What's In The Good Flea's Purse?

WARNING! Long post! Lots of pictures! Messy purse!!!

I am stealing Asthmagirl's meme from Thursday. It just looked like too much fun. One of her readers was disappointed at not finding really fun things in AG's purse, like guns or knives, so I considered slipping some naughty things into my purse. But a steak knife just wouldn't look right. That's about all the illicit fun I can find in this house, dang it.

Let's get started, shall we? Be warned: My purse is nowhere NEAR as neat as AG's. I am, by nature, a very cluttered person. Which is why I like this particular purse. But it's not quite doing it for me anymore, so I'm thinking of looking for a new one. I tend to buy a new purse every couple of years and use it exclusively till it dies. No matchy-matchy for me. Pragmatist am I.




This is my purse. I saw it across a crowded store and knew it must be mine. Good thing it was cheap. I don't usually see things I just HAVE to have. It doubles as a back pack!

I LOVE pockets and zipper pouches! One of these is my key pocket while I'm shopping or whatever (but when I'm home, the keys have a different place), the other my cell phone pocket, rarely used. That is what pants pockets are for.









And here are the contents of the front snap and Velcro pockets. Not a whole lot here. Let's see - a grocery list, a WalMart receipt, a lollipop, a glass cleaning cloth and an earring. One of my all-time favorite earrings at that. And I've lost its mate. That makes me very sad.









Here we have the zipper pocket contents. Ooo! A Zeiss glass cleaner! And another WalMart receipt. And the other earring! WOOHOO!!!

That little square in the back, with the chubby children? It's a mirror compact. Do I use it? Noooo.






Look. Pretty earrings. Gift from a friend back in Florida several years ago. They match my red hair and auburn eyes beautifully. I'm so happy to see them both together again! Maybe we can have a little party, just the three of us. Or maybe I'll send the two of them off for a long weekend, since they've been apart far too long ...









Now here is the inside center of the purse. This lovely faux leather purse has three separate compartments under the hood, two of them zippered. This center compartment is not, and if I forget to snap the flap shut and swing it over my shoulder, the center contents go spilling everywhere. I can't even TELL you how many times this has happened to my scatter brained self. Notebooks and lipstick everywhere.



I love my notebooks! Look at them! One can NEVER have enough clean paper on one's person at any given point in time. Agreed? Good. Obviously I can never have enough crap paper on MY person at any given point in time. I was amused at the heap of paper and trash I threw away when I was done. Thank you, Asthmagirl, for pushing me to clean out my purse. Only the notebooks and the nail file went back in.




Oh my. This is what I found UNDER the notebooks and crap paper. A blue flashlight with no guts. At all. A capless, dirty lipstick. Pencil sharpener and eraser (never know when that will come in handy!). Dental floss from my dentist (I do not floss, and I'm not afraid to admit it!). More crap paper. And my best friend in the world, store brand Excedrin. All but the pills, sharpener and floss went to the trash.



If you look carefully in the interior shot above, there are also pockets in the center pouch. This is where I keep the one thing my mama always said is an essential: the lip stuff. She told me that if I only had time to apply one thing to my face as I rushed out the door, it should be lipstick. There are many days I wear nothing on my face but my glasses, but I love to have these handy for when I pop into the grocery or my kids' schools.





I'm going to spare you all the shot of the interior of a zippered pouch. Boring. But here's what's inside! This is all from the two interior pockets (did I mention I like pockets? I love pockets!).

We have here ladies' essentials, pictures of my children, at various stages, my eyeglass prescription (WTH?), various reward cards and odd business cards. What fun. In a separate pocket of this zippered pouch is my license and voter ID, but I was frustrated with my paint program and couldn't figure out how to obscure the numbers and information any other way. Sorry. No pics.




The last zipper pouch (stop cheering - you didn't HAVE to read this far) contains my little Bible (NASB), which I got for Mother's Day about 4 years ago and needed bifocals to read just a year later. Here, I'll show you what else is in there ...








Isn't this fun so far? Yeah, stop yer gripin'. I know I'm a pack rat. This picture just reinforces that fact. Bible, immunization records from childhood - MY childhood, pay stub, form to renew Hunny's truck's tag, insurance form for tag verification, some kind of blue paper cloth (WTH?), checkbook and a fuzzy kooshy thing that broke off of my purse tape measure (which is on the coffee table - and doesn't every woman have a purse tape measure?). Whew!



What's this now? Below the Bible and papers, my favorite purse lotion, a couple of perk cards to Eskimo Joe's and a post office receipt. Booooring. Not boring? Forgetting to lotion face and hands, running out the door to be somewhere, and digging through the purse then applying lotion to said face and hands while driving the interstate at rush hour through the heart of the city. And if you know me, you know I'm a driving wuss. But I also hate being dry.






I know y'all have been dying to find out where I keep my writing utensils, right? Sure, you're just saying that to humor me. I wondered, when I first got the purse, where to stash my pens and pencils, and it didn't take long to discover that the sides were the perfect place, so long as I kept the thing zipped.















Last (stop your cheering! I TOLD you you didn't have to keep reading! Go away. Now.), but certainly not least, the zippered pocket with all of my essential cards. And not so essential cards. For instance, why do I still have the Florida blood center card? I no longer live there. I couldn't give blood the day I got that (stupid rule about not touching other people's blood!). WTH? And two Sam's cards? I no longer need the Florida card. The card just behind the blood card is a specialist back in Orlando. Not going to see him any time soon. But did I throw any of these away? No. Silly me.

So there you have it, folks. The Good Flea's purse. Tomorrow, the Good Flea's medicine cabinet. Joking. That's a JOKE. No medicine cabinet.

Until I write again ...

Flea