organizing posts, other than by date created

Greetings,

I need to organize posts (inside categories and displayed in the index.php page) manually. I realize the basis for posts is by date and I found a nifty hack that sorts either latest to oldest or vise-versa.

What I really need to accomplish is to set the physical order of the posts, regardless of when they were posted and time stamped.

I realize I could manually go in and update all the timestamps manually, but what a PITA!

Any know hacks, work around or plug-ins out there?

I have a very pissy client (my problem) who keeps randomly adding and updating posts (not pages) and I can’t seem to solve this one.

Thanks.