I’m not much for great clothes (except maybe shoes) or fine food and drink (except maybe pizza and beer), but I do like bags – backpacks, shoulder bags, fanny waist packs, and so forth. Over the last few years, my collection had grown steadily, so in January I resolved to cut back. I gave away a waist pack from Lowe Alpine (nice, ancient, and unused), then used a great Carleton listserv to sell an LL Bean backpack (nice but unused), an Eddie Bauer attache case (nice but unused), a Mountainsmith daypack (nice but unused), and my custom Timbuk2 messenger bag (nice and used, but too small). The Timbuk2 has been my mainstay for a couple years, the bag I strapped on my back every day for the ride to work. The bag never quite worked for me, though: I was always squeezing necessities (iPad, lunch, gym clothes) into it or leaving them out.
So while it was a bit tough to give up these bags, the sales garnered enough money to buy a new custom messenger bag from a new San Francisco bag maker, Rickshaw. The new bag arrived today. It’s much less tricked out with pockets and such than my old Timbuk2 bag, but the simplicity is nice, the construction seems solid, and it appears to be plenty big enough: