I blame these incoherent ramblings on my currently equally incoherent life

Still sick.

And now I'm off to New Zealand on Friday. Just for four days: a trip which I could never justify in real life, but some family issues have come up which demand that I be there.

Since no one's actually died, I can't get anyone to cover my classes (actually, I'm not sure the university has official provision for that even if someone does die, but that's the only situation where I've seen it happen before). So I'm just going from Friday until Tuesday, so as to be back for my Wednesday and Thursday classes.

I've never done this spur-of-the-moment-plane-ticket-buying thing before, and it's all scary. Especially since it ended up costing nearly three times as much as it would have if I could have booked more than six days in advance. But on the other hand, these are circumstances in which I would have been willing to fork out even more than that, if it had been necessary.

Don't tell anyone, Internet, because I feel terrible about admitting to feeling glad about any part of what is going on with my family right now, but it's kind of nice to have an excuse to go and visit. It's over a year since I visited my parents last, and about six months since I saw them when they visited us here. Usually I don't feel I can justify forking out the $1000 or more that it costs for both Geekman and me to get over there unless we have time to stay for more than a week. Which only happens about once a year. And between us we have three sets of family (it's complicated), spread out across a distance of 1000 km, so we can't usually visit everyone in one trip.

I got to thinking about this a few days ago, actually -- before this whole thing came up -- and realised something scary: if I continue to see my parents only once a year (it's probably more like 1.5 times a year at the moment, but may well be less than once a year if we move away from Australia), and if we assume that my parents will live to the age of 95, which is probably overly optimistic, that means I'll only get to see them maybe 35 more times. Ever. And that sucks. Because I like my Mum and Dad.

So what to do? Moving closer to them is not an option at all, since there isn't any group in New Zealand that does Geekman's brand of physics, and physicists, while generally loners in real life, apparently have to be part of a herd in order to work.

The obvious answer, then, is just to make more trips. At least, that is the conclusion I came to a few days ago. It means that I have to persuade myself that it is worth making such a big trip even just for a week (or less?), if that means I can get there more than once a year.

Hopefully the few days I'll be spending with my family next weekend will help convince me of that. After all, how could I possibly put a monetary value on the possibility of adding to that (horribly, shockingly small!) number of times to spend with them that I have left?