After yesterday’s post, you may be wondering on my level of crazy.  I’m a little crazy yes, but in my world, there are all sorts of crazy.  It’s like Eskimos having 50 words for snow.  Do they really have 50 words for snow, or did some comedian make a joke about it, and it became urban legend?  Someone look that up for me, and get back to us, because I’ve been awake for a week and I have a nasty cold.  I’ve learned never to mix cold meds with Google Searches.  I end up calling my doctor and telling him the Information Superhighway has diagnosed me with cancer every.single.time. But I digress.

My favorite of all crazy is what I like to call “Crazy Useful”.  Just plain crazy? Bad.  Crazy useful? GOOD. I’ve found that people who have the ability to organize on a macro-level are much like me: Crazy Useful.  I recruited my tribe last week, because SWEET SASSY MOLASSEY MY FRIENDS, we had an iced tea spill in the PTA Closet!  And I mean a big spill…like orange Gatorade Cooler leaking big.

The picture above is not a sign of neglect, but rather a sign of love.  Every year, over a hundred volunteers access this space.  We pull out, we put back, we add, we subtract, and by May…we’ve got one impassable space.  That’s  just life in the PTA-Lane. Closet.

The yank out and go through was ONE, LONG DAY.  I came home very tired, and very dusty. But I spent it with my fellow label-maker-owners, who were such organizing powerhouses, I secretly wondered if they were Container Store Design Engineers in a former lifetime. I’m proud to say, we ended here today:

The purging was significant.  I can confirm: we might have enough plastic forks and spoons to wrap around the earth. Twice. There was a small family of gnomes living in the back corner, but we’ve found them a nice new space in the closet above the gym (note to self: when the Athletic Director finds the gnomes, I might have some ‘splainin’ to do). Most things you see on the floor are scheduled to be sold, destroyed, or used in the next 2 weeks, which will leave us with 25% room for growth.  You know what Crazy Useful smells like?  Fair food.  That’s right, I’m a Hoosier and I’m allowed to say it: nothing smells better than Elephant Ears and Lemon Shake Ups.  Fried sugar fat and citric acid.  You can file that under Crazy Yum.

I’ve said thank you, and you know who you are, but if you’re out there relaxing after 2 dedicated days of sorting and stacking, I want to say: I hope when they admit me to the Mental Ward, you’re there with me.  Because what if they stick me with someone who doesn’t color-code her closet, and she hangs her shirts pointing in different directions?! Yellow shirts hanging next to blue shirts, and FACING each other.  The kind of girls who would mix sugar packets and sweetener in the same storage drawer.  Those kind of girls. Plain crazy.

You, my dedicated partners, are not just Crazy Useful. You are Crazy Awesome too. Godspeed to you.