The household is in a panic, at the moment, in preparation for a big remodel in the kitchen, living room, and dining room. This means a lot of Stuff is moving around, and we're trying to get rid of a lot of said Stuff via that age-old summer favorite: the yard sale.
Mom and I are TOTAL pack-rats, so there is plenty of Stuff to go around. I was working in my room, trying to go through my closets for clothes I never wear, and I found a tiny key sitting on my dresser (which has actually been serving as a bookshelf for many, many years now). It's very thin and about an inch long, and clearly a mass-produced-copy kind of key that isn't specific or unique to one terribly important item.
In any case, this finding-a-key business would not be so much an issue for a "normal" person, but for Strugglebucket it was practically a call to arms.
I spent almost an hour running around the house searching for the lock it might fit, more or less regardless of the actual plausibility (e.g. we have a gorgeous antique oak bureau and I tried it despite the fact it clearly needs a classy old skeleton key of some kind).
First, I have a little wooden box I got for Christmas from one of my aunts--though god only knows why she thought I'd like carousel unicorns--but it didn't fit that. Then I tried all the suitcase mini-padlocks, which are actually all in one place in the cupboard under the stairs because the TSA will cut them off these days anyway, and none of them fit the key. There are also several locked file cabinets scattered through the house, some of which I should probably not be trying to break into (my parents') but leave no stone unturned, right? No luck there anyway.
Then there's this old Ford Model-T piggy bank that I found years and years and years ago in some of my great-grandmother's things and which has been a constant source of frustration to me because it has a lock and it is FULL OF CHANGE. Anyone who knows me at all knows that coins are practically my kryptonite. I LOVE to sort and count coins, and I can pretty much be distracted from anything, ever, with enough pocket change. The world could be ending and everyone could be relying on me to race to the doomsday device and press the "off" button, but god help us all if there was a penny on the ground on the way.
In any case, the key now sits on my desk, and every now and then I notice it and my fingers itch to find the lock it fits. I don't know what to do about it. Probably I should throw it out and be done with it, but on the off-chance I will someday come across its lock... It will sit on my desk for the rest of my life, or at least until I lose it (the latter being the more likely of the two).
