Array#find is aliased as #detect, and #find_all is aliased as #select.
Pat
Just to offer another alternative, you can also #to_a it first:
user.thingies.to_a.find{|thingy| ... }
I think that will have the disadvantage of loading all of the objects from the database, even if you end up stopping before you hit the end. (Or perhaps this will actually be faster, due to eager loading? Anyone know? Anyone benchmark?)