Fifth Salon: Things we carry with us

[jenett]

Welcome to our fifth salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) The first three went wonderfully - you can find them in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

Topic of the day: What do you have in your pocketses? Or to be more useful, what stuff do you carry with you? I ask partly because I want to talk about what I have with me, but also because I'm contemplating being more systematic about some of it, and I suspect you all will have interesting ideas.

My usual bag is either a backpack (if I'm walking to work) or a small messenger bag. (My backpack is Tom Bihn'sSynapse 19, and my smaller messenger bag is their Medium Cafe bag. They wear amazingly well, come in nice colours, and have pockets and interior design that make me immensely happy. I own various others from them.)

What I usually have in my pockets at the moment is my keys (work key, house key, car key, car key fob) in the left, and my iPhone in the right. What I usually have in my bag is my asthma inhaler, a pen, and a few other minor things.

I'd like to do better. Things I'm currently contemplating include:
* Minor first aid kit (ibuprofen, several sizes of things to put on cuts or blisters, etc.)
* Whether I want to get some sort of pocket tool. In specific, the thing I need most and don't always have handy is stuff for opening computer cases/removing components. (And, y'know, in case of zombie apocalypse or getting stranded in back woods rural highway, a small knife blade and scissors and such wouldn't exactly be a *bad* idea)
* A small actually useful sewing kit (which probably means putting it together myself. because the pre-made ones never make sense to me.)
* Some combo of other useful self-care stuff. (Portable "I need food" object? I usually have a water bottle with me.) Lip balm. That kind of thing.
* A USB with useful stuff on it. (I have been creating one of these for work, with things I use all the time, but I could probably stand to have a personal one.)

Music in the background: I am very much about the comfort listening this week, which lead to my creating a playlist of Enya and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach cello suites. (Look, I'm a person whose comfort reading has long included Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I never claimed to be normal about these things. Whatever normal is.)

Other possible topics: (plus whatever you suggest!)
* The annoyances of weather. (Weather is my current most annoying migraine trigger: it threw me for a loop Monday. I am still cranky.)

* Ways you make things like waiting for laundry at the laundromat or waiting for car repairs more enjoyable. (Guess what I'm doing this week.) Both places are noisy enough that complicated reading is not generally viable. Neither place has wi-fi, so if I want Internet, I am limited to my phone, and neither has a table, so I can't type easily. And neither has somewhere near enough by I could go grab coffee and sit there instead.)

* Nifty things you have read/watched/listened to this week/month/year and why we ought to check them out.

Quick reminders
- If you want to post anonymously, please pick a name (any name you like) that we can call you - it makes it more conversational and helps if we have more than one anon post.
- Base rule remains "Leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse". If you're nervous about that, I'd rather you say something and we maybe sort out confusion later than have you not say something. (People here have been excellently friendly and helpful so far.)
- I am still working on finding the balance on how much I talk vs. how much other people talk, so I am sometimes taking a bit before I reply to things. (An hour or two, usually.) Also, it is a slow brain week for me, please excuse.
- The FAQ still has useful stuff, but I have not added to it recently.
- Comments tend to trickle in over the course of a day or two: you might enjoy checking back later if you're not tracking the conversation.

Comments

[branchandroot]

I'm actually undergoing a pockets-identity-crisis, at the moment. For about two decades, I've had a key chain with a leather card case attached, and carried my id, credit cards, library cards, etc. in that so I would be incapable of leaving the house without my driver's license and money. Thing is, I also, as a matter of course, stow in my (usually coat) pockets sunglasses, chapstick, and, these days, my phone every time I leave. Indeed, all these things live in a basket on the coat rack, along with my pill box and a small wallet of less vital cards, to be grabbed and stowed on the way out.

I'm considering putting all my cards in the little wallet and taking the card case off my key chain, for better pocket distribution when its my pants and not my coat. But it's a big and alarming step!

And then, of course, there's my actual work bag, which contains
-my iPad
-small pad of paper
-books for that day's classes
-my second largest usb drive
-a selection of pens and pencils
-chapstick
-a tiny and sharp switchblade for opening boxes
-a small umbrella in one outside pocket
-one sunglasses case in the other to keep them handy on walks to and from work

But the keys-cards-phone combo is always on me, and I feel irrationally anxious about breaking up the keys-cards set. Even if it probably will make stowage easier in anything other than my wonderfully oversized general coat with pockets that will hold a paperback book. (I love that coat.)

[houseboatonstyx]

Distributing important things in different pockets on different days, led to mad searches later. "What day did I last use that, what was I wearing, where is it, did I leave it in the car?" Sometimes the important item would turn up days later. If I was lucky, in the washing machine, wet and spun; if unlucky, in the dryer, clean, tumbled, and melted.

[branchandroot]

I'm lucky enough to be pretty good at avoiding washer-pockets or reconstruct-the-outfit searches. That's what the basket is for! Helps to be deeply, deeply Virgo about my enter-the-house-stash-the-pockets routine. But I keep having these moments of "but what if I forget to take my money shopping!" and have to remind myself firmly "you have never even forgotten the shopping bags, that was always your ex". Still. Anxiety!

(Dryer + chapstick = not good at all, yeah.)

[houseboatonstyx]

Well, backup money is easy, because it folds into the cell phone sheathe, and I NEVER forget my cell phone. (Well, hardly ever.)