Laugh if you want, but a week is a long time to be away from home these days. I didn’t think so in my previous (pre-kids) life. But now, I miss those little messy faces, those laughs, even that sound of “Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy” 45 times a day.
(And yes, I miss my husband too. I’m sappy like that.)
A week is also a long time to sit through meetings.
No, correction. It’s a ridiculously long-ass time to sit through meetings.
To be honest, I have not technically been in meetings for a full week. I had a little fun trip on the side before the work part of my travels began (see here), and now that seems like a decade ago. You know why? Because I just spent three consecutive days sitting in a conference room with 30 other people for nine hours. The discussion, the analyses, the PowerPoint decks, the small talk in between. And then the mandatory team dinners. By this afternoon, I felt like my spinal column was going to collapse into itself if one more person uttered one more word or showed one more PowerPoint slide in that conference room. They’re all very nice, but it was massive overload. It’s going to take a while to regain sensation in my brain.
A week is also a long time not to have personal email access in any reliable or consistent manner. I’m sure that many smarter people than I have found a quick and easy way to use their iPhones abroad without incurring huge roaming fees, but let’s say it’s not intuitive, at a minimum. Anyway, this isn’t a tech blog — the point is that I’m more than a little addicted to being connected to an email account other than the one in my office — meaning, other than the one that receives messages from those people in the conference room lockdown.
A week is a long time in some good ways too. It’s a long time not to have to cook, clean, pay bills, do laundry, organize kids’ activities or go grocery shopping for what I invariably forgot on my last trip to the store. It’s a long time to not race for the train every morning, but instead walk through St James park and past Buckingham Palace to get to and from work every day. Definitely an improvement over NJ Tranist and the PATH train.
My week is over tomorrow. Back to the household lists and things to get done. But I’ll be sprung free of the conference room and I’ll get my email back in order — and I get to see my family. Then it will feel like it has been forever.
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