Day: June 18, 2016

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Dinner and a Concert

I had a lovely last Saturday night in Saskatchewan!

Charles, Caroline, and I drove to town for dinner and then attended at the Shurniak Gallery in Assiniboia a concert by our friends Saskia and Darrel, The Great Plains. I saw them in Willow Bunch last year and had seen them at the gallery in 2013 as well.

It was lovely to catch up with them and they put on a great show as always. I was so touched that the first song in their set was dedicated to me, my favourite of theirs, “My Father’s Land.” They also do a hilarious song called “Cabin Fever” during which I always lose it when they get to the bit about the propane freezing.

A major rain storm hit while the show was on and the puddles were deep on the highway on the way home. I was relieved to get in to a dry bed. So it looks like I do have my roof leak tamed and doing some additional tarping will just give me peace of mind. Charles has me scheduled for Tuesday night to make sure the roof is secure and to do a few other chores around the property.

Well, I’d better get to bed since I called off early today and I have eight hours of typing to do tomorrow and… I’m invited to supper at C&C’s! Caroline is going to experiment and needs a lab rat. 😀

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Luggage Tetris

Who would have thought that all those hours playing Tetris while procrastinating on my homework would pay off?!

As it turns out, the key to solving my packing woes was pack my clothes flat (instead of rolling) and to only compress one of my compression bags…

All I’m missing for personal items in my suitcase are my French press and my toiletries bag. I am reasonably confident I will be able to fit those into my computer bag. I prefer to travel with my toiletries in the “personal item” anyway, in case I have to check my suitcase and also to hopefully avoid having to open the suitcase at security. Anything that I think is going to scan funny is better off all together in one bag.

So this is the final weight of my suitcase, 9.7KG!

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The suitcase is definitely packed to its limit, but it zipped with ease.

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First layer has a large packing cube, which I had to compress to get the suitcase to close with ease. Next to it are a pair of sandals and below the sandals are my travel purse.

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Take off that layer and you get the other large packing cube, the two small ones, and another pair of shoes (which fit nicely in that groove between the packing cubes).

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And now we get to the magical part… There are basically “ribs” at the bottom of the suitcase for the handle mechanism. Look what fit in the dead space between the ribs! Two spare pairs of glasses, one spare pair of prescription sunglasses, my jewelry box, and another pair of sandals!

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I really don’t think I’ll be able to improve on this and hope that the toiletries bag will fit in the computer bag! Thankfully, I really don’t have much to bring on that end and I know I have a few items that would fit in the space I still have left between the ribs.

What I love about the packing cubes is how little work it is to get to the small items at the very bottom without making a giant mess!

Yes, I will be posting my packing list at some point. 🙂

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Bulgarian Breakthrough

While on my coffee break, I visited the Bulgarian Wikipedia page for the town I’ll be living close to (6KM) away. I very painstakingly transliterated the Cyrillic Ябланица into Roman characters and got.. Yablanitsa. Exactly what my host calls the town.

Then, I got to the word География and I just knew it was “geography” because of the e,o, and recognising the final character, the backwards R, as being a “ya” sound. Again, I painstakingly transliterated it into Roman characters and got.. geografiya.

The switch finally went off in my brain! Now, I know that I just need to carry a Cyrillic alphabet cheat sheet so I can transliterate what I’m reading and, thanks to the number of English and French loan words in Bulgarian and words that tend to be mutually intelligible in many languages thanks to common Greek and Latin roots, I should be able to come up with something I vaguely understand. Yes, it will be a very slow process at the beginning, but once I master the Cyrillic alphabet, reading should go much more quickly.

I remember when this happened when I was learning Japanese hirigana characters and a whole portion of that language opened up to me. It’s rather exciting to have it happen with Bulgarian right before departure!

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Soapbox Travel Earring Organiser

I like to wear earrings and thanks to my winters in Mexico, I’ve accumulated quite a few pairs, none of which are valuable! I knew I didn’t want to leave without them as they would add some much needed variety to my outfits. I didn’t like any of the travel earring organisers I found online, like rolls, as they would not protect my earrings. I wanted something compact that I could throw around and not worry about, but also provide easy access to the earrings.

When I saw a soapbox at a thrift store, I had an epiphany. A standard soapbox has a small footprint and the lid fits tightly. I’d bought some thin layers of foam for another project while I was in Mexico and that seemed perfect for the inside. I pressed the bottom of the box into the foam to get its outline and then cut several layers.

I started with a bottom layer for loose items:

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Bottom layer has loose items.

Then, I simply poked my earrings through a couple more layers:

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First layer of earrings. There may be more on it now… 🙂

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Second layer of earrings.

I protected the top layer of earrings with another layer of foam:

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Piece of foam over top.

And here it is all closed up:

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And the cover’s on.

I found the perfect place for my organiser to travel to use up some dead space in my suitcase. More on that later. 🙂