Things I wished I had packed for Arisia

[chhotii]

Notes to self, to try to avoid packing fail next year:

* Disposable cups, bowls, utensils. We brought cereal, the rice cooker, etc., but it has been quite challenging to serve any of this with no dishes. We quickly used up the Starbucks coffee cups in the room.

* Paper towels. Without these, it has been very challenging to keep things clean when snacking in the room.

* Milk, preferably UHT tetra-pack milk because the car may have been warm during pre-con runninng around, and when we arrived the mini-bar fridge was set all the way on "warm". Without having milk in the room, I have not been using the little coffee maker and free coffee packets in the room, because it makes me sad to not have milk in my coffee. Rather I have been going to the con suite to dose up. The con suite coffee... At least it has caffeine, but it's not very good coffee otherwise. Also would be nice to have milk with the Cheerios we brought.

* A very small box of Cheerios! Rather than the really absurdly large box of Cheerios we brought, which just uselessly took up excess space in the baggage.

* Hose, to wear with the skirts I packed

* Shaving gel. I bring skirts and dresses to wear at Arisia. This makes me want to shave my legs. Shaving gel, I discovered, is stupidly expensive in the hotel gift shop.

* A shower cap. Hotels used to provide a shower cap in a little box, as part of the standard toiletries, didn't they? But now they don't, I guess. So I wound up washing my hair every time I showered, which was way too often for my hair which got all dry and static-y in the dry hotel air.

* Sandals, slippers, or crocs for Sophia (who didn't want to wear her winter boots all the time and thus was barefoot in the hotel a lot).

* Pens, pencils, and hightlighters, to annotate the pocket program etc.

Thing I didn't need to pack:

* Lettuce. Usually we eat a lot of lettuce. But, I discovered, O'Connor does a terrific green salad, and the con suite did a really wonderful fruit salad this year. And the lettuce didn't keep too well.