Yay! My Brother!

My brother is coming to visit us when we move to Tooele! Not the brother who's serving a mission in Ukraine, and not the brother who's still in high school-- the OTHER brother, the older of the three, who we hardly ever get to see! He does a lot of freelance work and has unpredictable schedules, and can't take a lot of time off for Christmas and such, so these occasional visits are important. Part of his motivation for visiting us, of course, is that we are now going to be living in close proximity to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where they race cars (and boy, is he interested in racing cars!) But I'm just happy to be able to see my brother, and I don't really care why he's coming.

It wouldn't surprise me, though, if despite the infrequency of his opportunities to visit, he visited us more frequently than most of our other relatives while we live down there. We might see more of one of my sisters, who already has in-laws in Tooele, but everyone else will probably see our house only once or twice during the entire time we live there. Another sister makes regular trips down to Salt Lake for doctor appointments for my little nephew, but even if she has to stay overnight it's unlikely she'd stay with us, because we're a half hour's drive away from the medical center. And so it will go for anyone who comes down to Salt Lake for some other purpose-- we'll be too far out of the way for them to drive out to visit us too. My parents don't like to leave Logan (and frankly I don't blame them-- I don't like to leave it either) so they might come for major family events like Princess' baptism if we have them on weekends, but otherwise they probably won't come. Since we're the only ones who don't live in Cache Valley, it'll make more sense for us to come up for holidays than for everybody else to come down to our place. And when relatives come from California, they will naturally go to Logan for the same reason, and we'll go up there to see them. We'll be closer to the airport than anyone else, but because we're not on the way to Logan, relatives will probably not stop by our place to say "hi" on the way up.

I'm not upset about it and I'm not complaining; I know they won't be avoiding us, just making sensible logistical decisions that any normal person would make. I'm just lonely and I'll miss my family. I've lived far from family before so I know how to do it, but it's been so nice living so close to so many of them for so long, and I'm really going to miss it.