My Father's Daughter

Sorry, no Fun Monday for me this week, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

When I was in college, it was my dad's job to pick me up at the end of the year. He was the perfect candidate for the job. He likes driving on the highway while listening to loud music, he went to the same college, and he's brilliant at packing. That packing bit was very important, since I'd always manage to accummulate a lot more stuff than I'd gone down with at the beginning of the school year.

The family car at the time was a Pontiac Bonneville (called Clifford the Big Red Car), so it had a reasonably roomy trunk and backseat, but there was no way to fold down the seats. My dad was a genius at figuring out ways to fit everything into that car. Tuck the VCR player I'd won in the raffle under the front seat. Take my clothes out of the bulky boxes and just pile them in the backseat. Line up the milk crates in the trunk so not a single cubic inch of space was wasted.

I am not ordinarily blessed with the ability to think in three dimensions. I am lousy at parking the car. I once got a 14% on an aptitude test that asked you to look at a flat diagram outlining the plan for a 3-dimensional shape and determine what it would look like if you folded up the diagram to make the shape. But somehow, when it comes to packing, I am my father's daughter.

That's what I was doing last night, when I should have been working on my Fun Monday post. Although I have to confess, I wasn't able to come up with any good stories. I have a great one about one of my brothers, a dance recital my cousin and I were putting on in my grandmother's basement, figurative directions that were taken quite literally, and some ensuing hilarity. But sibling stories were specifically excluded and I need to stay on my brother's good side since he's collecting me from the airport on Wednesday.

Special thanks to Peter for acting as my own personal documentarian. My challenge was to get all this stuff into two bags:


As you can see, it's about 15% clothes and about 85% tea and junkfood for friends and family. I started by filling the bottom of my rucksack with my clothes. (I always said I was never going to have one of those dorky things, but they are so useful.)


Nearly all the clothes fit into the bottom compartment of the rucksack and then I filled most of the top of it with bags of crisps. The next step was to get everything else into the duffle bag that I bought in Macroom two weeks ago with exactly this mission in mind.


The chocolate chip cookies are for my dad. Peter calls it "bringing coal to Newcastle." Just about everything I wanted to fit into the duffle bag did and I was able to find pockets and spaces in the rucksack for any stray items. While Peter was messing with the flash and focusing, Toby decided he was just about done with waiting. Even though it looks like it, I am not booting him up the arse.


Now it's time to clean the house from top to bottom and then I'll be able to leave. I'm really looking forward to this trip since I haven't seen my family since last Christmas and the biggest block of time I've had off work (with the exception of the week I took for Tom's funeral) has been the occassionaly 4-day weekend. I mightn't get to do much blogging or reading/commenting until December, but hopefully I will come back refreshed and brimming with stories.