Peaches & Honey: Fini Flight Fiascos

Do you ever envision certain events in your mind's eye--planned out to the nines, with everybody punctual and well dressed and laughing-- and then reality shits all over your carefully thought-out plans? Or have you ever wondered if you are, indeed, actually in the middle of a movie because the ridiculous situations occurring around you are too randomly specific and too stupid to be real life?

I had one of those days today.

Well, not even today.

The shitshow that fell into my lap actually happened in the span of about fifty minutes.

Longest fifty minutes of my life.

Today was Alex's fini flight, not only at Eglin, but it was his fini flight as an Active Duty military man. If you don't know much about military pilot culture, I'll explain a little. Fini flights are the final flight that a pilot takes at his current station, before he moves on to the next base. It's a final flight that the pilot's family shows up for to take pictures, give the pilot champagne, and hose him down with water tanks. It's also protocol for the pilot to bring food for the squadron afterward. This is what a fini flight normally looked like back when we lived in Japan.

So anyway, since we are about to move, today was Alex's fini flight. I woke up this morning to about 84,000 texts messages from him, reminding me about this and that, informing me he would be landing around noon, telling me that he drove my car into work and left me his car to drive instead, and reminding me to please, please bring 6 pizzas to the squadron. Also, he texted, I left my military ID at the oyster bar we'd had lunch at the day previously, so I would need to run by there and pick it up (because you can't get on base without a military ID). I thought it was odd that my military ID would be at the restaurant, because I didn't even use my purse there, and I was completely sober, but who the hell knows how these things happen. I just took all these factors into account and made carefully laid plans so that everything would run smoothly. Or as smooth as possible with two beasties underfoot.

Their main hobby is making sure shit does NOT go smoothly.

I set my alarm for 10:30am so that I could go ahead and start getting the three of us ready. I got myself ready relatively quickly and even wrestled my two beasties into human clothing. It was 11am, and things were going smoothly. Until we couldn't find the one pair of shoes that Bobby has deemed acceptable to wear. He has four or five pairs of shoes, but will literally only wear one pair (and they're Crocs at that...*shudder*). Well, I'll be damned if we couldn't find the shoes. We looked all over the house, and couldn't find them anywhere. At this point, I was starting to feel a little antsy, so I said, "Bobby, you're gonna have to take one for the team and just wear these tennis shoes."

And then World War III erupted. Because these tennis shoes have Darth Vader on them, so they "hurt." I was literally on top of this kid shoving his shoes on, and he was screaming bloody murder because Darth Vader was hurting him. It was a fight to the death that lasted a solid ten minutes, but I won it. Mama always wins.

So we walked out of the front door at 11:20am. That gave me a solid 50 minutes to get to base, and I felt pretty good about my efficiency and our odds of actually making it somewhere on time. I got the kids into Alex's car (remember, he took mine), which doesn't contain the carseats that they use regularly. His carseats are fine, but they just aren't the ones that they kids sit in every single day. As soon as I got Bobby latched into his seat, he immediately pulled off his damn Darth Vader shoes and began to complain about the seat latch. In case you haven't caught on, Bobby is the world's best complainer, and will quickly point out any imperfection, mild discomfort, or annoyance. The second he was in the seat, his chief complaint became, "This seat hurts my penis!" (Except he pronounces the word "penis" as "pee-nahs"--very distinctly and loudly).

I ignored his whining, because I was mentally checking off my to-do list; number one on the list was to swing by the Little Ceasar's drive-thru and grab six hot-n-ready pizzas. When I was calculating my timeline, I allotted five minutes for this, which was really quite liberal, considering that it usually takes about a minute and a half to drive through and grab a pizza at any other time of day. But I like to err on the side of caution. So I pulled up and ask for six pizzas, but the guy at the window told me that they were making new batches, and I was going to have to wait for ten minutes. This was not part of the timeline. But I proudly patted myself on the back for allowing some wiggle room in the timeline, so I said, "well, alright." I pulled off to the side and waited. And waited. And waited. And all the while, Bobby was still complaining about his "pee-nahs" hurting, and I was doing my best to ignore him.

Before I knew it, a solid fifteen minutes had passed, and I was beginning to get really antsy, and then I got a call from the Base Ops desk informing me that Alex was about 10 minutes away from landing. I hollered, "What?!? He's not supposed to be landing for thirty more minutes! I'm still twenty minutes away waiting on the damn pizzas. Y'all are just gonna have to keep him in the air for a little while longer!" Then the mental image of Alex landing and nobody being there to congratulate him popped into my head, and the stress hit.

I have no idea why.

I have a lot of pet peeves, but one of my biggest is being in a rush. I loathe it. Finally, after twenty minutes of waiting, the pizzas arrived, and I stacked all six of them in the passenger's seat and sped away. It takes a good twenty minutes to drive from our house to base, and there are traffic lights almost the whole way. And I hit every damn one of them. I was driving like I was in that movie with all the Mini Coopers (The Italian Job, maybe?), speeding in and out of traffic like a mad woman. And then I hit another red light and had to slam on brakes to avoid rear ending a semi truck. Which made all of the six pizzas slide into the floor board. And there was nothing I could do to fix it.

I continued to drive maniacally, constantly looking at the clock ticking, trying to push away the mental image of Alex landing without us there, and trying to ignore Bobby's whining.

"It's hurting my pee-nahs! Mama, my pee-nahs!"

"Oh my GOD, Bobby, I will pay you a dollar if you don't say another WORD until we get out of the car!"

Then there were crickets chirping and the only thing I could hear was the sound of my blood pressure rising. Still speeding, still weaving in and out of traffic, still looking at the pizzas in the floor, still praying I could make it on time for my husband's sake. And then I remembered I STILL had to stop by the dadgum restaurant to grab my military ID. So I skidded into the restaurant parking lot, parked in the handicap spot, and ran in to fetch my ID. Got back in the car, and turned my head to look and make sure I was okay to reverse. I am used to my car's backup camera, and Alex's car doesn't have that feature, so I was particularly thorough in assessing the situation. There were no cars behind me or on either side; nothing for me to hit. So I put the car in reverse and kicked it. And BAM.

"Oh SHIT!" I cursed.

Despite my best efforts to not hit anything, I had freaking hit something.

"Oh SHIT, Mama!" Bobby parroted back.

Seriously, the kid picks this moment to say his first curse word.

But I did not even have time or energy to correct him, because I had to get out of the car to see what in the hell it was that I had hit.

You know what it was?

A mother-effing fire hydrant.

A fire hydrant that was about two and a half feet off the ground, so there would have been no way for me to see it behind me without a back up camera. And it had left a lovely, golf-ball sized hole in Alex's rear bumper. Of course, this would happen when I'm driving Alex's car. It wouldn't have happened at all had I been in my own car. But whatever, I didn't have enough time to contemplate just how ridiculous the situation was. I could hear jet noise overhead, and I knew Alex was about to land.

So I hopped back in the car and sped onto base, raced to the squadron, and made it to the flight line literally in the knick of time to watch Alex land and pull in. We sprayed him with the water tanks and gave him champagne, and, had I not told him of the fiasco that it cost to get ourselves there, he never would have known.

After those festivities, we went back inside the squadron to eat pizza. Naturally, Vivi disappeared at one point, and I went to look for her. I found her sitting at someone's empty desk typing on their computer (this is a government agency, so who knows what she may have screwed up with our country. OOPS). I noticed that there was some sort of meeting underway in the next room, and the whole table started laughing when they saw Vivi. I asked why, and apparently, during the time she went missing, she had covertly crawled into their meeting and had begun to pickpocket through a lady's purse. The lady said, "It was hilarious! She pulled out my lipstick, then went through my wallet pulling out credit cards.."

And then it hit me.

That's how my military ID randomly ended up at that restaurant.

Damn Vivi.