Zipping up the Ziploc and zipping off to Iowa

We’re zipping up to Iowa this weekend for a bit of a bridge tournament, so this week I thought I’d become hideously organized sometime before 7.30 a.m. Friday.

Every time we go away, I arm myself with industrial strength plastic Ziploc bags and pack everything which might even think about leaking therein.

Invariably, I find that security at the airport doesn’t share my desire to keep the wet from the dry. Nor does it share the sentiments of a good old Aussie sheep farmer’s saying:

“If you found it open, leave it open – if you found it closed, leave it closed.” Now I will confess that this actually relates to sheep gates, but I don’t think I’m taking too much poetic license when I would use the same phrase with a bottle of shampoo or a tube of toothpaste.

I understand the need for security, truly I do. But please, dear security people, once you’ve satisfied yourselves that the Herbal Essence really is what it claims to be and not the ingredients for whipping up a quick plutonium bomb en route, or that the tube of Crest isn’t in fact plastic explosive, would it kill you to put the lids back on properly?

I find I get to my destination with my clothes damp from bottles whose caps have been put on askew, and quite frankly the whole thing clashes with my perfume – oh, and my need not to stick to surfaces. There’s nothing quite so inexplicable as turning up to work with a great wodge of goo on your jeans.

Consequently when I come home from a trip, I have to rid myself of my now soggy sticky Ziploc bag, and salvage whatever contents I have to a fresh bag. I then do the next logical thing, and that is to fling it all into the cupboard for next time, because after all, nothing is more of a downer than having to unpack with any verve once you’ve reached home. Unpacking smacks of such organization that even I, Madam Organized, shrivel with an overwhelming feeling of ennui faced with such a chore after a long weekend.

But by the time “next time” arrives, I completely forget about the “last time,” and start all over again with the result that I know – in my moment of organization – that I will be pretty much able to carbon date my life through various layers of plastic Ziploc bags smooshed into the back of the closet.

So this week I started my organization. I went to the drug store, and bought everything I could possibly need for a weekend away, including a very snazzy clear plastic multi-compartmentalized toiletry bag. I have vowed to go through the archeological dig which is my closet and ruthlessly eliminate that which is on life-support, and will rescue goodness knows how many untold bathroom related treasures.

I will be left with a perfectly packed, incredibly logically arranged handy-dandy bag which I will be able to store in one simple place. I will not have the need to do that last minute panic pack where I throw everything I own into a plastic bag just in case I’ve forgotten anything.

…and the chapter starts with three dots.

It is now several days later, and exactly 7 hours, 20 minutes to departure time.

I have managed to buy my aforementioned dilly bag and stuff it with all manner of bathroomables. And that pretty much does it, but I must say the pharmacy positively loves me.

I have not donned my pith helmet and gone head first into the cupboard to discover its inner treasures. I have not packed a pair of knickers, I have not cancelled the newspapers. I have flung a load of laundry in the washing machine so that I will at least have clean clothes, albeit unironed clean clothes, to take with me.

As we are in fact going by road and not by air, Sir likes to rent a hideously expensive vehicle just for a giggle, and so I did in fact pick up the beast from the office and managed to steer it home.

As we speak, Sir is in the driveway on the eve of our departure trying to figure out how to lock the thing. He is, I would have to say, absolutely pinched notstrilled at me for not standing out in the driveway at 11:45 p.m. to give him moral support in the locking department. But I could give him a bit of a parry and thrust about all that when I tell him that there’s actually no key to start the damned thing. There’s a button. A button! That took me a good half hour to work that one out, so my sympathy level is pretty much wavering toward zero.

Lord knows how to drive the radio. That will take us to at least the Iowa border to figure that one out.

And in the meantime, soggy laundry up to my shell-like ears, I will think about which suitcase to take.

And in the morning, Sir will get up ten minutes before departure, shower, fling a toothbrush into his starved-of-affection dilly bag, thrust a couple of shirts, a pair or two of underdungers and a pair of jeans in the suitcase, and wonder why I’m not ready.

Oh the wonders of travel. I really must get organized.

Gotta dash, see you next week, kids!