Here’s another geek post about the stuff in my backpack. This one is about a black long-sleeved shirt, and what I do and don’t use it for.
This shirt is made out of some sort of man-made fiber, but I don’t know exactly what that fiber is. The shirt’s labeling was worn away long ago.
Because the fabric dries really fast the shirt is great for wet days. However, the fabric is very thin, so the shirt doesn’t provide much warmth. It works best when the weather is wet, but merely a bit chilly and not cold enough for wool.
However, and this is where I kick things up a notch geek-wise and start talking about my sleeping bag, which is my single most important piece of equipment, and which I will describe in excruciating detail in a future post, this shirt is not good for sleeping in, at least not in that bag.
When I sleep in this shirt in that bag, I sweat. This shirt does not pull sweat away from my skin and transfer it to the bag. So far so good. Cotton shirts transfer the sweat to the bag. It makes the bag wet. When the bag gets wet it becomes almost worthless.
However, this shirt doesn’t pull sweat away from my skin, so the sweat sits there on my skin and makes me think I’m soaking my bag, even though I’m not. When I’m worried about my bag, I don’t sleep well. Wool pulls the sweat away from my skin without transferring it to my bag. So in a wool shirt I don’t wake up with a start multiple times during the night worried about my bag.
Okay, so far I’ve written geek posts about my phone, my camera, my socks, and one of my shirts. For the next geek post I think I’ll write about my “operations bag.”
By the way, at the bus station people were asking why I was photographing black socks laid out on a table, and now in the airport waiting room people are looking at me strange, perhaps wondering why I’m taking photos of shirts.