I just got back from a week long TDY. It was a lot of fun and a ton of work. We went to Kentucky and to North Carolina and just when I thought we were getting ahead of schedule and could come home a day early we shut down an engine in-flight and had to divert to Georgia. It clearly was my fault that we broke because I had sent a text message to Michelle just before we took off saying we'd be home by dinner.

So yesterday we did everything we could to get airborne and home. Once we even got off the ground, thinking maintenance had found the problem, but just as I called for gear up, the engineer pointed out that the engine problem was still happening. So we landed again and gave it back to maintenance.

If you are a friend of Michelle's on Facebook you can probably see that she was not really happy at the prospect of me being stuck in GA over the weekend when I'm only a couple of weeks from deploying for four months. It should be noted that Michelle has been extremely understanding throughout this whole surprise tdy. She has had a great attitude-she's getting really good at this Air Force Wife thing.

So I finally got to a place where I could call her last night, though it was like 12:30 pm. I apologized profusely and she just had reached her tipping point. I listened to her rant and rave for nearly 12 minutes about how she has so many things to do this weekend and how frustrated she was with the Air Force and this stupid old plane for me not being home. Let me emphasize this - she was DONE being patient. She went on and on and on.

And then I pulled up to the house and she said, "Did you you just pull into my driveway?!" I had in fact pushed really hard and made it home in a plane that I probably shouldn't have and she was really happy/frustrated/upset/excited/done with me. I wish I'd had a camera to take a picture of her face as she was standing on the back porch when I got out of the car. It was pretty funny.

I have been playing tackle football and trains with the boys all morning and it has been wonderful. I'm very glad to be home.