TITLE: One Big Expenditure
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 24, 2006 2:09 PM
DESC:
-----
BODY:
As I
mentioned yesterday,
as father to two active daughters, I sometimes make
price-conscious decisions in other areas. The expenses
of fatherhood are on my mind right now, because I have
a large credit card bill in store... On Monday of this
week, my wife and daughters left for a two-week trip to
Italy. They'll be staying with friends who are stationed
at Aviano Air Base, in northern Italy not too far from
Venice. The friends will serve as local hosts and tour
guides, which makes such a big trip less daunting.
This will be a great experience for the girls. They
will be missing the last two weeks of classes at school,
but they'll learn far more on the trip than would during
two weeks in school (especially, sadly, the last two
weeks of school, when things seem to wind down a bit too
fast for my tastes). As Andy Hunt wrote a while back,
travel
expands the brain.
I am so glad that they have this opportunity, and a bit
envious.
What about me and my opportunity? Bad timing. This is
the end of the academic and fiscal years at school, and
both present me with things that have to be done in the
near-term. Besides, I didn't have the most productive
spring and so owe my department some work that I'd promised
earlier. On top of all that, I've been tired, run down,
and
injured
since the end of February or so, and I just need time to
recover. As much as I miss my wife and girls already, I
am glad to have some quiet time to rest and relax my mind
a bit.
We thought about delaying the trip until later in the
summer and traveling as a family but, to tie back to my
previous post yet again, the cost of airfare rose
dramatically as we got into traditional summer travel
dates. We also started to run into conflicts with other
summer activities. In the end, we decided that the
opportunity was too good for Mary and the girls to pass
up... So now I look forward to frequent e-mail, an
occasional phone call, and when they return a thorough
review from the journals that they are all keeping. (No,
we didn't set them up to blog their trip, though they'll
be taking plenty of digital photos!)
It's too bad we couldn't make a later trip fit our
schedules and budget; Italy would have been a great
change of scenery for me, too. I've not yet been to
Europe, and I know I'd love to see so much of it.
The end of next month would have been perfect: I
could have attended
ITiCSE
-- in Bologna, no less! Alas, the airline tickets would
have been $1400 or more each, and the idea that the price
of my ticket would have been tax-deductible just wasn't
attractive enough.
-----