What I am about to show you is an atrocity.

I'm not kidding. You may need to avert your eyes from the computer screen. I'm showing it to you only in hopes that publicly taking myself to task will result in me never letting it get this bad again.

Ready? Here we go.

These are the contents of my junk drawer:




Nope. Not kidding. As of last night, every single bit of that crap piled up on the counter was crammed into a single drawer in my kitchen.

Now, you all have them, right? Junk drawers? A drawer somewhere that you keep pens and pencils and tape and nails and other flotsam and jetsam of life that finds its way to you? I know you have them. Everyone does. And (unless you are an organized and anal person, which I am not) they usually tend to be a tad messy.

But mine. Oh, mine takes the cake. It had (OBVIOUSLY) been a very long time since I organized it. More than a year. I don't even know when the last time I attempted to clean it out was. For awhile, I had it on my to-do list, because I knew it really needed to be done, but I kept putting it off and in the end secretly erased it from my to-do list in failure, because I never got it done. But finally I could put it off no longer. Last night was the night. I dumped everything out on the counter, vacuumed out the inside of the drawer, and went to work.

Some of the more amusing items are pictured below:




1. The big vertical thing in the middle. That would be my husband's recorder. Yes, recorder, complete with blue carrying case. Which he used in his elementary school music class in fourth grade. And he still has this because...? And it needed to be in a drawer in our kitchen because...?

There really are no satisfactory answers to those questions.

2. Immediately to the right of the recorder, almost hidden underneath it. A brown rock. I'm assuming that was a contribution from one of my daughters.

3. The roundish black thing in the upper right. A wheel. From some piece of wheeled furniture. It looks like it came off an office chair. But my chair has all its wheels. I have no idea where this wheel came from.

4. A bag of marbles. Again, I'm assuming a relic of my husband's childhood, that for some reason found its eternal resting place in my kitchen.

5. Twenty-six cents in change.

6. A plastic case that once contained Glow-in-the-Dark Magnetic Poetry. I have had this set of magnetic poetry since I was in college. It was on the side of Meg and I's dorm room fridge. It's now on the side of my fridge here in my house. It also contained letters and blank magnetic strips should you wish to painstakingly cut and paste your own magnetic poetry words. I've had this set of magnetic poetry since 1998, and I've never done that. Probably safe to assume I can throw it out.

7. To the left of the recorder. A bright pink lipstick. I bought this shade and didn't like it. Why did I stash it in my kitchen?

8. A full set of Burt's Bees hand and lip balms. Nice. Why was it hidden in the back of the drawer?

9. A pressure gauge for checking tire pressure. Not sure we see a lot of flat tires in the kitchen.

10. The leg from Lucy's transformer. Poor guy has been leg-less for who knows how long. I may even have thrown him out because of his leg-less status (I know, after watching Toy Story 3 I feel horrible for ever condemning a toy to death at the landfill too. But not horrible enough to stop me from doing it).


Oh, and also it contained twenty-four pencils, AND twenty-one ink pens. And why did I think I could never find anything to write with in there? Oh yeah, because they were all lost in the bottom of a sea of crap. I went ahead and just threw out any pencils that weren't already sharpened. It's not as though I have a writing implement shortage.

Okay, now we get to the good part. The after picture! Here is what my junk drawer looks like now:




Lovely, clean and organized. I feel good every time I open it up.

Anyone want to make any bets on how long it's going to stay that way?