calendar conflicts

One of my favourite Drachenwald SCA events is Double Wars, held for a week + 2 weekends every spring in southern Sweden. Last year I missed the first few days of the event because I had to do the Cyprus trip for work. This year we haven't yet decided which event(s?) we will be travelling to attend (events in northern Sweden a four hour drive from home or less don't count as "travel", but there are not so many of those), in part because of budget reasons (so far as the budget is concerned fewer long-distance events is a good thing), in part because of complications in coordinating lord_kjar's vacation time (his company, which does IT support for many other companies) has a policy wherein the summer is split in half, and have of the people take their holidays in the first half of summer, the other half takes theirs in the second half, and the following year they switch. This policy ensures that there is always someone on duty who can handle any computer repairs that come up. However, the big Drachenwald 20 year anniversary event happens to fall in the wrong half of the summer for lord_kjar to be able to attend this year. It *might* be possible for him to trade with a colleague which half of the summer he gets off, if someone else also has a reason to want to swap, but there is no guarantee that he could find someone, and he was otherwise looking forward to having some time off in late summer this year to do mountain hiking.

Because of these questions we have been putting off deciding which event to attend. Double Wars is always fun, and since it is before summer he can, in theory, attend every year, since there are no restrictions on asking for time off then. 20-year would be fun, but see above for complications with respect to timing. Visby Medieval week is fun, and if he doesn't swap holidays it falls in the correct half of the summer. There are, doubtless, other events we would enjoy that aren't yet on this list. We want to travel to at least one big event this year, but it might be smart to limit it to only one for budget reasons, to say nothing of the fact that work has been in the "way too much to do and not enough time to do it" mode for a while now, so and attending long camping events will not help that one bit.

This week I have yet another complication come up. It turns out that the geologists at the mine have a meeting every 2-3 months, and the next meeting has the theme of "lithogeochemistry" (which is what my project is all about), and I have been invited to attend the meeting (which is actually held out at the mine site and not at corporate headquarters--I have not yet been to the mine site, and it would be good for me to see it) to present my work in progress. Sounds good, yes? However, the date of the meeting happens to fall in the exact middle of Double Wars. This means that either I would have to miss the event, or decide to attend only one weekend of it, or drive down to the event, leave Tuesday evening, fly back up north, attend the meeting on Wednesday, and then fly back down south to finish the event--a prospect that is both expensive and probably rather tiring.

When I was a child I used to hear people reply to questions of "are you going to ____, it will be fun!" with "I can't, I have to work", and I was grateful not to have a job, and hoped that I would never have one. Now it is my turn to realize that sometimes I should say "I can't, I have to work", and I find myself wishing that these schedule conflicts between personal and work lives didn't come up...