This morning when I dropped the little angel off at the Emerald City, I noticed the helium balloons that I had taken in after her birthday party were dragging on the ground.  Then my mind started spitting out warning labels and worst-case-scenario articles from parenting magazines. The sequence went like this:

• What is one of the kids popped one of those balloons?
• Then, what if they put one of the little balloon shards in their mouths?
• Then what if the balloon shard closed over their esophagus?
• What if the daycare lady wasn't paying attention as some child (maybe even the little angel) turned blue and DIED?
• What if this was all my fault?

I took the balloons out to the dumpster in the parking lot. Again, here was the mental model:

• It's a windy day.
• What if the balloons fly out of the dumpster and are littering the parking lot?
• They'll know it was me.

I decided to pop the balloons with my car keys. 

Background:  My rings are too big. My engagement ring, which is smaller, normally holds on my wedding ring. The prong on my engagement ring is broken, so my engagement ring is currently in my purse, waiting to go to the jewelry store for repair.

See it coming? 

As I vehemently popped the fourth balloon, my wedding ring shot off my finger, hanging in the sky for just a moment, before it slid into the dumpster.

It was raining. Cold rain. And the dumpster was filled with bags, some open, of the following items:

• Food remains from a week
• Dirty diapers
• Paint cans
• Glass

Aghast, I tried to keep calm as I went to find the director. She went to find the janitor.  She grabbed her digital camera as the janitor lowered himself into the dumpster in the cold, wet rain. Parents dropping off their children stopped to watch.

After about twenty minutes of this, I begged him to get out of the dumpster.  He sighed.  "I don't think we're going to find it," he said.  At that moment, his fingers hit paydirt, and he triumphantly raised my wedding ring from the putrid abyss.

Thank God they don't have a cleaning service.