A trip is in the works for next week which will take me out of town for a couple of days.

I am trying now to make preparations, getting things in order and lining up someone to house-sit.

When your primary heat is a wood stove, it is important to have someone take care of your home.

Of course, there are also chickens that need feeding and even a goldfish and two cats that also need some attention.

I can usually get by with being gone for a day at a time, but much more than that is more of a problem.

If the temperatures are warm, I can put out extra food and water for the chickens and cats and feel pretty good about their survival chances.

But if it is cold, like it has been for the past month or so, the water will freeze up and someone will need to offer the critters their daily libation, which consists of a cup of boiling hot water to melt the ice that usually fills their watering devices in the chill of the winter nights.

I also have other plans to make, like how I am going to get all my work done here at the newspaper while being out for a couple of days and how to arrange some other trivial this and thats.

I think that about sums it all up, but I'm sure there will be other things that come to mind as time goes by. There always are.

Sadly, some of those things don't come to mind until the car is already out of the driveway and traveling at a cruising speed on an interstate somewhere. That's when the "did you check the...?" Or "Did you bring the....?" questions arise.

I come from an obsessive/compulsive background, so perhaps I came by it honestly.

I can remember my father sometimes going back through the house twice to check the faucets, toilet, lights and door locks before leaving.

He also sometimes turned around and walked back to the door after getting halfway to the driveway to jiggle the doorhandle, just to be sure it was shut well.

It sometimes was hard to cope with, especially when he asked, "Did you lock the door?" Usually that question came while he was on his way back to the door to check, regardless of the reply.

My mother, on the other hand, has a cleaning compulsion. I think I've mentioned this before. She spends much of her efforts counting things, like how many brush strokes she makes in cleaning a tile or how many passes she has made with a vacuum cleaner on a piece of carpet. I think she has decided that five passes over a spot make it clean enough to move on.

In my house, if the floor gets a friendly wave from the vacuum as it rides by, it's doing well. I feel sure that the inexpensive carpet in my home couldn't stand up to the rigors of a few months of her vacuuming techniques, let alone my discount linoleum.

Thankfully, she had ceramic tile installed and is risking little more than the grout between the tiles, which is visibly showing signs of wear from her constant scrubbing.

She also washes the dishes before she puts them in the dishwasher, mops the porch and polishes her solid stovetop after each use.

So, as you might guess, I can sometimes suffer from a few hangups when trying to get ready to go somewhere.

I try not to let that stop me. I remember when I was walking to school one day, I started counting my steps to and from the bus.

I can't recall how many steps it was, but I later feared I might have contracted this disorder. Later, when I found distraction in other kids joining the walk, I felt better about the whole thing. Boredom seems to have been my chief mental enemy, one which strikes me rather quickly and can be hard to overcome.

At any rate, I also tend to over-plan a bit at times and then not plan at all at other times. Both ways have worked well in the past, as well as providing for a few distinct disasters.

The well-planned family trip to the beach a few years ago was fabulous, the well-planned trip overseas met with its near demise in France. The poorly planned jaunt to trout fish in the mountains of Virginia was a joy, but the unplanned trip to the beach that I took about 10 years ago left me wondering why I wasted my gas money. It all comes down to one basic fact: Perhaps trips are really not made in the planning, but in the attitude that we take along with us. So, I'll make sure and pack up my sunny disposition right along with that change of socks and underwear. I'm sure both will come in handy.

Get more tongue in cheek commentary this week's issue of the Alleghany News!

Email: allnews@ls.net