I was standing in line at the downtown post office yesterday — our last day in San Luis Obispo — when I received a frantic phone call from Jamie. She was hyperventilating, gasping for air so rapidly that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She was finally able to blurt out that she had lost our passports.

Holy crap. We were scheduled to leave for our going away dinner just two hours later.

Displaying a Phil Jackson Zen-like calmness that’s completely foreign to me, I tried to calm her down so she could help figure out where the missing documents might be. Strange as it seems (even to me) I calmly finished my business at the post office, strolled down to the bank to make a last minute deposit, and then thought “Hmmm. We only visited two places this morning, so they must be at either the town’s other post office or the AT&T store.”

I quickly drove to the other post office, bypassed the people waiting in line, walked up to the counter and said, “Did someone leave a large gray wallet here this morning?”

Before the clerk could answer the first woman in line said, “Your wife just called. We’ve all been looking around, but it’s not here.”

“Thanks,” I hollered as I ran out the door.

The AT&T store was just around the corner so it only took a couple minutes to drive there. A young rep greeted me at the front door and asked how he could help.

“Did anyone leave a large gray wallet here this morning?”

“I’ll go in back and take a look.”

Just as he disappeared around the corner the rep who had helped us earlier that day walked out from the back office. He saw me and said, “Hey, I have your wife’s wallet.” He pulled it out from under the counter with a big smile on his face.

But I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as big as the smile on Jamie’s face when I called to tell her the passports had been found.

That’s Russell and Doreen Kasselman lounging in our backyard on one of our last days in San Luis Obispo. If you like JimandJamie.com, thank Russell. He put the whole thing together virtually overnight with a budget of zero.

We were lucky enough to meet Russell through his wife Doreen, a speech pathologist who worked with Jamie at Bishops Peak Elementary School.

If you like the website and need one of your own, let us know and we’ll give you Russell’s contact info. He’s pretty damn cool.

Additional kudos go to our beautiful and brilliant (or as her father would say, “Brilliant and beautiful”) god daughter Stella Ginsberg. She attempted to guide Jim through the process of building a website, but he’s the first to admit that he’s technologically inept despite co-owning a couple very successful blogs. Stella learned that ol’ Jimmy Boy can write ’em, but he can’t build ’em. Luckily, Russell was there to help out when he crashed and burned.

Thanks again, Russell. And you, too, Stella.

We love San Luis Obispo for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the view from our living room. But after 12 wonderful years in SLO we’re taking off on a 180-day adventure around the world.

We’ll miss a lot of people and places on the Central Coast, but what our cats will miss most are the unexpected critters that meander past the living room window every once in a while.

Friends keep asking if we’re going to do a blog, so here it is – our blog. We’ll update it as often as we can, which will undoubtedly be more often than you want to read it.