Once I heard, on Monday, when pop’s funeral would be, I booked a flight over. That was annoying to do – it took a few hours just to book because Qantas’s booking website is seriously snafu and I had to try a couple of different routes through it to find one that actually worked. Then after buying the ticket my bank rang me not fifteen minutes later to tell me they’d very helpfully detected a fraudulent transaction and cancelled it. Ee gads.
Only Qantas’s website was pretty adamant it had gone through, so I had to phone them, which meant spending about forty five minutes on hold for the three minutes it took the guy to send the charge through again. He was very nice and directly helpful, though, I’ll give them that.
I fly out tonight. I’m well aware and not amused of the “perfect” timing of this; we have a few days off next week anyway for Thanksgiving and the week is basically a wash anyway because most people are on holiday, so time off isn’t an issue, and in much the same way flying out of the U.S. this weekend is really cheap, as is the return, since most people are going the other way.
It’s a pretty melancholy trip overall, obviously. I’ll be catching up with friends and family and in all honest probably having a good time for much of it, which only makes it feel all the worse right now, thinking about it. Nonetheless, everything at this point is purely for the sake of the living, there’s no illusions otherwise, so going into exile and converting to emo seems pretty pointless.
It has raised the cost of living here, away from everyone. I don’t think I’d change having done that even if I had the time over, but I would seriously cogitate on it a whole lot more.
[[ and I’m vaguely aware I’ve probably used that post title before, but this case has much more meaning ]]
