Stuff

Spent Sunday intensely preparing to leave on a trip, starting at 6:30am, with few breaks. This involved time spent preparing the garden to look after itself (I’d added several plants over the last six months that were not on the drip system), preparing various rooms to be more easily traversable for some contractors to do some plumbing and other work while I’m away, doing endless bits of paperwork and related things that I don’t want to deal with while I am on retreat thinking (almost) exclusively about physics, and so forth. At 3:30pm, in a panic I began the run around the house grabbing all the stuff I wanted to take with me, and going down to storage to bring up the two large bags I always take with me to Aspen.

hard case for the bromptonStuff includes notebooks, computer, hiking boots, bike, helmet, books, water bottles, drawing equipment, raincoat, umbrella, sketchbooks, shorts, t-shirts, underwear (yes, I did fly to a workshop one time and discover that I’d forgotten all my underwear…), various cables for charging various bits of consumer electronics, consumer electronics, shopping bag, small hiking pack, the pens I like to write with, the pencils I like to draw with, good tea, medium hiking pack, cloves, black peppercorns, good sea salt, whole nutmeg and a big stick of cinnamon (sort of hard to explain why these last several are important unless you’re also into a certain sort of cooking, and are familiar with certain Aspen grocery stores), and the list goes on and on. Why a panic? Well, my flight was at 6:40pm, and I had no idea how long it would take me to get ready, get a taxi, and get to the airport…

Anyway, all this gathering together of my stuff, and deciding which of it to bring (I have a standard core list of objects that I can assemble (the objects, not the list) rapidly, from years of doing this, but there’s still a lot of dithering about what exactly I will want and need, and what I should leave – Do I really need this many socks? Isn’t one notebook enough? Can’t I just read these papers I’m working from on screen instead of bringing them?) puts me in mind of one of the standard riffs on the matter from George Carlin, who died very recently. He makes some excellent observations about this exact situation (including the having to take a subset of the subset… more on that later), and there’s a clip on YouTube about it here:


I hope you enjoyed that. (Direct link here if slow to load.)

-cvj

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5 Responses to Stuff

  1. Pingback: Hanging with the Funny People at Asymptotia

  2. Tommy says:

    Jude,

    Aspen may not be as pleasant in the winter overall. If you’re me though, and you once skipped out on a trimester of college to teach skiing in Colorado then the appeal of spending half your workshop days doing stupid things on skis is too much to resist.

  3. Enjoy Aspen.

    I totally get the spices issue. My partner and I have gotten sufficiently spice-obssessed that we go camping with a spices/ingredients kit that is bigger than the packed tent, and we are vaguely aware that this is not an economical use of packing space, but the justification we always give is that we might want to make curry. But we never make curry when we’re camping, because we can never be bothered to huddle around a bunsen for 40+ minutes in the British rain. Still, we have used every single one of the spices that we carry on at least one camping trip. And every single trip we have a conversation about whether having used the whole cardamom on one camping trip justifies its inclusion in the camping kit.

    Have fun hiking.

    –IP

  4. Jude says:

    Aspen in winter isn’t as pleasant as Aspen in summer (although either season beats Aspen in mud month). I once took a week-long trip with a small sack of stuff including one change of clothing, but I’ve gone the other way too. Give me lightness of stuff any day. The all-purpose packing list provides clarity in the midst of the confusion of getting ready. Have fun in what my dad called “Hippieville” (that nickname came from 1968 when hippies were squatting in houses throughout Pitkin county and cavorting naked in Paepcke park). The grocery stores are rather ordinary, especially considering that it’s Aspen.

  5. Tommy says:

    I’ve done the arrival with no socks. The list of things I’ve forgotten is, well, too long to list. I’ve since taken to the practice of making a handy packing list in Google documents for myself a few days before. Then after a day or so I remember all the stuff I forgot and add it to the list. By the time I have to pack, its pretty much all there. Plus, since I check everything off as I pack them, it saves my OCD self from constantly wondering if I actually packed various items. Then again, I’m a complete and total nerd. On that note, enjoy Aspen! I haven’t been in a couple of years myself, I definitely miss it. Now, if we could just convince them to hold some winter workshops for string theorists, that’d be perfect.