Flight and car booked, I'm going out of town for my aunt's funeral.
I got off the phone with my father about an hour and a half ago, shortly before I arrived home from the commute. He's green-lit the trip to Texas and also clarified on why my mother pushed back the way she did about my travelling. Once I was home I called my uncle's house and, receiving no answer, called the cell phone of my other uncle. I felt bad calling him since I knew he had just arrived in Texas with his wife this afternoon (after a 25-hour straight drive splitting shifts all the way from Northern MN). I was quickly passed to my now-widowed uncle and cleared my visit with him. I hung up with a plan of action in mind but was partially balked as it seems absolutely none of the airlines offer discounts for passengers traveling for a funeral service. What the fuck is up with that? Are their margins really that thin that they can't shave $60 off a $600+ dollar round-trip ticket? This will dent my pocketbook plenty -- $609 for the airplane tickets alone and another $100+ for the rental car, but I have to do this. Still, it doesn't change the fact that I feel like I'm taking a complete ass-beating on the price.
Price gripes aside, as of this very moment I have my plane tickets booked and my car reserved. I leave on Thursday and I'll be back on Saturday. Work is just going to have to cope with my taking emergency bereavement leave.
youngvanwinkle -- I know you offered crash space while I was in the state and I really appreciate your generosity. Given that my uncle lives 2 hours outside of Houston I'll just stay at his house and lend whatever hand I can during my all-too-brief stay.
[Addendum at 2108: USB 2.0 can suck a bucket of ass. FireWire 400 (aka "First generation Firewire", not to be confused with FireWire 800 aka "Second Gen Firewire") is about five orders of magnitude faster than this shitheap of a protocol. It's taking forever to copy my entire MP3 collection onto the iPod in preparation for my flight, all because Apple completely abandoned FireWire on the video (5G) iPod because their user market is expanding so strongly in the PC arena and all the Windows mouth-breathers were confused by the shining beacon of hope that was IEEE-1394.
youngvanwinkle -- I know you offered crash space while I was in the state and I really appreciate your generosity. Given that my uncle lives 2 hours outside of Houston I'll just stay at his house and lend whatever hand I can during my all-too-brief stay.