Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

This past weekend marked the return of the big annual air show at the local executive airport (read: airport that the common unwashed rabble don't get to use), and I think I speak for the majority of us townies when I say I'd like to kick the organizers someplace sensitive. There's plenty of ground-level come-look-at-the-cool-planes that sounds like fun, especially for families with kids, but the issue is that the headliners this year were the Air Force Thunderbirds. A big draw and a big get, to be sure, so they were given the clearance to arrive early to rehearse, and then had multiple performances over several days. Fun!

Except.

When I say it's the local airport, I mean way local. I mean we drive past the airfield daily. I mean said airfield is on Bath Road, and some weekends we walk to Bath Road. Jets, however, don't have a concept for the term "local". Jets need space to operate, especially if they're rehearsing flight formations, and the space they operate is the entire surrounding space, i.e. right over every house and business in town. Back when I lived in Glens Falls, we had the balloon festival, which meant occasionally looking up and going, "Oh hey look, hot air balloons!" Much less fun is having naps interrupted by jet engine screech, with no recourse other than stomping onto the porch in your skivvies and impotently shouting "PIPE DOWN, MAVERICK, WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME".

And if it were just about inconvenience, I'd only be grumbling a little. That kind of inconvenience is the price of living in a populated are, the kind that comes with parades and street fairs and beet festivals and whatever else your town boosters like to do. But I'd like you to take a moment to think about how veterans with PTSD react to fireworks displays, and just imagine subjecting them to repeated jet fighter flybys like a nonconsensual pro-am restaging of Top Gun directly above their backyard that lasts for four days. The point I lose my patience is the point where inconvenience tips over into hazard. That point is somewhere behind us.

On the other hand, I got to watch a plane do a bank-and-roll maneuver over the Hannaford parking lot without having to pay the $60 admission price. That was kinda cool.

fiddledragon is officially nominated for sainthood: she voluntarily surrendered most of her Saturday to take her van down to Providence, pick up hypnagogie's mattress and box spring, and haul them all the way up to Brunswick, Maine. This was very much a mission of mercy, as hypnagogie recently learned her borked-up shoulder has been the result of a six-years-undiagnosed torn rotator cuff, and the bed that came with her rented room (I'm searching for a diplomatic way to phrase this) sucks hairy man-ass. Like, "a comparably sized pile of Reddi-Wip would provide more back support" levels of suck, that's what I'm saying here. The one that got hauled up on Saturday is like memory foam only better, and allows her to sleep without wanting to take hostages when she finally wakes up. Out with the old, in with the new, and all that.

I was already in Brunswick when the bed arrived (see previous entry for details on birthday dinner and didImentionIgotasmokingjacket), and the plan was to haul the old bed downstairs before fiddledragon arrived, in the interest of streamlining the process. I'd assumed that the blob mattress of blobbishness would be the challenging part of the operation, especially since the journey involved a staircase that turns twice followed by a trip through the kitchen and out to the storage room, but that bit turned out to be not too awful. The box spring, however, was...problematic. The item itself turned out to be what you might charitably call "vintage," hailing from the days when the "box" in "box spring" really meant something. We're talking the sort of thing where an accidental drop on your toes earns you a Vicodin script at the ER: hardwood 2x4 construction, weighting roughly the same as the 2004 defensive line of the Indianapolis Colts. When the power grid goes down during the upcoming Apocalypse, this sumbitch will be the first thing they chop up for firewood. Also, let's review: torn rotator cuff.

Luckily, fiddledragon arrived in time to help with that part, which was completed with only a tiny bit of damage to the ceiling plaster, and then it was time to move the new stuff in. This was a good news/bad news situation, because on the one hand, the mattress was considerably lighter and the box spring disassembled into easy-to-carry components, but on the other, (1) up the stairs instead of down, and (2) no handles on the mattress. My thumbs are still not speaking to me, but all in the end is well, and fiddledragon is awesome, and hypnagogie is much less inclined to get out of bed in the morning for all the best reasons, and yay.

That was the main excitement of the weekend, which was otherwise largely taken up by lounging and avoiding the single-digit temperatures that Maine likes to face-punch its residents with. hypnagogie and I took the time to reconnect—if you haven't done one of these in a while, yes, long distance relationships still blow, and Skype can only do so much—and it felt like we'd leveled up somewhere along the way. In any relationship there are those conversations/discussions/arguments that keep happening over and over again, where you can only hope to chip away at the central Thing over time; we revisited a couple of those, only we'd somehow managed to filter out the noise and get right to the signal. Truths felt heard, rather than just brushed against, a gift of time passing or of wintering in or maybe just of us being us for so long. Time was far too short because it always is, but I'll take what we have.