Katie & Justin

When we came back home on Tuesday, bummed that our vacation was over and exhausted from the time change, we were nicely surprised to see that my brother made us a “welcome home” sign hanging in our kitchen, accompanied by a bottle of booze. (Although after we unwrapped the Christmas paper, we noticed the bottle was already partially used, haha.)

Today, we found yet another surprise.

I was cleaning out the fridge this morning getting rid of all the fruits, vegetables and random leftovers that spoiled while we were gone. It was a chore that I meant to do before we left for Italy but ran out of time. Because of my procrastination, I ended up with a huge garbage bag full of nasty food that desperately needed to go.

Anyway, I was in the midst of purging when all of a sudden I noticed something in an old bag of broccoli that I was just about to drop in the garbage. It was covered in chunks of ice, but sure enough as I looked closer, it was Justin’s wedding ring!

For those of you who don’t know, Justin lost his wedding band about a month after our wedding.

He noticed it was missing when we were at Navy Pier, about to board the Tall Ship Windy for a Friday night booze cruise. We tried to search up and down Navy Pier, but as you can imagine, it seemed like a rather hopeless task. (The picture on the right is one I snapped after Justin first realized the ring was gone — when he started looking around the bar where we were sitting.)

The next day we checked our condo, but still no luck. Eventually Justin gave up and took one of his dad’s extra rings to use as a replacement.

Apparently we just didn’t search our place hard enough… why didn’t we think to check all the vegetable bags?! haha

Still have no idea how that happened, but we are very thankful to have found it. And indeed, it was a nice surprise for our honeymoon return!

Now the remaining mystery is why a bag full of broccoli stalks was saved in the fridge to begin with… ;)