Now It's About Packing

I feel slightly guilty that one of the primary tasks of preparation has been planning activities to do in the car. Did Ma Ingalls worry about keeping the girls occupied for months on the trail? I think not. Of course, they didn't have to be completely immobilized for the entire trip. And there are a lot fewer buffalo chips to gather these days. Besides, what's the point in bemoaning how much more spoiled we are than past generations? Now is when we live and there's not much to be done about it; we might as well enjoy it.

In that line, I am delighted by the discovery of burning MP3 files, which our car CD player can handle. With the aid of Librivox and some spare CDs, we now have more than a dozen books on three cds--which in audio files is only about half of one short book. Trying to aim at books enjoyable for all concerned, I have both Alice books, The Princess and the Goblin, the Just So Stories, a whole bunch of Oz books (pretty silly as I recall, but DOB has a deep appreciation for lame puns that should carry him through), The Lost Prince, and an E. Nesbit I've never heard but am willing to take on faith. Also I and II Samuel, Luke, and Acts.

There's a point in an airline journey--usually it's getting on the second flight on the trip out--where I always used to be able to think of nothing more than the misery of another flight (I never quite outgrew motion sickness) and then think with further dread of how I would soon have to repeat all this in a few days to return. Why not stay where I was? Whatever it was I was going to do fades completely.

This is that point in packing. All I can think of as I watch everything disappear in boxes increasingly random in composition despite every attempt to make them sensible, is how I'm going to have to unpack them all. And then pack them all again. And then unpack them all again. Each time no doubt increasing the randomness. (The trouble is, things seldom occur to me the same way twice. This time it made sense to put the extra tea and the cookie cutters and ingredients for cookies in a box labeled "Tea and Cookies," but is that likely to happen again?) And how is it that we already gave away half of our stuff AND packed up half of what was left and stored it at someone else's house, and we still have this much stuff left?