W2's ...where art thou?

I think the biggest lesson I've learned throughout this whole buying process is "NEVER lose track of your W2's". That means, don't ever put them somewhere where you can't get them with less than 10 minute's notice.

I spent more than an hour today digging as strategically as possible through the front most layer of the 400+ boxes in storage looking for my archival documents. I was unsuccessful. There was one tiny triumph, however, when I actually ran across the line by line inventory of all the boxes...

Here's the story about the box inventory process:
3 weeks before we were supposed to move I devised a very clever strategy for knowing ahead of time what was in any given box without actually unsealing it. I would carefully inventory every last piece of stuff that went into each box, and then give each box an ID number. I thought this was a brilliant plan, and I was so proud. I enforced the inventory plan along the packing process once others joined along, requiring that they also painstakingly enter each mundane object into the notebooks.
There were two notebooks; one inventory of storage boxes, and one inventory of boxes which were to go to the house (for example: H37 is the 37th box going to the house and 370S is the 370th box going to storage). I might add there was plenty of grumbling on the part of the others at this tedium. All worth it, I thought, if it means that when I need to know where one thing is I don't have to dig through 399 boxes to get to it (it being in the very last box I check, of course). My brilliant plan included transferrance of these data into a database on the computer with a light application (perhaps web-based?) as a front end.
So, here I have two spiral notebooks filled with this very valuable information, and we've packed almost everything up. Just a few things left in the kitchen to toss into a box and then we were out of there for good. A plan executed flawlessly, if I might add. That is, until I discovered that in one of the very last boxes (which was obviously NOT INVENTORIED) someone had packed THE NOTEBOOKS.
"Where are the notebooks?!" I asked Matt frantically.
"I dunno." He responded, uninterested.
"HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? WERE THEY AT THE HOUSE LAST TIME YOU WERE THERE?!!" I asked, with the calm and control of the tasmanian devil.
"No, I haven't. and I dunno." He responded. Again, not even remotely concerned, comparatively speaking.
Today, as I was going through boxes (begrudgingly unsealing them just before we have to move them again), I saw that they were indeed in the very last boxes that had to be packed. The boxes containing the cleaning supplies and junk drawers in the kitchen. The boxes Matt packed.
Ha.