I'm not like other people

Most people are satisfied with having a kitchen junk drawer. Not me.

I also have a kitchen junk cabinet.

Like a junk drawer, a junk cabinet requires regular maintenance. I cleaned mine out this morning because it wasn't working for me anymore. Because every time I tried to dig out some scotch tape, a bottle of glue would fall into the butter that lives by the toaster on the counter below this cabinet. Cleaning butter off glue bottles becomes tedious more quickly than you might think.

Here is an inventory of items that belong in the junk cabinet starting on the bottom shelf:

• cookbooks
• mailing envelopes
• disinfecting spray (The kitchen trash sits right in front of this cabinet. We spray the can every time we take out the trash and before putting a new garbage bag back in the can.)
• grout sealer
• a bottle of goo-gone
• more cookbooks, and also some instructional dvds and videos (for things like my grain mill and sun oven)
• packing tape
• scotch tape
• a big box of crayons for big, responsible kids who know what they're doing
• in the black and red Avia shoebox are my craft supplies for kids. Things like watercolor paints, small boxes of crayons for little kids, fun stickers, glue sticks and colored pencils. Also the remnants of opened boxes of pens and mechanical pencils. Also a spare pencil sharpener. Also some extra leads and erasers for the mechanical pencils.
• a super-duper, mega box of crayons that is only mine. Because I need that in my life. I don't know why, I just do. If I let you use crayons from this box then you'll know I really love you. And trust you.
• extra, unopened boxes of pens, mechanical pencils, and highlighters.
• almost every kind of glue you can think of: gorilla glue, krazy glue, super glue, E-6000, tacky glue, school glue, and gel glue for paper.
• a bottle of white-out. Why do I have this?

None of this stuff is out of place - it all belongs here, and everyone in the family knows right where to go when they need one of these things. It's a strange combination. Sort of like a cooking/school supplies/office supplies/household supplies kind of place.

I need to get a couple of small trays or shallow baskets to keep my glues together. All those small bottles and tubes get jumbled around and it's hard to pull one out without knocking the others over or sending some falling down into the butter.

While cleaning out the cabinet this morning I discovered that I don't have any markers. I've had markers in my house since my Pretty Girl was a toddler. I'll write "markers" on my shopping list for the next time I go to the store. Because little Buttercup will soon be old enough to color with markers and it would be tragic for a Grammie to not have any. Have you seen these markers? You could die from so much cuteness:

(It has not escaped my attention that my blog has become boring. While recently suffering through an acute insomnia attack I was reading back over some old blog posts. I used to be more fun. More interesting. More...well... just more. Now I'm reduced to listing in great detail the contents of my kitchen cabinets. Maybe it's time to step away from the computer and have some real life? Somehow I seem to have lost my way.)