By now, even with her brother's speed and efficiency, Patty should be safely on her way to Ohio. It's just for a couple of weeks to see everyone, but I've gotten particularly used to having her around.
For the many new people who may not know, Patty's an archaeologist, which means she generally spends 8 - 12 weeks a year (all in one burst) somewhere isolated and remote. By isolated and remote I mean no Internet, no phone, sometimes no address. She's been places where I couldn't mail her letters and places that read her letters before they go to me. So that can be tough. Considering that she left on one of these digs three weeks after we first started dating, I am more or less used to them, however.
That said, I've been spoiled lately. After a very small gap (a couple of months) between trips to Syria (where they read our letters) and Oman (where she had no address and got pneumonia), Patty's been home for more than a year (a few visits to her family aside). We'd thought she be away this summer, but once it became clear she'd be in Cardiff their academic calendar has meant she's more or less home until late September this year. And Cardiff is civilization -- phones and email and letters and packages and everything. And I'll be able to visit and she should be able to meet me over in Europe when I'm on a business trip in the fall too. So in the scheme of things, that's going to be easy, even if the gap between this trip and the next one (India) probably won't be more than a month (and that's optimism, I know).
Even so, I miss her and Patty worries (I always cry at the airport when she goes off on her long trips) because I certainly feel like sometimes I can be pretty dysfunctional. Also, she likes me. Right now, though, I need to be focused on finishing work that must be done before the
Bristol trip and the Bristol trip itself.
My plan is to make all the annoying calls this weekend: my bank, my mobile company and print out all my itineraries and reservations/receipts, so I'm not making myself last-minute panicked on Wednesday (I leave directly from my office that night). I also need to prepare my response paper for the article I'm paired with, and it probably wouldn't hurt for me to figure out where my brain is about the whole of my own research which has been a strange thing to live with over the last several months.
As for the event itself, I'm excited. Full stop. But the coinciding of the trip with the one year anniversary of a fictional fact central to the paper's theme is bizarre to me, and since nothing about this work is about
my uninvolvement with its subject, I keep waiting to be hit with something other than the rather extreme compartmentalization and sense of having a damn job to do that I have about it right now. Not that that isn't fitting. It's fucking fitting.
My trip is, for now, as planned as it's going to get (and perhaps as planned as it is possible to get), and although I may really find myself regretting going to the Imperial War Museum when I've been on a plane all night and am high strung and have probably slept dubiously, that's what makes the most sense in my schedule right now. Knowing myself, and my history of solo travel, it's also perfectly clear to me that I am trying to make this hard, because I find solace in that.
Right now, my only real quandry is whether to take the small suitcase that will make the constant moving around on this trip easier, or the giant suitcase, so I can fill it with gluten-free bakewell tarts on the flight back.