Mess

Isn't it amazing how stuff makes itself into a mess? Last week I went on a search and rescue mission to the very back of a kitchen cupboard looking for my Food Saver. I knew it was back there, and it was, but on my way there I found ever so many things:

• A little slip of paper with my neighbor's email address on it. She gave it to me months ago and I was supposed to send her a link to the Bountiful Baskets website. But I set it on the counter by the phone and then it disappeared. Apparently it went to the very back and bottom of a cabinet that is across the kitchen from the counter by the phone.
• A post-it pad.
• An opened package of "purse packs" of Kleenex. I knew I had them...somewhere.
• A small piece of adhesive plastic that you would use to repair a hole in a pool floaty. Which thing I don't happen to currently possess, and therefore makes me wonder how many years has it been since I really cleaned out this cabinet?
• A padlock with its prongs (prongs? What is the right word?*) threaded through a pair of child's safety scissors. This object could be the focus of a whole post all by itself. It raises some questions like "Who?" and "Why?"**, and  "Where is the key to this padlock?" and "Are you sure this is the kind of 'safe' we're worried about with this particular pair of scissors?". Without a key these scissors are so safe they are virtually worthless.
• The operating instructions to my new handheld mixer. The mixer is in another cabinet, and the directions to all my other things like that are upstairs in a file drawer.
• Some other similarly random flotsam.

All that belongs in the cabinet where I found all this stuff is some bottles of water and a variety of small kitchen appliances like my Food Saver that I don't use very often. Sometimes I think there must be mini tornadoes whirling through my kitchen while I'm sleeping at night. I have no other plausible explanation for how these messes happen.

*I googled "parts of a padlock". Those prongs are called the shackle. I find that, in this instance in particular, to be both fitting and hilarious.
**I suspect the answer to "Why?" is "My children are bored and looking for trouble because they don't have enough chores to do". Which is a totally solvable problem.