T-minus twelve hours

In a little less than 12 hours, I will head to the base and pick up Pants.  The sun, which came up in a bath of pinkish light this morning and cast sharp, fresh shadows on my kitchen wall, will need to make it all the way across to the western horizon one more time before I see him.  It's done this pretty regularly for the thirty or more days he's been gone, so there's no reason to think it won't today.  Still, I'm wishing I was a pivot point and that I had the thing by chain so I could whirl around and hurl it like a Highland gamer.

I am exhausted.  This weekend I took cleaning to a pathological level (did you know you can dislodge grout with mere fervor?) and plowed through Pants's not-so-secret dumping grounds for old flight manuals, aviation logs, and cryptic scribbly notes on the back of Taco Bell receipts, the study closet.  I didn't throw anything out but I did try to organize it by training phase and aircraft, and what struck me was possibly the most basic and insultingly late revelation: there is a lot of paperwork involved in being a pilot.  Seriously.  Flight logs, weather calculations and updates, pre- and post-flight briefs, in addition to learning reams of engine limitations, stress parameters, maneuvers, tactics, principles of meteorology and flight physics, and on, and on, and on...  And on top of all of this, I found his old Service Etiquette book from Officer Candidate School, and homeboy had to learn all kinds of complicated place settings and arcane Naval dining traditions on top of worrying about getting his face stepped on doing push-ups in the sand pit.   

I originally tackled the closet out of a sense of frustration with Pants's conspicuous and surprising lack of workspace organization, but it ended up being a needed reminder of how much he's always balancing at a moment when I was feeling the weight of my own load pretty acutely.  I also mowed and watered our lumpy lawn and tackled the sloppy climbing rose bush a second time with attempts to train and re-rig it that involved hacking a decrepit trellis out from underneath it and wedging a new one in.  My arms look like I've been wrestling epileptic cats.

After a final run to the commissary last night to stock up on Pants snacks (he likes Goldfish and little fruit cups-- I always feel like I'm stocking a preschool), I collapsed to watch the last episode of the first season of the Sopranos and then retired for what I thought would be a deep and profound sleep.  No dice.  I know you have to be a certain kind of asleep to have dreams, and I did dream last night, but I could swear that I spent the whole night in twitchy wakefulness, my mind's eye wide and roaming and bored, bored, bored.  I am moving today by the grace of an overpriced latte and the promise, at long last, of a big, jet fuel-smelling hug.