I did not inherit those genes, and I don't think my brothers did either. We are total failures, what can I say?
Here's what it looks like when I have a trip coming up:
Four or so days before - I think to myself, "I'm going out of town. Maybe I should do laundry in preparation for packing" and then I do something else and forget all about it.
Two days before - "hmm. I am going out of town and most of my clothes seem to be dirty. I should do laundry and decide what to pack" and then I do something else and forget all about it.
Day before leaving - note: this happens whether I'm going away for a weekend or 10 days. Same thing every time.
7am - wake up and think "oh crap I still haven't done my laundry".
5pm - Scramble to do laundry after work in order to not give out of towners the impression that I don't like wearing clean clothes (unless the trip is to my parents' house in Michigan, where I have been known to pack an entire suitcase full of dirty clothes to do laundry when I get there. Give it up for a 5 state commute to do laundry at the folks').
8pm ish - return home from doing laundry with every intent to pack and get to sleep early. Put laundry away, good start. Decide to sit down and check facebook, just for a minute.
10:30pm - Sitting down to check facebook somehow turns into spending two hours watching a movie and downloading music (or prior to the iPod, checking my email, and generally doing nothing of value). Finally get out the suitcase and start to throw things in it.
Next comes the tricky part. Fitting everything I want to take in the smallest suitcase possible so that my boss won't make fun of the size of the suitcase I'm taking in relation to how long I'm going to be gone (always trying to avoid judgment) but still making sure I have everything I need. I have this one tiny suitcase that I try to use whenever possible if it's going to be less than a week (shown next to a standard two drawer sized file cabinet so you can see that it is, in fact, tiny. Apologies for the darkness of the photo, camera phones are only so sophisticated):
This is kind of a problem when it's February and you're packing for cold weather and you need sweatshirts and sweaters and the like. But you'll note that I did it. The thing may completely explode when I try to open it later, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
30 minutes later (approximately): decide it's probably as good as it's going to get, I'm sure I have everything necessary because I travel all the time, I'll just finish up with toiletries in the morning.
Here's the problem with that last part - the chance that I forgot something I will definitely need at some point while I'm gone is somewhere around 90%. I always forget at least ONE thing. You know, a hairbrush, underwear, pants (I know I have pants this time, at the very least I'll have the ones I'm wearing). This could easily be solved by going through everything one last time to be sure nothing is missing, but when I reach the point where I've decided I'm done, I'M DONE. That suitcase is dead to me after that.
11:15ish - go to bed, vowing to wake up early in order to finish packing.
Day of trip - wake up at usual time, throw final toiletries into toiletry bag, jam suitcase closed, run to catch the bus. Hope for the best when the suitcase gets opened on the other end.
Then there's the unpacking. When I came back from Thanksgiving I didn't unpack my suitcase all the way until sometime around Christmas and the only reason I did it then is because I was having a houseguest and I didn't want any judgment.
Oh well, someday I'll get it right (but not really).
(I have a roadtrip to Maine planned with the girls, depending on the health of an under the weather bunny)
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