As I sat down to have my coffee on Friday morning, my boss came in and sat next to me. "How do you feel about travel?" he said. "I'm not sure," I said.
He then asked if I wanted to come to Las Vegas to a convention. He gave me a choice in the way that I'm the only video editor in the company, and they need someone to edit a video during a show. Not that I didn't want to go. I like being needed, and I want to be there. The question was the logistics.
My wife goes to graduate school classes twice a week. We don't have a babysitter because we've never needed one before. It's always been pretty much just us. For the first couple of years, her cousin lived with us, but she has since returned to Hawaii.
We've never left Timeout Boy in the care of anybody else, let alone someone new whom we don't know. In fact - I've written about this before - anytime we really want to see a movie, we take a day off, drop him at day care, and go on a little date. (Over the years, we've taken days off for "The Dark Knight", "Inception" and "The Dark Knight Rises". We're actually going to see "Django Unchained" this Friday, which is not a Nolan movie, for a change.)
After sorting it all out, my boss agreed to let me leave a day early so I can be home for one of my wife's classes, and she will either bring our son with her or just skip the other class. Now what I'm worried about his Timeout Boy himself. As mentioned, we have never been away from him much, and definitely not overnight. Not even once in his almost four years.
There were a couple of occasions for me. One was when he was about 9 months old. I was invited to this Monday Night Football viewing party with free beer and food. I was pretty miserable. I just wanted to be home playing with my kid. He didn't seem to notice that I was gone long, so that was good.
The second time was just a few months ago. We had a little company dinner, and he kept asking for me all night. He couldn't go to sleep because I wasn't home yet. I kinda felt bad about that.
This time I'll be gone for about four days. I hope he'll be okay. I probably won't be. The worst part will probably be the flight itself, when you're just sitting there with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Maybe if we get free internet on the plane, and we can do a video chat. We probably won't have internet at the hotel, in order to save money, but we might have it at the convention since we'll need the connection, so maybe I can sneak in a quick video chat before or after.
I don't know how frequent flyers do it. Sometimes I rush out of the office just to have a few more precious moments at home. I don't know how some people can deal with being away from their families so often. Even those who don't really travel but spend long hours at work. I'm not sure I can handle that. I don't get paid very much right now, but at least I have my weekends and generally get to leave after 5.
Anyways. Getting there and back safely is also in the back of my mind. I don't even wanna get into that at this point. I just can't wait for it to be over and be home again.
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