The 3AM Packing Nightmare

So the title of this post is actually extremely misleading, as I just finished packing! The entire process was a nightmare, as is usual with my packing. I really do consider all of the things I'm bringing with me necessary! This post will be a photo-story of my night. It will be amusing or scary, depending on who you are and how you perceive serious overpacking. Hopefully I can look back on this and laugh at how crazy I am!

So this first picture is of my room before I started packing or did anything. This is how it looked when I brought back all my stuff from Boston, and I left it like that for a week. Yes, for a week, I actually preferred to walk over things and have no floor space than unpack and organize things. There are actually more things off to the right, but they're not visible in the picture. 

Somehow, when looking through random papers in my purse that just sit there and don't get organized or taken out, I found the packing list I used for my summer in NC last year! Good thing, because I used my past self's organization and list of things you need when moving via airplane to write this year's list. I even color coded it! It was definitely helpful to have the old list. In the process of actually starting to pack, each category actually ended up getting longer with things I'd forgotten, whoops!

At 8pm or so, when I decided it was time to start packing, I started on the non-clothing portion of my checked luggage, and this was it. It's not really much - the pile is essentially a third shoes, a third towels, and a third hair products. 

And then we go to my real problem area - me bringing WAY too many clothes because apparently, they're all absolutely necessary. The empty suitcase at the bottom is the one I brought back from Boston, the laundry basket was to move things into to sort them, and the suitcase on the top left is a bigger one that I was moving the clothes into. Clothes that didn't make it to the big suitcase made it to the "I don't need to take this!!!" pile, which you can see forming next to my shoe. 

What I neglected to mention when discussing the previous picture is that I brought back a suitcase and two small duffel bags worth of clothes back from Boston, in addition to a medium sized duffel of misc things that I didn't know where else to put when I was moving out of my apartment. All of those bags had to be unpacked and sorted. The result is what you see under my shelves - I decided to just make a huge pile of stuff that was in those bags that I didn't need. 

Then came the Dark Ages. It involved packing and sorting, trying to use a medium duffel as my second bag, me realizing I forgot to pack all of my dress clothes and sweaters and subsequently realizing I just had way too much stuff, needing to search the house for a bigger duffel, unpacking and repacking AGAIN, weighing, moving things around, and finally finishing. There is no photographic proof that the Dark Ages ever existed. 

This is the light at the end of the Dark Ages. All my things packed (somewhat) nicely into a very large suitcase and a very large duffel bag, both weighing about 35-40 lbs each (the bathroom scale I swiped for my room for the night isn't very accurate!). 

Now onto my carry on luggage! Besides things like my computer and it's associated wires, and the things I already put into the carry on bag before taking this picture (calculators, cards, calendar, other misc wires, a textbook, etc) this is pretty much it! 

And this is the carry on mostly packed! I'm bringing the duffel for flying to LA mid summer for the Amgen Scholars conference (no way I'm checking one of the huge bags for a three day trip!!). I ended up putting stuff in my backpack and then putting it in the duffel because I didn't think I'd have enough space in my backpack for what I wrote on my carry on list, plus my backpack is in the process of breaking, so I didn't want to put it under too much stuff stress. I believe all I have left to put in it is my laptop. The rest of the small things that are laying around my room (camera, iPod, cell phone) plus the stuff I'll pack tomorrow morning (toothbrush, glasses, etc) can either fit in crevices in the duffel or just into my purse. 

And now, I've probably convinced everyone I'm crazy! But hopefully this post was somewhat amusing to read :). 

It still hasn't fully hit me that I'm leaving so soon, and am on my way to what will hopefully be one of the greatest most memorable summers I've had to date. I'll be sitting in the airport/on the plane thinking "I can't believe I'm here, I can't believe this is actually happening!". For the thousandth time, I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!