En Route

I’m sitting in the beautiful Minneapolis/St. Paul airport right now (thank you, free WiFi!), in my layover between flights to L.A.  Boy, were the last few days a race!  I definitely noticed my missed day.

Truth be told, it’s really hard to write coherently right now, given how sleep deprived I am.  We have an…unusual next door neighbor, whose late-night altercation with the police a few weeks ago repeated itself last night, right as I was desperately trying to fall asleep.  The result, while grimly fascinating (and rather sad), was that I got about two hours of sleep, instead of the five I was going for.  I snoozed a little on the plane, but it was too short a flight to get real sleep.  I may go to bed very early tonight in preparation for tomorrow’s rehearsal!

The city that never sleeps, indeed. This is 3:30 am.

So packing was fun.  I almost mean that!  I made piles of clothes and hair products and shoes on my couch on Sunday, just so that I could get that awful feeling of “I haven’t started yet and I just don’t know if I’ve thought of everything!” out of the way.  It worked, too!  I spent Monday grabbing the occasional thing I’ve forgotten and feeling much calmer.

However, every time I looked at my couch, all I could think of was this game my siblings and I played growing up, alternately called “Escape from the Orphanage” (when Amy was in charge) or “Survive the Apocalypse” (when I was in charge).  In this game, we’d identify a piece of furniture that was to be our raft and then spend an hour or so grabbing all of the essentials we’d need for our trip – teddy bears, special Barbies, our toothbrushes, a box of crackers, etc.  It always ended up being a huge pile!  Then eventually we’d put everything away again and play like normal children. (Maybe.)

Well, Monday night, I couldn’t wait for Tuesday morning to pack (which was my original plan), so I loaded up my suitcases early.  The good news is that I had room left over!  The bad news is that the suitcase with extra space is very much overweight, with the other coming in exactly at 50 lbs.  #efficientpacker  I suppose I’m leaving room for lightweight souvenirs and gifts when I come home in January?

I’d love to hear if anyone else has packing rituals or techniques like my piles on the couch! Let me know in the comments if you do.

Hopefully everything gets into L.A. okay. I’m safely on the plane now and preparing to take off, so I suppose I’d better publish this and turn off my phone!

#Airport #packing #neighbors #flights #nyc #childhoodgames #preparation #earlymorning