There are few things less pleasant than a fire alarm at 0630 in the morning.  (I'm saying this as someone who's had nine root canals, so I know.)  The alarms here are particularly shrill, which, if there ever was a fire, would likely be very helpful.  Don't get me wrong - I'm thankful that such systems are in place, and that I'm less than a mile from a firehouse, but when the alarms turn out to be false, as they were this morning, it's still annoying.

Anyway, while I was throwing on clothes in order to trek outside for the inevitable all-clear, I decided I'd "save" some of my stuff.  Given that I wasn't *entirely* sure that it was a false alarm (though I was at 95% - this has happened before), I made a light-hearted attempt at hastiness and decided to fill my backpack with things in case this turned out to be in the 5%.  Here's what I saved:

- Macbook w/plug
- Portable external hard drives
- Canon Vixia HF S11 Camcorder (with batteries) (w/accessories)
- Passport
- Kindle
- Droid 2 Global
- iPod Touch
- Both watches (they were easy to wear)
- Car key

As it so happens, in the first three instances, I wasn't running around looking for accessories - they were all in the same place.  (I'd had a long day of cleaning and organising yesterday.)  Most of the items were already in my bedroom with the backpack, and so it was easy to get them all.  Additionally, these are all things that fit in my backpack, and were my storage options larger, or my preparation time longer, I might have saved some additional items.  (For instance, if I were evacuating & had some time, I might take my Linux desktop and the smaller of the two monitors.)

One thing I didn't save is the family photos - I have some going back more than a hundred years - though this will provide me more impetus to finish scanning them so that they're online in case there really is ever a fire!