That one time I forgot my password

Remember when you were a kid and your older brother would put his hands and feet against the doorframe to block you from entering the room? "What's the secret password?" he'd taunt but you never could guess the password (deep down inside you knew it was because he kept changing it every time you guessed it) and would inevitably break down in tears.

Or maybe I was the only one that ever happened to.

Anyway, the same thing happened to me this week only it was my computer, not my brother, taunting me. And, of course, I was the one who set the password in the first place.

We've been out of town so long that our neighbours collected an entire brown paper bag of mail for us. Three weeks' worth of mail. That's a lot of mail.

It also means I was away from my computer for three weeks.

The silly thing is that I remembered my password at my parents' house and blogged from there. I remembered my password from my in-laws' house and blogged from there. But then I went back to my parents' house and I could not, for the life of me, remember my password.

There were tears, folks. And a little bit of panic because do you know how much of my life is on Google? My calendar. My documents. My email. My pictures. My blog. All of it out of reach.

How does one just forget their password? How?!

I was texting Andrew like crazy trying to get it figured out while he was hauling the kids back across the country. Eventually we had to give up.

"I'll figure it out when I get home," he promised.

But then he couldn't.

My back up codes weren't in the firesafe (Where are they? I don't know.) and even with our two brains together we still couldn't crack the code. I knew basically what it was, but could only remember exactly what my password was ten months ago. We tried every variation we could think of.

Finally Andrew started asking me my passwords for other applications, probably thinking that if I could remember one password that I would remember another. But I couldn't seem to recall a single password correctly.

Finally he said, "What's your password for xxxxxx?"

"XXX XXXX XXXX," I told him immediately.

He tried it.

"ZOMG!" he texted me. "I'm in!"

Naturally, the G there stands for 'gosh.'

Equally naturally, I suddenly felt at once incredibly stupid and completely relieved.

So I haven't done a lot of blogging this week because I was locked out of blogger, but I'm back now, and my password has returned to its happy little home in my brain. The school year is starting next week and I'm really not sure I've quite recovered from the previous school year, let alone our crazy summer break, so if I forget anything I'm totally blaming baby brain...because I just had a baby (two months ago).