the great wallet debacle

Friday:
Work
Big family dinner (my sister came home from college AND my grandmother was visiting)
Stop-motion movie marathon

Saturday:
Work
Dinner date with Matt at the Kibitz Room
Flyers game! (We lost. WHATEVER.)

Sunday:
Early dinner at the Greek Agora Festival with Scotty and Jewel
Harry Potter D&D - that's right ... you heard me.
The Great Wallet Debacle (more on this later)

My Friday and Saturday were pretty low-key; I was counting on Sunday to be the Major Event of the weekend. And. Well. I definitely got what I asked for.

So we went to the Greek Agora, which is this big festival at this Greek Orthodox Church in my town. Matt and I met Scotty and Jewel there to peruse the handmade wares:

And to eat tons and tons of awesome Greek food. These fried honey puffs were our favorite:

We accidentally the whole thing. 

Naturally, Matt and I went back to buy another container-full. But when I got to the booth, I reached into my bag and realized that something was missing. Something extremely crucial. Yes. My. WALLET. 

Now, I have had this wallet for 2 years and I have "lost" it at stores, restaurants, and movie theaters multiple times. I always manage to re-trace my steps and find it again, thanks to the kindness of strangers who don't steal it and make fraudulent purchases. But this time we were in the middle of a huge festival with dozens of vendors and hundreds of people. Devour-The-Honey-Puffs time quickly turned into "FIND MELISSA'S STUFF" time. Matt and I asked every vendor, "have you seen a ladies' wallet? Tan, leather, about yey-big?" No dice. 

We even went all the way back to the Wawa convenience store where I'd taken 20 bucks out of an ATM. We asked the clerks, they hadn't seen a wallet all day. So then -- and this is by no means my shining moment, but I'll share it with you guys because this blog is about HONESTY (and pictures of food) --

I. Dug. Through. Their Trash.

And guess what? IT WASN'T THERE. 

So I accepted defeat. Matt and I deduced that the only way my wallet could be missing was that I must have dropped it in one of the parking lots, and someone must have picked it up, thought, "Hey! Free money!" and walked away with it. A sad day for humanity. Frustrated, I whined for the whole drive to Scotty and Jewel's place. Before we started D&D, I made the requisite phone calls.

Debit card customer service.

Credit card company #1.

Credit card company #2.

My mom, asking her to get my passport out of its hiding place so I could go to the DMV.

My local bank (they were closed).

Then I settled down for some D&D, figuring it was no use fretting now that it was all taken care of.

Then the phone rang. It was my mom. Probably to tell me some more bad news, like my passport had mysteriously been in a freak shredder accident. 

"Melissa, someone from St. Thomas Church just called! They have your wallet! You can call them back at [this number]!"

I half rejoiced, half face-palmed, because hooray -- my wallet's not stolen, humankind had redeemed itself! -- but BOO -- I'd just gone through all the trouble of cancelling all my cards!

So I called back Father Emmanuel, who was very nice and told me he'd lock my wallet in a filing cabinet, and I could come pick it up on Monday. 

And here we are. I picked it up today with little incident, then I called the debit card hotline and my credit card companies, who luckily had only put holds on my accounts and hadn't fully canceled them. All my cards got reactivated instantly. And I didn't even have to go to the DMV!

To celebrate my newfound financial accessibility, I did the most cathartic thing I could think of: I bought a new wallet. The old one was obviously a bad seed. Here's Dahlia:

I know she'll never hurt me like the others did.