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

[adrian_turtle]

I really struggle with the question of what to carry with me. I want to carry as little as possible, to minimize strain on my shoulders. Carrying any bag at all causes noticeable problems, though it's sometimes worth it, and carrying a backpack (even an empty one) is a disaster.

I used to be able to get away with just my smartphone case on my belt--I could tuck a $20 bill, my transit pass, and my bank card behind the phone, slide a small comb in the back flap and pin my housekey to the elastic tiedown. (But now I need reading glasses. And I need separate keys for the building door and the door to the apartment.) And even when I could sort of manage with that kind of minimalist approach, I often missed not having tissues or hand lotion or my little pillcase or those store discount cards that make my keyring so bulky. Or earphones or business cards or flyers or pens or thumbtacks or lip balm or change. Or graph paper or a protractor or a bottle of water or some convenient way to carry home a library book or a quart of soymilk or a bunch of fresh chard or a loaf of bread.

I haven't worked it a good solution yet. I set out Monday in a skirt with small pockets but no belt loops. (I COULD hook my phone case on a belt, but it looked awful.) Skirt pockets had a wallet, pillcase, tissues and keyring. I wore a rain jacket with my phone, and hand lotion in the pockets. I carried a small purse with a pad of graph paper, pens and pencil, 6 flyers (folded), reading glasses. I was out for 11 hours. I brought home a reference book in another jacket pocket, because it was too tempting to leave behind. I came home painfully aware that I had been carrying way too much--was it the purse all day? The book, for the last couple of miles? The book in the wrong place? The jacket over my arm for a little while around lunchtime?

[untonuggan]

So much THIS the problem. Why do purses have to hurt so much? Why does stuff have to be so heavy? Why can't we all just have Mary Poppins bags?

I have played around with some of those ergonomic shoulder bags and they do help somewhat, but the harsh reality I've discovered is that if you have a bunch of heavy stuff to take with you it's going to hurt if you have chronic pain.

Grrrs at pain.

[houseboatonstyx]

Baggalinis are wonderful lightweight material, and they make a small one that can be carried either Portrait or Landscape, so to speak. But all the inside compartments open Landscape, so I'm using another brand that is made of leather.

[redbird]

This doesn't exactly solve the problem, but I chose my current daypack specifically because it is not too big: with a large bag, I kept tossing things in and leaving them there, and the bag would get heavier and heavier. The current bag is big enough for the stuff I talked about above and a bit of other miscellany, but small enough that I can't just toss in another two books without pulling a bunch of other things out.

This thread has also reminded me that I need to do a bag-culling fairly soon; I almost certainly don't need to be carrying tubes of both hand lotion and sunscreen, for example. (Yes, three ounces each, but enough small numbers add up to a large one.)

[kakiphony]

One thing I have found that I adore for when I have to carry my (heavier) bag longer distances than usual (like in the airport) is a strap pad. Some are better than others (the one linked is so-so, but is the commercial one I could find readily).

Victorinox (Swiss Army brand) has always made bags with wonderful ergonomics and padding which helped my shoulder issues. Sadly, their bags also tend to be more sporty and less cute than I prefer -- and their tear drop slings that sit on your back can be really hot in the sunshine.)

[cheyinka]

I loved the Victorinox 'boarding bag' for my last trip - big enough for what I absolutely had to carry on, small enough that juggling it and a baby and a diaper bag and a carrier for the baby was actuslly possible.

[houseboatonstyx]

I drive my car everywhere, so I've distinguished
* what can live in the car (duplicates and replaceable stuff)
* what needs to go in a store with me (valuable stuff - in normal small purse)
* what I might need just driving to a neighbors etc (in with cell phone)

[adrian_turtle]

Some things would be so much easier if I drove. Of course, I'd have to actually DRIVE...which hurts my shoulder. And provokes anxiety. And requires shoveling out the car, and parking it. And makes it awfully hard to avoid strobes. So maybe not so much easier as differently hard. *sigh* It did solve the carrying problem.

[houseboatonstyx]

Even on public transportation, I might distinguish big and/or replaceable things that could be left in a big bag on a seat occasionally, from small and critical things must have in pocket/small purse at all times.

Good luck....

[jenett]

One of the bags I have is this one which is both a waist pack and has a shoulder strap for when a waist pack is not visually appropriate. For people for whom it's the weight-at-shoulder and not weight-at-all, something that lives at the waist might help.

(I have the older model: the waist straps are now an optional thing.)

I find mine really helpful sometimes, but not always.) It's often been the bag I stick into other bags, in which things like the wallet/inhaler/necessary med things/random bits of stuff I have to carry get stuck when I don't want to haul the whole bag out to a restaurant, or I'm walking around a museum or something.

It's big enough to hold a mass market paperback comfortably, plus glasses/tissues/etc. though obviously you can't put large size pads of paper in it.

I also find in general that a really well-balanced bag helps, though not if I overload it. (There are days I'm a lot more sensitive to weight on my shoulders than others, but most people's idea of a purse? Drives me up a wall because it neither stays on my shoulder without my tensing muscles nor can be easily carried in some other way that does not hurt.)

[adrian_turtle]

That looks like it might possibly work. The waist packs I've tried tend to be too small for phone + wallet + keyring + glasses. Unless they are huge lumbar packs for hikers, and those tend to mess with my gait (or balance or something.)

The main thing I carry for teaching is a 5x8" pad of graph paper with 3 felt tip pens. (There are some advantages to carrying it in a little vinyl folder with a side pocket. But that adds more than a quarter inch and isn't always worth it.) A couple of the blazers I wear to teach in winter are not really flattering, but I wear them because they are the right level of businesslike and they have 5.25"x8" pockets.

[jenett]

You might *just* - looking at the dimensions - get a 5x8 pad in there, actually.

(I am, obviously, not at work today, but let me bring it in tomorrow and snag one of our small pads and see if it fits.) Um. If I can remember where I put it. (Desperately need to clean my kitchen.)

[jenett]

I am at work, and have tested - you can get a 5x8 pad in there, with a little cautious levering (and assuming you don't mind the possibility of a little bending at the corner.)

It's easiest if you put the notepad in first, and then other stuff, but there's definitely room for keys, phone, a moderate paperback book, etc.

[shoaling_souls]

i have a waist pouch. it's much better than a sling over my shoulder bag. and i'm constantly amazed at how much i can fit inside it.