Boeing or Bust

I'm leaving tomorrow for an overseas business trip and like EVERY other time I cross the Pacific, I find myself paralyzed by the number of tasks that I must accomplish before leaving.

Of course, it is vitally important that I clean every square inch of the house. Why?  I'm not sure but somewhere, there must exist a bible for good wives and mothers that ranks a spotless home as top among those identity-affirming characteristics.

Bedsheets must be changed.  This is essential because I'm not interested in arriving back in Auckland in two weeks time to be greeted by both my family and their sheets, which will have sprung forth from the bed screaming, "For Chrissakes, WASH ME!"

Speaking of laundry...

It all has to be done because the last time I went away, Dallas text asking me to send directions on how to operate the washing machine.

True story.

I love my mother in law and if I don't do the laundry, I will be able to go on Google Earth and see my husband's jeans flapping in the wind on the clothesline at her house because he still thinks it's perfectly ok to have his mum clean his clothes.

Of course, there are also all of those last minute business issues that need to be tied up before leaving.  I do have better than half a day on an airplane but I won't be working there.  I will be drinking bubbles, popping controlled medicine and (hopefully), sleeping most of the way over the Pacific.  You see, tomorrow morning, I will be out on the water with my teammates, paddling just over 25km.  This journey takes a little under three hours to accomplish.  Many, many calories will be expended.  Muscles will scream.  By the time I board the plane tomorrow night, I expect to be shattered.  I'll probably snore, which is when I am my most attractive.  Bottom line, the presentations have to be finished before I go.  

Finally, there looms the job of packing.  It takes me hours to decide what stay and what goes.  There is nothing I like less.  I am the quintessential, "what if" girl.  What if the weather in Vegas suddenly turns cold?  What if I get an opportunity to swim when there is not a single other person around?  What if I find the perfect, sleeveless, dress in Santa Monica that begs for a wrap to keep my shoulders warm? What if we get a freak snowstorm in Arkansas? So, I will find myself standing over a suitcase packed for every imaginable contingency and I will end up wearing exactly 1/16th of it.  And I will forget something essential...like a toothbrush or underpants.  Guaranteed.

In the past, when embarking upon extended trips abroad, I have prepared meals in advance and frozen them with the idea that they were to be pulled out in the morning to thaw and tossed in the oven at night.  I am so not that wife anymore.  Gratefully, she died and fucked off to Stepford although today, I have to admit that I toyed with the idea of making pie.

Why pie?

I'm not sure except that my pie is really quite good and if anything awful, tragic or otherwise newsworthy, should ever happen, it would be nice to know that my family's last memory of me included a clean house, fresh sheets and a perfectly baked pie.

I do realize how much I need therapy.