The closet was overflowing. The sort of overflowing where finding what you need requires pulling three things out and runs a not insignificant risk of avalanche. The sort of overflowing where you avoid putting things away properly because you know it’s going to require a game of tetris, so you either fling and forget or shove and swear.

And I? I needed one Very Small Object that I knew was in there. Somewhere. Probably at the very bottom of the bin. Probably towards the back. One small, inexpensive object. One small, inexpensive object that I absolutely could have ordered from the evil overlords in the sky and had delivered to my house 24 hours later. But that attitude is, in all seriousness, leading to both the downfall of democracy and the death of our planet. So I decided to do something about it. I decided to clean my closet. To save civilization you understand.

This task was made less daunting because I knew that, while the closet was overflowing, the card catalog had fifteen gloriously empty drawers and was thus ripe for colonization. And much of the problem with the closet was that I was storing many tiny, uncategorized things in a few large bins. And that really never works. And the card catalog is perfect for that specific problem.

So the bins came out of the closet (this was a bin-based tidy up, it was not the day to do the yarn).

And the tiny things came out of the bins and went into the drawers (in a fashion that makes perfect sense to me and which is, thankfully, not required to make any sense at all to anyone else).

And Miss Fizzy looked nobly on and commended me for finally providing her with a suitable vessel from which to lead her army of minions.

And order, or something slightly closer to it, was restored to the land. Sort of. Kind of. More or less. For some values of. For the moment. In this one small area.

And yes, I did find the tube of glue I was looking for along with all the other tubes of glue I’d ordered in the past when I couldn’t find the ones I already had (in my defense, I get the 12 packs of tiny tubes because otherwise they dry out before I use them up, so the pile is probably two or three orders, not several dozen like it might seem). And maybe just maybe, if I and everyone else can manage to do their own versions of this a little more often, we can stave off doom for just a moment longer.