Happily I have discovered another coffee shop in my little home town, one that seems to do a better job at a latte than the previous one. I have sent off emails to Kadie, Adam and one of my students, and hopefully that keep people up to date on my progress. It has been important for me to get away from the farm, even just for a little bit lest a vacation seem more like being at work. Perhaps I just suffer from a cosmopolitan version of ADHD, and need constant and multivariant stimulation to keep me from going spare.
The holiday has been pleasant, and I have been trying to help Mum out as much as possible. Lightening her load through the end of the drought and the oncoming winter is really important to me, she has always given of herself for her kids, and now it is time for me to pay back a little of this.
I had originally intended to fly to Perth and catch the Indian-Pacific transcontinental train to Sydney. Alas, that trip will have to wait for another time. I really have not been ding a great deal, mostly helping feed the cattle, cleaning up the house and trying to be useful and available. In an ideal world I would be hunkered down in my laboratory making strides towards tenure, but to disagree with Voltaire, I don't agree that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Still, I am getting the opportunity to step away from my work, and so I will be able to view it all in a new perspective upon my return. It's amusing to see the turn my research has taken as shaped by the terrain of my environment, I cannot do anything but move with that flow.
8:30 pm - Dealing with Mum definitely has its ups and down. I am trying to make myself available, and she follows up one unintentional insult with another. She then presumes to treat me as if I'd just arrived from outer space and hadn't spent my entire childhood growing up on a farm.