Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

melannen is making a cloak, and asked how many secret pockets it should have. My thoughts, some of which I posted as a comment:

Whichever number of secret pockets you pick, you shouldn't tell the world the answer.

The thing about secret pockets is that it's tricky to use them for everyday items, because -- for example -- my winter coat has an inside zipper pocket that contains a small amount of emergency cash, a pen, and a pair of earplugs. The earplugs are there because I want to be sure they don't fall out/get lost, and the cash is there in case of random pickpockets.

The earliest version of this, the inside pocket contained a subway token and a quarter for a pay phone. None of the subway systems I now ride still uses tokens, and pay phones are a rarity, so these days it's a $5 bill. I have other coats with similar pockets; they each have a $5 bill and a pen. That's a total of fifteen or twenty dollars; I've occasionally gone into the coat closet to get money to pay for a food delivery and refilled the pockets later.)

Any time I use the earplugs, the most casual bystander could become aware that I'm using an inside pocket; it's not secret, but feels safer than the outside pockets. (This coat has four outside pockets, two with zippers, and two inside pockets, the other large enough to hold my kindle; the manufacturer labeled it as the place for my hypothetical ski goggles.)

/[not in that comment, as even less relevant:] Right now the various front pockets contain gloves, a small tube of NSAIDs, a lightweight silk scarf, and at the instant are getting my house keys when I go out. The large inside pocket is being used for a hat -- a cheap felt "pussy hat" that I am still wearing, two years after the Women's March, because it's the snuggest warm hat I own -- and a reusable shopping bag, both of which fold flat. If the temperature gets significantly below freezing, or I'm traveling without a backpack, my kindle will go there: Jo, who lives in Montreal, says that model is okay to about -10 C; it might get colder than that in the outside backpack pocket, but if it's not safe in the inside pocket of a coat I'm wearing, I have much larger problems.

We have been to the self-storage place in Medford, and have a specific unit and a signed contract. That was annoying, not because of anything the storage company did—they were organized and helpful—but because of transit stuff. We didn't want to wait half an hour for one bus, so we took a different one, and got to wait half an hour there. And on the way back we were late for lunch, and had a plan, and then cattitude said "get off here" and then "no, really, we overshot" convincingly enough that we were off the bus before I clarified that we hadn't overshot, except that the app he was using had suddenly decided we wanted the 89 instead of the 90. *sigh* But we eventually got back to Davis Square and had smoked salmon crepes, and bought some plums at the farmers' market, and came home.

Then I did another round of book sorting. (The categories for now are "I want this in the apartment, given limited space there" and "I'm fine storing this for a while.") I continue to be surprised at how few books I'm putting into the first category; it's not just because Cattitude did a first pass while I was in Montreal, because he hadn't looked at the paperback shelves. Once I've gone through the rest of the hardcovers, and he's looked at those paperbacks, we may do a second round and add some things that we might read, or that we'd be okay storing because we can borrow them from the library if we want. It is very weird to be thinking "why do I own all these books?" I have read about sixty books this year, with significant rereading, but relatively little of that has been rereading my own physical copies of books (rather than borrowed books, library or ebooks, or purchased ebook copies of things I'd forgotten I owned).

No matter what Environment Canada is currently saying, it would be stupidly foolish to go up to Montreal in April without my winter coat. Yes, it might not go below 4°C as an overnight low, as predicted through Sunday--in which case, my Spring coat plus cardigan would do--but it might. This makes packing bulkier and more annoying than it otherwise would be, but at least down is light. (I may, however, leave the boots behind, because space may not be finite, but my backpack is.)

Environment Canada's forecast only runs through Sunday, and I'll be there until Tuesday, so it's not just a matter of limited faith in the forecast--though Montreal forecasting seems to be less reliable/more difficult than New York City forecasting.