Reasons why leaving the family for 10 days may not be a great idea:

• Your brother may decide to divulge all of your adolescent secrets to your 12-year old who is staying with him and his family for a week of summer fun and extended family bonding while you're away. This litany of disclosure will likely include the times you dyed your hair purple; wore safety pins as earrings; got caught with your boyfriend hanging out of your bedroom window at 3 a.m.; vomited in the choir loft during communion following a Saturday night of drinking hurricanes in celebration of your 18th birthday.
• Your best gay boyfriend will become so bored he will launch his own blog which uses your full name and muses on all the things he loves about you, many of which you would rather not be divulged in public.
• You will receive 177 e-mails while you are gone, none of which are spam. Your eyes will bleed when you check your account remotely. You will be unable to deal with them and repeatedly hit the delete key in a fit of helpless anxiety once you arrive home. People will be really irritated with you for not responding to their e-mails. You will lie unconvincingly that your PC crashed while you were out of town.
• You will meet all kinds of wonderful people while you are out of town on your own, sans spouse and child. Every one of these wonderful people will want your e-mail address. They will begin to e-mail you immediately, further adding to your crawling anxiety over your inability to keep up with your e-mail correspondence. You will begin to hate these people.
• The GITB will rearrange all the furniture in the house in your absence. It is now not feng shui. It is fucked shui. And you keep tripping over and running into things THAT SHOULD NOT BE WHERE THEY ARE.
• After ten hours of drinking endless cans of Starbucks' double-shot espressos, smoking cigarettes like a sailor on shore leave, singing along with Springsteen at the top of your lungs and tailgating truckers doing 85 mph with all the windows open and your hair flying, you will discover that you really, really, really love solo road trips, so much so that you begin to fantasize about the next one exactly one hour after you return home. You will muse that this is probably not a good thing.