Who doesn't love packing?

I am leaving tomorrow at 6:45am for Tampa, Florida where my boss and I will be presenting a poster about a media campaign at the university that I work at which centered on alcohol use. A trip tomorrow means packing today! I actually started last night. I must admit, I LOVE packing. I think that it is because I have always been a plnner/organizer, and packing for a trip is the perfect opportunity to do lots of planning and organizing. For example, last night I made a list of outfits i will be wearing, down to the underwear to wear with them...And tonight before I start packing, I will make a big list of everything I need to bring with me, so I do not forget essentials like extra contacts and pills for the plane. (I DESPISE flying). So now, you are getting a better view into what I call my OCD tendancies...

OCD tendancies run a little in my family, one of my brothers is a 'counter', he knows how many steps there are in the places he spends most of his time (from ground floor to apartment door, from first floor to basement at work, etc.) My dad has also always been a perfectionist, and that rubebd off on me too. When I was in grade school and had to make posterboards, he would always help me write the title, whcih included counting the number of letters and spaces in the title, measuring how big the title coulf be on the board, then dividing it be letters and spaces, then making hash marks so each slot for each space or letter was the same... it used to drive me crazy, but at least my title was always straight...

Now, I am definitely an organizer. I like lists, categories, manila folders, color coding, and systems and processes. I also like efficiency. Some of the jobs I have held have definitely reinforced this tendancy of mine. For a few years in undergrad I worked in the donations office, where I would sometimes have to stuff thousands of envelopes in a few days. Each envelope needed to be stuffed with a letter and return envelope. I used to figure out how to fold more than one piece at a time and how to arrange the materials for the quickest stuffing. Sometimes I would have to rearrange the materials two or three times on the table before I decided the most efficient set up. A little crazy, huh? It was only a few years later that I found out that THEY MAKE MACHINES THAT DO THIS FOR YOU. Had the department not been so cheap and had bought said machine, I might be slightly more sane today.

When I started working at a high end clothing store in Newport, my ocd tendancies moved into clothes. We steam each piece of clothing as soon as it comes out of the box and before it goes ont he floor. Steaming. Is. Amazing. You can steam things that don't work very well with ironing, like sweaters or t-shirts. So what did I do? went out and bought a steamer. Now I steam at least one piece of clothing that I wear each day.

Also at the clothing store, we had this back room with lots of shelves where we would store merchandise. The type of merchandise would change with the season, jeans in a massive amount of styles and quantities in the spring, t-shirts in the summer, courduroy pants and jackets in the fall, tons of sweaters in the winter. On the slow days, I would go in the back room and say someting like "how can anybody work like this? the way this stuff is jammed in here, it doesn't make any sense!" But secretly, deep down inside, I was a little tingly because it meant an afternoon of refolding and figuring out the best way to store everything so it made sense and was easy to get to. I like it when things make sense.

So now you know about my ocd. I hope this post did something to enlighten your day. Now I have to go organize my desk...