My travel kit

When I fly, I try to do it with only a carry-on suitcase and a backpack, no checked luggage. That means that I have to deal with the TSA and their rules on liquids, etc. At first, I did what most people do and limited myself to 4oz containers of my shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, etc., stuffed in a quart-sized zipper bag. But even the best little containers can and often do leak after being subjected to the back-and-forth pressurized/depressurized of just a few plane trips. There had to be a better way!

So I started investigating ways I could reduce the number of liquid products I needed to bring along with me.

I started with my hair products.  I bought a few bars of J.R. Ligget's Old Fashioned Shampoo as well as their Natural Traveler set. This worked great! I love the container that came with the NT set. However, J.R. Ligget's is all the way on the East Coast, and thus has a large carbon footprint, so I started looking for something more local. Dr. Bronner to the rescue! Their bar soap works just as well as the Ligget's shampoo bars, and their factory warehouse is only a few miles from my house. Dr B's has the added bonus of being Certified Fair Trade and Organic.

JR Ligget's Shampoo bar & Natural Traveler,
plus a bar of Dr. Bronner's soap.

Next up was my hair gel. Those little travel size tubes of hair gel are convenient, but are very expensive compared to buying hair gel by the gallon from the beauty supply store. Not to mention the waste! (The tubes are wasteful, plus you can never get all the gel out of it!) I started using hair paste or putty instead. The TSA does not consider it a liquid -- according to them, a liquid is anything that "pours" - so I don't need to put it in a 311 bag. I just buy the whatever brand is on sale.

Hair Putty, plus a folding brush from Japan

For my teeth, things are a bit complicated. I am allergic to SLS, an ingredient in most toothpastes, so I have to buy special toothpastes that do not have SLS or even ALS in them. Fortunately, this gets easier every year, but special toothpaste can be expensive. When I am traveling over just one or two nights, I usually forgo the toothpaste and make sure to be extra vigilant with flossing. When traveling more than that, I suck it up and put a tube of toothpaste in my 311 bag. I thought about just taking some baking powder or other special tooth powder along, but the TSA gets antsy about anonymous white powder in your luggage. Go figure. This picture is of my travel toothbrush, plus some floss made from organic silk -- because it can be composted and regular tooth floss cannot. I am experimenting with the use of a miswak stick, but have only been using it a couple of days & so haven't formulated a real opinion about it yet. If I end up using it - even if I only use it for travel - it would eliminate the need for toothbrush and paste or powder. Not pictured is my Listerine Pocket-Pak - obviously I am out of them and need to get some more! - which is meant to be used as a breath freshener through the day, but I have found that one or two strips on the tongue, plus a mouthful of water makes an acceptable substitute for mouthwash while traveling.

travel toothbrush plus compostable silk floss

Then of course, there's the usual deoderant and q-tips. I only cotton swabs that have a paper stick, never plastic. With the paper stick, they are compostable. I used to keep the q-tips in the special plastic box for travel that they sell, but the lid kept getting broken, or I could never get them all back into the box so the lid wouldn't close, whatever, so now I just keep them in a small plastic bag. I buy whatever deo is cheapest.

Also in my travel kit are some items that are not daily use, but I have found if I *don't* have them with me, I wish I had brought them!  

Towels. The one on the left is a travel towel in a little pocket holder like you can get from REI or any other camping store, while the one on the right is a compressed towel that opens to 10"x10". To use it, I just have to take it out of the wrapper and pull it open.

towelage

Tide To-Go Pen and Dr Bronner's lip balm. Tide To-Go, or a similar product, is a MUST HAVE for traveling, especially if you don't know where/when your next laundry stop is.  My lips get very dry, so I often have 3 or 4 tubes of lip balm stashed about my person.

Tide To Go and Dr B's organic lip balm

Speaking of laundry, on longer trips when I know I'll have access to laundry machines (not just a sink) I take along some of these Purex 3-in-1 laundry sheets -- detergent, softener, and dryer sheet all in one. My friend Barbara turned me on to these - all 3 of her boys were Boy Scouts, so she understands about packing! Unfortunately, I see now that Purex has discontinued these things. Mutter. Hopefully, they'll either bring them back or someone else will start selling something similar. For trips in which I'll be washing in the sink, I have some powdered detergent that I put into a bag and take along. TSA is ok with laundry detergent powder. Also pictured is a stretchy laundry rope thingy to hang wet clothes on.

3-in-1 sheets and Flexo-Line clothesline

When one travels, one doesn't always know what state of cleanliness the toilet facilities will be in, so I also carry a set of Whizzies with me. There are a lot of products along these lines to help women out in this kind of situation, but I like the Whizzy because it's just manilla paper and can be composted. Reusable products are great, but if water is in short supply, how do you clean them? or keep their case/bag clean? These are great when camping, hiking, or just stopping at a highway rest stop!

Whizzy!!

And of course, what travel kit would be complete without tweezers, a combo nail clipper/bottle opener, and a wine opener?  I keep these in my 311 bag because TSA likes to have a look at my corkscrew. It does NOT have a knife on it, so they let me keep it, but they always have to pick it up and look at it, so I make it easy for them to do that.

The essentials!

So, the only things pictured above that go in my 311 bag are the opener, clipper, and tweezers. Everything else here can be packed into whatever nook & cranny can be found in my carry on bag - though I do usually keep them all together in one clear rectangular zippered bag for ease of use. 

Someday I'll write a post showing how I pack a carryon suitcase for a 5 week trip. It's easier than you might think!

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Your basic green bean casserole

Tonigh I took the rice mix from the previous post, added a can of cream of mushroom soup, plus a can of chicken breast, plus the leftover frozen green beans, some salt & pepper, mixed them all up, then topped them with some sourdough bread crumbs (which I keep in the freezer -- from our free sourdough loaves from being in the Boudin Bread Club).  Baked it at 350 for 30 minutes and YUM! Green bean casserole.

There's enough leftover that we will probably have it for lunch tomorrow, too.

So much meal value from that little effort on Friday....

Still here

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here. Since the last post, I've had spinal fusion surgery, a trip to the emergency room for what we thought was a heart attack but turned out to be a gall bladder attack for which I need more surgery, attended a conference in Portland, and finished a semester of grad school.

In short, I've been busy and I have neglected this blog. Sorry.

We are still here. Brian is still unemployed. We have used up all of his severence pay and have nearly depleted our savings. Things are really really tight.

Just last week, I "discovered" -- in quotes because duh, I really should have been paying attention to this! -- that we were still making large payments to our credit cards. We started this last year to pay them down quicker, which was good because we have more room on them now, but not good because that was a large chunk of cash that we could still have to use for things like, oh medical bills, health insurance, tuition, etc. I stopped the extra payments, but do plan to restart them once we get back on our feet.

Added up our medical bills and if insurance had not paid a large chunk of it, my spinal surgery would have cost us over $100,000. As it is, our portion of it comes to something like $8000. Could we have waited and had the surgery later, after we're back to normal? No. My injury was such that time was of the essence; the longer we wait, the more damage to my nerves. We are waiting on the gall bladder surgery as that is not an emergency. Of course, if I have another attack, it will be an emergency, so we are gambling a bit here. Wish us luck.

I have applied for a job at CostCo and plan to apply for other retail positions such as PetCo, PetSmart, etc. While not what I *want* to do, even a minimum wage job will help us at this point. Brian has applied for unemployment insurance and applies for multiple jobs every week. Today he told me that he is branching out into other fields (for example, a photography position). I hope he finds something he likes to do and pays reasonably well!

I am not so worried about the health insurance aspect of whatever job he gets. I've done some research into California's upcoming health insurance exchange as part of the Affordable Care Act and we can get something fairly close to what we have for approximately $300 less per month than we are paying for COBRA now, and with a MUCH lower yearly deductible! We can register in the exchange starting October 1 and coverage begins January 1. This means that Brian has an opportunity now to pursue employment doing something he loves without worrying about the health benefits package of that job. If I can find part-time employment to fill in some gaps, plus ramp up my music business again, then maybe we'll be ok.

I have been trying to be creative in the kitchen. I stocked up on components to use to build meals. For instance, I have cans of tomato paste, chicken stock (more on that later), cream of mushroom soup, diced tomatoes, different kinds of dry pasta, beans, herbs & spices, etc., as well as canned roast beef, salmon, tuna, and chicken. These things can be made into a number of different meals fairly quickly -- which is great because I often forget to plan out a meal and get things thawed out or otherwise ready in time to make dinner. I need to work on the planning thing. *sigh*

Chicken stock -- I buy cans by the case from CostCo, but on those occasions when we have bought a roasted chicken, I have saved the carcass and put it in my crock pot covered with water, plus a half cup of white vinegar, and made my own stock. I use this up first, but if I don't have any on hand -- or all I have is frozen because I forgot to thaw it out, which has happened numerous times -- then I have the canned stuff.

Tonight, I am making rice, etc., in my crock pot. I started with the recipe from "A Year of Slow Cooking"but instead of following it exactly, I doubled the water to 4 cups and used 1 cup of mixed white and brown rice, plus another cup of combined wild rice, pearl barley, and green lentils. I also forgot to butter the inside of my crock; hopefully it'll be ok.

Once this is done, I plan to stir fry the rice mixture with green beans (frozen, thawing now), eggs, and some canned salmon. I'll add some granulated garlic and dried onions, plus rice wine, soy sauce, lemon juice, etc. I'll update this post (hopefully with a picture and everything!) when it's finished to let you know how it turned out!

This weekend we'll be up in the LA area for my music group's retreat. We are working with a handbell friend who also does team building. Should be fun! But I won't have time to post anything, unless it's just a quicky because I've found something worth sharing while there. (Hey, it could happen!)

Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

UPDATE #1: It was yummy! It looks a bit woodgy because I just broke the eggs into the rice mix instead of cooking them separately then adding them, plus the canned salmon is in itty bitty pieces like canned tuna, but it really did taste quite nice. We'll do it again!  I have enough rice mix and green beans left over that on Monday night, I will make green bean casserole with chicken. Yum!


UPDATE #2: Again regarding chicken broth -- a roasted chicken is less than $5 at CostCo, so I don't feel guilty buying one when it's been "one of those days" and I don't feel like cooking. It makes multiple meals, especially once you've made broth from it, and it's yummy. However, a whole frozen or fresh chicken costs even less than the roasted one and I can roast it myself in either the oven or crock pot and then I get the giblets to use for fish food, too. (My fish LOVE frozen pureed chicken livers. They're not too wild about gizzards, though.)


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