As much as I freaked out in the weeks leading up to my trip, I’m proud to say it was a well-organized success. I remembered my underwear, and my passport, and my meds. I even remembered some [...]]]> I got in from France on Saturday night. I’m still pretty jet-lagged, but I’m recovering slowly.

As much as I freaked out in the weeks leading up to my trip, I’m proud to say it was a well-organized success. I remembered my underwear, and my passport, and my meds. I even remembered some French. All in all, I had an awesome time and I can’t wait to go back.

The whole experience got me thinking about some of the tools I use to stay organized while packing and traveling. Back in the day, I would say that the most stressful part of packing was dealing with toiletries. The night before I left town, I would inevitably be running all over the house trying to look for plastic bags to put my shampoo in so that it wouldn’t spill all over my clothing. Then I got a few simple travel toiletry items, and it made all the difference.

I store these items in my luggage so I always know where they are, and when I’m ready to pack I can just refill my shampoo and conditioner and be ready to go.  The best thing about this list is that all of these items are available from under $20!

1. The Eagle Creek Pack-It Toiletry Kit at Magellan’s. In this airport-friendly kit, each bottle is clearly marked “3 oz.” and the bag itself is clearly marked “1 quart/liter”.  It’s clear plastic, so you can see what’s inside.  This is one of the best things I’ve ever bought.

2. Eagle Creek Travel Bottle Kit at Magellan’s.If you need extra bottles, or want to customize your Toiletry Kit, grab one of these. Again, all of them are clearly marked “3 oz.”

3. Eagle Creek Plastic Pack-It Sac, Xtra Small, Magellan’s I have a few of these running around. I use one for prescription meds, one for colored pencils … and I could really use another one for first-aid supplies like ibuprofen and band-aids. These are invaluable!

4. Eagle Creek Plastic Pack-It Sac, Small, Magellan’s I use one of these for make up. Since I don’t have that much make-up, nor do I wear it that often, I can just chuck the whole case into my luggage. The best thing? These are spill-proof. On the return flight, one of my eye-shadow cases broke, spilling finely-ground, slightly oily, colorful pigment all over my make up case — and it stayed inside the case, not all over my clothes.

5. Eagle Creek Mesh Laminate Pack-It Sacs, Xtra Small.So you want to see inside your bag, but you also don’t want to show all your underwear to everyone else waiting in the security line. These mesh laminate Pack-It Sacs come in various sizes, from extra small to large, and balance visibility with discretion.

5. Magellan’s Flat-Pack Toiletry Kit For longer trips, you’ll need to check a bag, and 3 oz. of shampoo might not be enough. I keep my toiletry kit stocked with shampoo, conditioner, lotion, contact lens solution, and a few first aid supplies.

6. Magellan’s Travel Jewelry Pocket OK, full disclosure — I don’t have one of these … yet. But I am going to get one. My current method of packing my earrings and necklaces in a series of nesting ziplock sandwich baggies is just. not. working.

Bon Voyage!

I will resume posting when I return.

As I wrote last time, there were things on my original list — the one I made in plenty of time, when [...]]]> I’ve been on about my upcoming trip to Paris for a couple of posts now (see here and here and here), and it’s almost down to the wire.  I leave at noon on Friday.

As I wrote last time, there were things on my original list — the one I made in plenty of time, when I was planning to leave eight days later than I actually am — that simply had to be sacrificed to reality.  One was to sell all that crap on Craigslist I’ve been meaning to deal with since November.  This time I’m admitting that I won’t be able to do something about my travel jewelry situation.  I’m sure I could have found something at The Container Store yesterday when I stopped to pick up seed storage, but I wasn’t thinking about it.  I guess I’ll just go for my default — lots of ziplock baggies.

Unfortunately, I’ve also had to add to my list.  Thanks to some incredibly, unbelievably slow shipping and handling, some of the items I ordered on February 1st won’t arrive until the 17th.  Yeah, you’re reading that correctly — in this day and age, there is an internet storefront that takes TWO AND A HALF WEEKS to get your crap to you.  What that means is that I will not have those items by the 12th, when I leave.

Sadly for me, two of the shirts I need to bring with me have ridiculously low necks — we’re talking bra-band here — and I can’t go out in public without some sort of cami underneath.  The camisoles, along with some lightweight slimline long underwear, and several pairs of underpants, will be arriving at my door much too late for me to do anything about them.  So I’ll have to spend tomorrow running around like a decapitated chicken, shopping for a bunch of stuff that was supposed to arrive at my doorstep.

So my new list looks like this:

Things to get done before France:

Get meds

Go to mall *shudder* for camisoles, underwear, etc.

Have pants hemmed

Download French phrases to iTunes

Clean house

Check CQ(OL)ZBOS* and top off any liquids

Pack:

• Carry-on

• Suitcase
  

* Clear Quart (Or Liquid) Ziplock Bag Of Safety

Wish me luck.

As you may know, I divide my online writing time between my blogs and Squidoo.  Squidoo is an online self-publishing platform that allows you to create articles, called “lenses”, without necessarily knowing all the technical [...]]]> This is a cross-post from my other blog, Addaptabilities.com, but it’s kind of a big deal so I’m reposting it here.

As you may know, I divide my online writing time between my blogs and Squidoo.  Squidoo is an online self-publishing platform that allows you to create articles, called “lenses”, without necessarily knowing all the technical stuff you need to know to run a Wordpress blog.

Yesterday my lens on math disability, What the Heck is Dysclaculia, was made Lens of the Day!

Of course, the validation is wonderful, but most importantly there are now hundreds of people who now know what dyscalculia is.  This includes people who saw themselves in the article, people who realized that it described their friends or family members, and teachers who are taking this information to their schools.  This is great news.  The better people are informed, the better life is for those of us who have math disorder.

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s [...]]]>

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s not surprising, really.  A femme has to be organized.  She needs to get her hair cut regularly, and she needs to leave time to style it every morning, and then she needs to do her make-up.  She needs to shop for coordinated, fashionable, flattering outfits, which can mean buying more bras than I’ve ever seen in one place to go with different necklines and silhouettes.  Then she has to get up in the morning early enough to put all of this together.   If you have ADD, you’re lucky to be heading off to work with matching shoes.  We need to keep it simple just to stay sane.

For instance, take my wardrobe (please!).  Clothes are one of the areas of my life that I streamline for time-management purposes.  I don’t spend a ton of time shopping or dressing.  To this end, my couture consists of five t-shirts and a single pair of jeans that are all way too big.  But what the heck, I have a belt, which means my pants stay up.   It’s all good.

Most of the time, this works pretty well for me … except that I’m going to France next month, and people there dress up a little more, and I don’t want to stick out like the Ugly American.  On a more practical level, I need some clothes that dry quickly, and my giant pair of jeans is not that.

And that means it’s time to shop for Pants.  The dreaded, dreaded pants.

Allow me to digress into an anecdote.  I used to work for a major outdoor retailer.  Many of the women who shopped with us were marathoners, triathletes, and century cyclists.  What I’m getting at here is that they are not your stereotypical chubby Americans.  They are not marshmallows.  They are athletes in prime physical condition.

And yet, every single woman who shopped at the store where I worked would come out of the dressing room with a dozen pairs of pants.  “I’m really sorry”, she’d say as she handed them to me. “I don’t want to make you restock all these, it’s just that none of them fit.  I’m sorry.  I must be a mutant or something”.

At the time, I was a good sixty pounds overweight, and pants shopping was a nightmare.  I assumed that it was because I was fat; for some reason, a lot of stores — my employer included — seem to assume that fat people don’t exercise or go outdoors.  By their standards, I was the mutant.  Right?

But if that were true, why were all these fit, athletic women struggling to fit into pants?

The answer is that Pants are Evil.

Pants, you see, don’t fit any woman, at all ever.  At least, not until her spirit has been broken by trying on the 30th pair in four hours, and even then, only if she’s lucky.  It has nothing to do with how fat or thin a woman is.  It has to do with the fact that she’s a woman who dares to shop for Pants.

Back then, I was a size 20.  When I started working at that store, nothing we sold off the rack fit me (I had to go to the website for extended sizes, and even then it was a maybe).  Shopping for pants was a miserable, horrible experience that made me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I was sure that if I could get into shape, lose some weight, everything would be different.

Now that I’ve gotten into shape, shopping for pants is a miserable, horrible experience that makes me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I’m a size 8, or 10, or 12, depending on who’s asking.  There’s actually one retailer’s size chart where I’m an 8 in the hips, a 10 in the waist, and a 12 in the bust — except of course that size 12 shirts haven’t fit me in six months.  Except that one time, when it did.  And I recently had to return a size 8 I ordered because it was too big.   Of course, it should go without saying that whatever pants I get are 5 inches too long.

Talking to those athletic women who came out of our fitting rooms with armsfull of pants should’ve given me a clue.

My partner travels a lot.  And when I say “a lot”, I mean that when somebody asks me where he is, I have to stop and think pretty hard about it.  Is it Beijing? No, that’s next week … Australia? Hong Kong? Seoul? Tokyo? … Brussels?

Last year he spent more time driving on the left-hand [...]]]>

My partner travels a lot.  And when I say “a lot”, I mean that when somebody asks me where he is, I have to stop and think pretty hard about it.  Is it Beijing? No, that’s next week … Australia? Hong Kong? Seoul? Tokyo? … Brussels?

Last year he spent more time driving on the left-hand side of the road than the right.  The people in the local airport lounge for his preferred airline know him by name.  Sometimes I think this is because they see him more than I do.

What makes it worthwhile is that sometimes, when he goes someplace really cool, I get to go with him.

This February he has a meeting in Paris.  Yeah, I know, poor me.

So I’m off to Paris in a month, or something, and I have a ton of stuff to do before I leave.  I’m probably not the only one who finds international travel to be a little stressful, but as with so many things, I manage to make it just a tad bit worse.

My typical ADD travel planning procedure goes something like this:

Trip minus 6 weeks and counting. “I have that trip coming up soon.  Next week I should really make sure I have everything I need in case I need to buy anything”.

Trip minus 5 weeks and counting. “I should make sure the cat sitter is available during our trip. I’ll e-mail her next week.”

Trip minus 4 weeks and counting. “That trip is coming up pretty soon. Next week I should check to see if I’m running low on any prescriptions.”

Trip minus 3 weeks and counting. “I wonder if I have contact lens cleaner in bottles less than 3 ounces. I should check on that before the trip.”

Trip minus 2 weeks and counting. “I wonder if any of my clothes fit?”

Trip minus 1 week and counting. (staring off into space) “La la la la la, la la la la la la la …”

Trip minus 3 days and counting. “OH CRAP I’M LEAVING FOR EUROPE IN THREE DAYS AND I ONLY OWN A SINGLE TORN PAIR OF BAGGY GRANDMA JEANS!”.

This time, I’m trying not to do that.

Since Rule Number One for managing my time and sanity is to avoid the mall at all costs, I do 95% of my shopping online. So far, I’ve ordered some tops, which have arrived in plenty of time to try them on and exchange the ones that didn’t fit. I still need to remember to do the actual return, but I at least I remembered to take care of ordering the replacements in the correct sizes. I now have two tops and a dressy winter jacket taken care of.

I still probably need one or two more tops, one or two pairs of pants, and maybe a vest or jacket or something to accessorize and pretend that I’m not wearing the same three shirts for two weeks straight.   So far I’ve spent most of the evening looking for this stuff.  Why is this so hard?   I just want a couple of outfits that won’t wrinkle, will dry quickly, and don’t look like featured ensembles from my second grade teacher’s line of polyester couture.

Am I really being unreasonable?