On the road again...

I've been running some numbers in my head. By the end of this weekend, I'll have spent about 24 hours this month driving back and forth from Maryland to New Jersey. I'll have spent over $200 on gas, consumed about 3 gallons of coffee, and slowed down past an unknown number of state troopers hiding in the median.

My mom had knee surgery early this month - I came up that weekend, driving up late Thursday night and coming back on Sunday. I drove up the next weekend, leaving late Saturday morning and coming back on Sunday - just long enough to visit mom at rehab and take my dad to visit my aunt and her cousin who was visiting from NY. I took today - the day before Thanksgiving - off and drove up, I'll be here until Sunday.

I owe my parents a huge debt - they made huge sacrifices to put me through school, and put up with me from the pooping infant stage all the way to the unemployed college grad stage and beyond. I feel pretty guilty grumbling about the hours I spent in the surgical waiting room at the hospital, given that when I was four I had open heart surgery to correct a congenital defect and my mom slept on a cot in my hospital room for the multiple weeks I was in there.

Still, I've got something resembling a life in Maryland, and coming up to NJ interrupts it, means I need to work around stuff, means I don't have as much time to do stuff around the house or put into my eBay business or take weekend overtime when it's offered to me. And as much as I normally enjoy long drives, I've found myself getting pretty tired of it by this point - probably not helped by the fact that I also had to make a run to suburban Philly to pick up some eBay inventory last week. I'm sure my mom is looking forward to her knee healing and being able to move more - and I'm looking forward to a couple weekends of not having to go anywhere - at least until Christmas.