by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.
I've already started packing for Malice Domestic. Not quite halfway packed, but I still have a couple of days. If I were talking to my friend Barb Goffman, I would tell her that I am 42.51% packed, mainly because I know it would send her into peals of laughter.
Okay, I'm a geek. I use an Excel spreadsheet for packing.
My spreadsheet contains a couple of pages on which I list everything I might possibly want to pack when I'm taking a trip. Several hundred items. Some of it's stuff I'd need for just about any trip, like socks and shampoo. Other items are for specific kinds of trips. If I'm taking a plane, I don''t want to forget baggies for going through security. Coat and gloves if I'm heading into cold weather. Sunscreen if my destination's beachy. Bookmarks and hotel addresses for a convention. Dressy clothes if there's to be a banquet.
And at any given moment, if someone asks me how my packing is going, I don't have to fall back on imprecise statements like "barely started" or "halfway there" or "almost done." I can tell you precisely. To two decimal points.
Okay, it's a useless statistic. Is it any more useless than most statistics?
I try to start packing a few days in advance, in case I'm out of something I need to take with me. Gives me time to run a load of laundry if I'm out of clean socks, or renew my allergy meds if I'm running low.
But the first thing I do is go through and mark the stuff I don't need with an "N" for "no." Gives me a big head start. So if I announce that I'm, say, 20% packed . . . I probably haven't really started throwing things in the suitcase yet; I've just made the first round of decisions on what I don't need to bother with.
Then follows that laundry, and probably a trip to one or more stores to stock up on supplies. An orgy of charging camera batteries and Mophies--external power supplies for when my phone or my iPad runs low. I won't say I'm a well-oiled machine, but I manage to get it done, and I don't usually leave behind too many mission critical items.
But all the while I keep my eyes open for another familiar pre-travel tradition: the inevitable small disaster. At least the disasters usually stay small. Before one trip the dishwasher broke--and of course dishwashers never break down after all your dishes are clean, so you end up doing a lot of hand dishwashing if you don't want to return to squalor. Before my Easter trip to Yorktown this year, my EZPass transponder broke, which means until the new one arrives--probably while I'm at Malice--I have to stop and pay in the cash lane instead of breezing through the fast lanes. I thought I'd escaped without a pre-trip disaster for the next trip--to New York for the Edgars--but when I got up to go to the bathroom in the pale light of early morning, the hinge that holds the toilet seat onto the toilet suddenly snapped, sending me flying. Fortunately it's a small bathroom, so instead of falling and breaking anything I merely ricocheted off the (fortunately very sturdy) shower door.
I didn't have time to hit Home Depot for a new toilet seat, and I knew I'd only have a couple of days before heading to Malice, so I ordered a toilet seat online and felt very efficient when it arrived--on Sunday rather than Saturday, but never mind. Still efficient.
Or so I thought. Unfortunately, instead of having a normal bolt, the toilet seat I ordered comes with a plastic bolt that, for installation, requires you to use a wrench to tighten it until its top snaps off. All my wrenches are hiding at the moment, so I borrowed one from the neighbors and set about installation. And failed. Maybe Superman could tighten that bolt to the snapping point. I can't. The miserable mutant toilet seat goes back tomorrow; I'll be making that Home Depot trip anyway; and I'm hoping the whole bolt fiasco counts as this trip's disaster. Unless I get to count the humongous tree on the border between my yard and my neighbors' yard, the one that fell down during the tornado that happened while I was down in Yorktown. The tree guys will be here tomorrow for their second day of work on that--surely a small disaster in its own right.
So I should probably do a little more packing before I hit the hay, just in case there's another small disaster lurking to eat up my packing time.
I'm up to 46.44% now. And wondering . . . hmm. Does Meg pack with a spreadsheet?
Comments