"Husband Speak"

I've been married a long time. I've known my husband for 41 years and we've been married for nearly 36 of those years. We met when we were both dweeby high schoolers. Well, that's not entirely true. He wasn't dweeby, but I had a corner on the market. He was fun to be around, and he liked all of my friends, so we got to spend a lot of time together. It took a couple of years, but he finally wised up and decided it was time to actually date me. Smart man. Ok, so I had to rid myself of a boyfriend too, but when we finally figured it out, we didn't act impulsively. It wasn't until we had dated 4 years that we actually walked down the aisle. That was ok, because I was only 16 when he asked me out the first time. We both had some growing up to do.

At the young age of 6 years old, the hubs decided what he wanted to do with his life. That's not unusual. Most little boys and girls can finish the sentence that starts with "I want to be a ....." long before they turn 6. But he never changed his mind. I'm told that randomly at Christmas of that year, he turned to his parents and enthusiastically exclaimed "I want to be a jet pilot!!"

He started flying lessons at 14 and soloed an airplane before he got his drivers license. He went on to major in Aeronautical Technology Management in college, courtesy of a full ride scholarship from the Air Force, and started active duty shortly after graduating. He's made his living sitting in the front seat of one kind of airplane or another ever since; both military and civilian.

Over the years, as a result of sharing life with this man,  I've learned to like new things, live new places, and speak a new language. We've moved a lot over the years and he's traveled extensively while flying all different kinds of "equipment". He comes home with different stories all the time. As he tells them, terms and phrases come up that I need to be able to interpret to follow what he's saying, so my vocabulary continues to expand the longer we're married.

Here's a taste of what I hear, because I know you can't live without knowing the drivel that fills my mind. You're welcome.

1. Acronyms - by the thousands. AC, FO, SO, FE, IP, PIC, SIC, OPS, CO, DO, ADO, CP, ACP, BAQ, BOQ, JATO, FBO ........ The list will grow. Give me time.

2. Pilot Pellets - Peanuts. On occasion, we've called donuts by the same name.

3. Mallet-tize it - As in beat it with a mallet. He had to mallet-tize a fuel something or other with a rubber hammer in order to get out of Bangkok. I don't ask. I'm just glad he made it home.

4. Mountain Wave - Turbulence. I guess the air stirs up over mountains. I don't know. I just take his word for it.

5. Bag Drag - An Air Force term. Every time they hit the ground, they might go into crew rest, but the airplane kept flying with a new crew. So they had to drag all their bags from the plane to their lodging for the night. On long international USAF trips, there was a lot of shopping that went on too, so by the end of the "sortie" the bag drags were huge.

6. Crew Rest - When the crew rests. Duh.

7. Bags - What most people call "suitcases".

8. Sortie - See "Mission".

9. Mission - See "Sortie".

On one of our first dates, at 18 STINKING YEARS OF AGE, he took me in a 2 seater airplane from Fullerton, California to Catalina Island for lunch. They served buffalo burgers at the Catalina airport, which was a rare treat at the time. I was 16 and had never flown before. There was a boat race going on out of Long Beach that day, so he turned the plane on it's side so we could see the boats. With all the pressure on young men to come up with unique date ideas and marriage proposals, meet my better half. He would be pretty hard to beat.

10. "Make sure you fly with the Goodyears down" - Should be self explanatory. If you end up flying with your Goodyears up, another term comes into play, but I don't use that language.

11. Equipment - Airplanes. Ask a pilot what equipment he's on, and he immediately knows you're in the business.

12. "Let the big dog eat" - Keep your airspeed up.

13. "Keep the brick in the boat" - I don't know. It has to do with some instrument.

14. "Pin your ears back" "Light your hair on fire" - Go fast.

15. Go fast pants - G-suit. A pair of specialized pants worn by pilots that go fast and pull a lot of "G's". These pants keep the blood in their upper body so that they don't pass out. FYI, passing out at the controls of an airplane is not the preferred behavior for optimum performance.

16. M-1 maneuver - Facilitates the performance of go fast pants. It involves non-productive grunting. Want to stop reading now?

17. "Feel it by the seat of your pants" - Just fly it.

Is this like reading a text book? No worries. No pop quizzes.

18. "Arming handles raise, triggers squeeze." - Recited exactly that way, including the punctuation. In UPT, the student pilots had to memorize a list of behaviors necessary in the event of an emergency. I also memorized it from quizzing him over and over. This particular phrase had to do with punching out of an airplane. If we're at an event, and are ready to go home, all we have to do is look at each other, put up our thumbs and quickly jerk them a few inches into the air. It's then understood that we want to "punch out" or "depart the fix".(Go home)

19. UPT - Undergraduate Pilot Training

20. Punch out - The act of being propelled from the cockpit of an airplane by a small rocket under your seat. Always a last resort, understandably. The only time to leave a perfectly good airplane is when it's no longer perfectly good. Sorry to all you wannabe sky divers out there. What you consider recreation is just wrong.  

21. "Depart the fix" - "Leaving the final approach fix outbound". Whatever. Go somewhere else. See #18. Go home.

22. B-4 Bag - The large green bag (see #7) he carried in the military. He managed to pack for trips that consisted of several weeks, not just days, though he didn't own that many pairs of "undergarments".  I don't know if he ever did laundry. Honestly, I never asked. Some things are better left unsaid. Though our children DO know how to get 4 wears out of a single pair of undies before they're washed.

23. Boom Ride - When you fly so fast you cause a sonic boom (which happens when you break the sound barrier). Note: Boom rides cause pilots to smile.

24. "Sucks, blows, goes" - Explaining in 5 words or less how a jet engine functions.

25. The whites of their eyes. Something you never want to see in the cockpit of another airplane while inflight. It means you're entirely too close. Yes, he has, courtesy of inattentive flyers in other equipment (see #11). We don't talk about this either.

Are you getting an idea of what our conversations are like? I think I need to be done now. Except to tell you how to get away with graffiti. When the hubs was in college, he and some friends painted correctly named runways on the sidewalks of the Aero Tech quad. They used to go up to the second floor and shoot paper airplanes out the windows to see if they could achieve a correct approach and "stick it" in the middle of the runway. The university never asked who did it, and in fact still maintains the original work.

Pilots are nothing more than children with very expensive toys. We wouldn't have them any other way.

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:

The Lord make His face to shine upon thee,

and be gracious unto thee.

Numbers 6:23-25

Lord guard and guide the men who fly

Through the great spaces of the sky;

Be with them traversing the air

In darkening storms or sunshine fair.

Thou Who dost keep with tender might

The balanced birds in all their flight,

Thou of the tempered winds, be near,

That, having thee, they know no fear.

Aloft in solitudes of space,

Uphold them with thy saving grace.

O God, protect the men who fly

Thro' lonely ways beneath the sky.

Amen

Mary C. D. Hamilton

1915



My Grandmother Called it "St. Vidas Dance"

My mom and I are very different. In fact, sometimes, I wondered where I came from. My brother, Ming, didn't help with that quandary either, because he assured me I wasn't normal and had questionable roots. There was a time that I truly believed everything Ming told me. He said that if the skin under your fingernails peeled, it meant that you had leprosy. I actually believed it into adulthood, and was always secretly thankful that my leprosy never progressed beyond peeling fingers. Until one day when I looked it up. 

He also assured me that he could teach me how to breathe underwater. He would demonstrate how easy it was, and I would see lots of bubbles popping on the surface of the water. When he came up, he was just fine and encouraged me to go under and take a nice big breath. Of course, I came up coughing and sputtering. I couldn't understand why I wasn't unable to figure it out when it was so easy for him!! 

Perhaps I was just simple minded. I think Ming came by those kinds of stories naturally. My dad told me a few things that I believed wholeheartedly too. And for entirely too long. Nothing malicious, just mischievous. I'm such a lemming.

Anyway, like I said, my mom and I are very different. I think she would have been very happy to dress up every day and take her briefcase to work. She really always wanted a career, and even to this day, when asked what she did when she was younger, she responds that she worked in a bank. Which she did, for a very short time before I was born. Actually, she was pretty much a full time mom. Interesting how we all choose things in our lives that define us.

But I never wanted a career. In fact, I never aspired to work outside the home. I just wanted to get married and have lots of children. I wanted to be a keeper at home and love my husband, and raise cool little dudes and dudettes. God, in His grace, gave me 2 grandmothers that were pretty good with domestic things, so they introduced me to sewing and a few home arts. I took the little bit they showed me when I was very young and went on to teach myself how to sew, and I do pretty well with it. But the problem is, no one was around to teach me how to cook or clean. As a result, my dear husband got to weather the "learning years" when I turned out things like "gravy", that was made from a package mix and was clear with little brown pebble like things in it. Not pretty. When he said "you don't need to make that again" I knew I hadn't been too successful. 

My biggest learning experiences came at the expense of my parents home, for it was there that I learned to clean. Mom wasn't too particular about the condition of the house, but I had a bent to keep things clean and orderly. I thought of myself as being very helpful. In truth, I'm a tad on the hyperactive side and don't sit still well.  So when there is nothing to do, I'll find something. My grandmother identified my inability to be still early on and often accused me of having "St. Vidas Dance". I don't know what that is, exactly, but I'm glad it's not terminal. Now, I tend to put my hands to things that I won't destroy, .........usually.......... but that wasn't always the case.

One day, I decided that mom's refrigerator needed to be cleaned. So, I emptied it out and thoroughly washed the inside. Then I went on to tackle the outside. It was in the days of earth toned appliances, and she was so proud of her new brown fridge with the freezer on the bottom. It was obvious that the outside had lots of fingerprints and scunge on it from the 3 of us kids. But when it wouldn't come off, I took a steel wool pad to it, and that did the trick. Kind of......

What I didn't know was that the paint was SUPPOSED to be darker around the edges of the door. ............um, oops. I also decided to clean the oven for her. So, to make it easier to reach inside to clean it, I pulled the door off. You can do that with some ovens and easily put it back on. Yeah. Not hers. My poor patient father labored for a couple of hours to get that thing back on. He was actually sweating and breathing hard when it finally snapped back into place. I also mixed all the sugar in the sugar canister with the flour in the flour canister, and put it back just as if it had never been touched. It went unnoticed until dad went to make coffee. My response? "I was helping!" I said that a lot. Usually when the parentals were bailing me out of the situation my 'helpfulness' had created. 

Some things never change, and often my husband has to bail me out to this very day. My delusions of grandeur cause me to take on projects that I can't always accomplish on my own. He shows the same patience as my father, thankfully. He survived my learning to cook. Maybe he thinks that if he sticks around long enough, I'll outgrow my inability to sit still too. 

Older women likewise are to be reverent 

in their behavior,

not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine,

teaching what is good, 

so that they may encourage the young women

to love their husbands,

to love their children,

to be sensible, pure, keepers at home,

kind, being subject to their own husbands,

so that the word of God

will not be dishonored.

Titus 2:3-5

Mommy's Excellent Adventure - An Old Email

Many of you have already seen this, but for those of you requesting a "read", here you go. Knock yourselves out.

This is an accounting, in email form, of one of the dumbest things I've ever done. It was a very cold January night and I was headed to the airport to pick Jim up after coming home from a trip. I had my watchdog, Doug, in the car with me and was on the phone with Abbey when it started. I wrote her later that evening to tell her how it all ended up. 

-----Original Message-----

To: Abbey J*****

Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:33 PM

Subject: Mommy's excellent adventure

So, here's what happened to me tonight while on the phone with you. It's now an established fact that I can no longer be trusted around small children and open flames. Good thing I'm rarely around either one!! 

When I was pulling out of the garage to get your dad, the garage door wouldn't close. It kept going back up, which it's been doing a lot lately. The remote seems to be a little temperamental. So I sat about mid-way down the drive trying to get the remote to work but the door just kept going back up. So, with the remote in one hand, and while still on the phone with you, I got out of the car and started up the drive to see if there was something in front of the beam on the door, and I look over and the car is going up the drive with me!!! So, I go to hop back in the car to put it in park only to find that the door has locked, which it does automatically when the wheels move, and I stinking CAN'T GET IN TO STOP IT!! In a panic, I see that the garage door is coming down and the car is probably going to run into it and at the same time, I'm pulling on the door handle trying to stop the car, which amazingly I'm doing!! So I figure if I can get into the beam of the garage door quickly enough, it'll make the door go back up and maybe, since I've been able to stop the car by pulling back on the door handle, I can also stop it by standing in front of the car. Obviously, these thoughts are going through my head rather quickly, while I'm chanting "oh crap, oh crap o crap, Abbey, I've done something REALLY stupid!!!" 

Well I managed to send the door back up and stop the car with it's nose just barely into the garage, only to think "what in the world to I do NOW!!???" SO glad I had the phone in my hand! So, I called 911, frantically explained my situation and begged for help. The operator informed me that I had the wrong 911 exchange, and so she transferred me to the Reynoldsburg emergency, where I got to go through the WHOLE STINKING THING AGAIN!!!

So after about 10 minutes, the cop sauntered up the drive, hands me a release to fill out and sign, and starts working on the door. She was expressing a little frustration that the dispatcher hadn't told her that the dog was locked in the car. ALL THE WHILE I'M STANDING IN FRONT OF THE CAR HOLDING IT BACK FROM DRIVING THROUGH THE HOUSE!! HELLO!! 

So, finally, when I started to shake because I had been standing like that for about 15 minutes and I was also freezing my gazorplatz, I asked her if she had anything in her car to block the wheels so that I could stand upright. I'm not sure what she was thinking about why I was braced against the car like I was. So she got a big jack to brace in front of the wheels of my car, and expressed yet more frustration about the dispatcher not telling her that I was actually holding the car back with my body!!! Like I said, WHY WAS I STINKING STANDING LIKE I WAS AND WHY DIDN'T SHE INVESTIGATE FURTHER FOR HERSELF!!!??

She finally had to call another car with a longer thingy to reach the door lock to trip it. The whole time she was working on it, she was talking to Doug trying to get her to stand on the door ledge where the lock button is so that she might press the button. I guess her dog had done that with her electric windows and choked itself when the window came up. At one point, the dispatcher called and said something to her, and she turns to me and asks if the voice was familiar, and if that was the one I had talked to. I told her I was a little distracted and couldn't be sure. HELLO LADY, I WAS TRYING NOT TO GET RUN OVER BY MY OWN CAR WHILE MY BIG BAD WATCHDOG BARKED AND PLAYED INSIDE!! ALL I REMEMBER DOING WAS BEGGING FOR HELP!!

She really did a good job, and I'm not busting her chops. It is kind of amazing that the dispatcher didn't pass along the nature of my problem. It took so long for the police to get to me that I actually called back to see how much longer it was going to be. I was getting kind of tired and really didn't want a car in my laundry room. At least not tonight. I'm really glad I wasn't pinned somewhere!! But just as my second call was answered, the police car drove up. It's kind of bizarre to look back on now.

Anyway, when she finally wedged the wheels so that I could let go of the car, I filled out her release and I was so frozen by that point, I could barely write. Her other cop guy came, they got the door unlocked, and she promptly proceeds to get in the car, with my big bad watchdog, and put the car in park. Yeah, my big bad watchdog didn't make a sound and I think they're best friends now. In fact, I think they're going shopping this weekend!! So much for the watchdog I take to the airport with me!!!

So, that was MY excellent adventure. What do you have to say for YOURSELF???!!! I've fulfilled my stupid quota for the week and it's only Tuesday!! I say I've done pretty well. I'm just so glad the car didn't run over me, or hit anything else. Thank you Jesus!!! In any game of "Can You Top This" for the foreseeable future, I say I win. Hands down. Feel free to tell all your friends!

I'm going now. I love you, and am so sorry that you have a special needs mom. Oh well, at least I'm fun!!

Kisses!

Bob

-----End of Message-----

You who are simple,

gain prudence;

You who are foolish,

set your hearts on it.

Proverbs 8:5

"New Rules" 10 on 10

"10 on 10" is 10 pictures for 10 hours on the 10th day of the month. It's just a fun project started on A Bit of Sunshine. Often the 10th of the month happens to be a fun Friday when some of my littles come to play. That's what we did today! Last month, my friend Jen at Living Life One Cheerio at a Time posted 12 pictures. When I asked her about it, she told me that it was okay because there were only 10 "events". I love making up new rules!! So, following her lead, here is my January 2014 "10 on 10." Enjoy!!

The dreary weather kept us inside today

Helping unload the dishwasher

Sometimes a  man just needs a little time to himself

"Run wiff me!"

And so they ran!

Grand-dudes home!

Makin' tunnels

Highlight of the day: news that our SIL got a job!

Snack time

Munchies in mommy's old high chair

Playing with trains before bed

Our trains have names. This is "Corn Cob" and "Diesel Dude"

And all the people went up after him,

playing on pipes,

and rejoicing with great joy,

so that the earth was split by their noise!

1 Kings 1:40

Linking up with: A Bit of Sunshine