Midnight photo snack

No crazy adventures today, unless you count a two hour walk with my mom.

Other that, I was inside packing bags. Well, I took one break to walk on my own earlier in the day. Even though it ate up more of my oh-so-precious time, I took a few minutes after my first trip around the block to grab the watercolor set that has lain untouched since I returned to CA.



The mountains looked transparent in the haze. Our local hills are much more likely to be wrapped in smog than mist, but today was relatively humid, and it was mainly water vapor obscuring the slopes.

Other than that, today has been spent inhaling and exhaling chaos. My room is a universe of stuff, expanding and contracting. Order and organization break over the accumulated things in waves as I gather, sort, then put clothes, toys, shoes, papers, and odd ends. Much of the day my bed was a map of thoughts... pens and pencils collected over here, food items over there, a pile of bags, and other little things I didn't quite know what to do with.

I've managed to rough out a basic structure for everything I'm packing. One bag for day use, one small bag for camping (clothes and such, camping gear gets a box of its own), one medium bag for staying in town with friends, one large bag for things I'll want in MD. A backpack for electronic goodies, a messenger bag for art supplies, a tote for knitting, and so on.

A disproportionate amount of Peter Gabriel is being played on my iPod tonight. Not that I'm complaining. Shuffle has been very good to me. I've only skipped one song out of 60.

There's a photo of Reagan hanging on a wall near the kitchen. I see it every time I go downstairs. He's in the dress blues coat, wearing a hat, and looking very stern with an American flag in the background. The context of the photo doesn't consciously influence me, but I miss him each time I glimpse the picture.

I test-packed my clothes in their various receptacles, but when I got to socks and underwear, the bags didn't have proper pockets for segregating them. Luckily the sewing machine (and my boxes and bags of fabric) were still arrayed in the dining room. A couple hours later....



The sock bags (pieced-together ones) have some... issues... and the seams on the fancy looking ones are far from professional, but they will service. I have a habit of being very scrappy in my sewing, improvising everything. Rarely do I follow a pattern faithfully. I keep telling myself "next time I'll do what I'm told and even iron the seams open when it says to" but that particular "next time" has yet to come around.

Besides those little bags from fabric scraps and a pair of exercise pants cut down from a extra large thrifted pair, my other recent project is the purse-like bag I'm replacing my old green bag with.



Again, fully improvised with what I had on hand. The only thing purchased with this bag in mind was the zipper, although I used the bag without it for a week. The top part folds over like so:



And take a peek inside:


Usually it has more stuff in it, but I was making a few improvements last night. I love how it has all the right pockets. The right things fit in the right places! Except my keys. I didn't account for them, so I still have to dig around to find them sometimes. Or perhaps one of the outside pockets was intended for keys, and my new camera displaced them.