Perna-
The thing is that I have a weekly scheduled appointment with him. Same time every week. He just recently took all of our (his grad students) meeting times and reduced them from an hour to a half hour, and increased our lab meeting to two hours from one hour. So overall he gained a lot of time in his schedule. The other issues that I have to talk to him about will not really work over email.

I know from working that almost anything that needs to be talked about can be done over the phone if it can be done in person (I had a job where half our working group was on one side of the country and one half on the other w/ weekly phone conferences.) So if he wanted to, he could have done this over the phone. Instead he decided that the person in front of him was more important.