to wait for them to resurface on their own.

After an hour or so I happened upon them – I had put them in the section where I needed them to be. Isn’t that the way? Put something away and it’s hard to find because stuff doesn’t usually get put away.

The suggestions for redeeming my manual ranged from putting it under the object it belongs with to finding it online. I do have a place for manuals, but decided since it wasn’t the manual I needed, rather the phone number I had written on the front, that I should put it in a handier place.

I remembered re-homing the manual. Because I only use it for the phone number I decided to store it in a place where I could reach out and touch it immediately. Here, a few months later, I forgot where I put it. I did, however, remember I felt like a genius when I did it.

After some major sleuthing, using all the tips I gleaned from my readers, their advice indirectly helped me find it: one reader suggested I look under the machine, my husband called me and told me he had seen it recently. I got up to check under the machine, because although it’s a small machine we sometimes forget about things we see all the time, which then made me realize if my husband had seen it recently it had to be in an obvious place. It was.

But as in the retrospect I garnered from shopping for Superbowl snacks last year (this year I’m just making chicken nachos), I probably could have just written the phone number down in a place where I keep all my phone numbers.

Now, if only I could remember where that is.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. She is committed finding everything she loses (again, not a prediction). You can also read more of her writing and her daily blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com or on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh.” Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Lifestyles section.