Fast Forward

Greetings fellow earthlings! While I traveled aboard my fabled space craft through the limitless dark of space to worlds both far and unfathomable, mere weeks passed for me while millenia turned back here. Is there still a place called America, or have the continents drifted so far as to leave this blue ball topographically unrecognizable? Do humans still even use their tongues and fleshy lips to communicate or have we finally evolved to point of brain-to-brain interlocution. Do I need to get myself a clone for organ replacement or has the Replacement Revolution already occurred? If so, ignore this opening sentence and let me begin again:

Salutations my androgene brosters. I am Jim Billy 4.0. I and my nearly limitless supply of similar genotypes eagerly await a recharging meal of yeast paste and reprocessed sea water. Also, death to the primagenitors! Now, where may I acquire a sexless, white jumpsuit with an absurdly large diagonal purple stripe?

Or at least it feels like it has been that long.

As has been quite apparent, my posting has been somewhat irregular for roughly a year now. Except for a few drips and drabs I have dropped like tantalizing bread crumbs, this blog has been effectively defunct since I moved back into my palatial Valley Glen estate (over 2000 square feet now, woohoo!). The number one reason is, of course, gross laziness. The number two reason will be covered in the next post (stay tuned). But the number three reason was that once I fell far behind it became harder and harder to catch up.

The primary on-going reason for this blog is to try and record the ongoing trials and tribulations of fatherhood. Not only is this a creative outlet and frustration release, but in theory it might be nice to have something I could show my kids someday, especially as we more or less completely dropped the ball on baby books. You know how the second child always gets short shrift on the baby book? Well, when you have twins it is instantaneous tiny shrifting. No time, no time. Anyways, once I fell behind during the summer of exhaustion ('08) I had a very hard time moving forward, because I didn't want to leave stuff out that had happened. Of course, events that happened 6-12 months ago don't have the driving immediacy of more recent events so instead of putting anything out there, I just spun my wheels and waited.

Now I am determined to get back in the game. Rather than just jumping ahead in the "story" or trying to go completely back a year, my present solution is this: Two part posts. BAM! Genius. One part present day, the other blasts from the past. That is a one two punch of baby adorability that is without mercy.

Or alternatively, it will be a god-awful mess. Time will tell. And just like the Bush legacy, it may truly be centuries before we can know for sure.

As I have babbled on for quite a bit already, for the "present day" half of this blog let me simply post a video of the girls attempting a Vulcan mind meld. Honestly, to this day I have no idea what they were up to, but it was definitely some sort of bizarre twin behavior, the sort of thing you might expect to see in the hallway of an empty hotel or anything from the set of Full House. They were doing this for a couple of minutes before I thought to grab my camera.



My mind to your mind.

Now compare that to this next series which are the remaining shots from our trip to Austin in January 2008. You can clearly see the toddler/baby split. Today they got hair, high level speech, 10 more pounds, several more inches of heights, and, of course, green-striped shirts. Totally different.

Here we are packing to go on the trip. This was back in the days when we didn't have to pay to fly the girls. The airlines just made us check them inside luggage.

Ho ho, you have seen through my little charade. The airlines didn't make us do anything. Rylie just climbed into the bag and we couldn't get her out, so we gave her a box of graham crackers and zipped it up. Tip the skycap an extra twenty and you are traveling light.

Oh yes, there are levels and levels to my deceptions. Did we enclose my 1-year olds in suitcases and sneak them on a plane or were they just playing with them? You may never know.

It was the second one. The playing thing. That is what happened. Now you know.

Here are the twins in their metal cages of doom from the first hotel we checked into. I suppose the bars are close enough together they are not going to choke themselves, but it did not strike me as the safest or most comfortable crib I had ever run across.

Let me take this moment to bitch about the Austin Hilton Garden Inn. Because I made my reservation late (typical) I ended up at this "overflow" hotel. But not all nights were "overflow" nights, i.e. the conference discount did not apply to all nights... only some of them.

Mind you this was their comp- lication, not mine. I just wanted a hotel for 3-4 consecutive nights with no trouble. Their reservations lady dealt with all of the ins and outs this oddly byzantine reservation structure and assured me I had a room. Not so. They lost the second half of the reservation, where I was supposed to be paying more, by-the-way. And despite having a wife and two one-year old babies they kicked us out of the hotel, this even after a great deal of pleading to the contrary. They put infants on the curb. This adorable face (Classic Kayla), out in the winter cold.

Sons of bitches.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending. We were able to force our way into their sister (and superior) Hilton Hotel, which was closer to my conference and less money. So [cover the eyes of the little ones] FUCK the Hilton Garden Inn. Fuck them. All right, let's move on.

I might have oversold the "out on the streets" angle a little bit, as I actually did have family in town. This is Mark Land and his kids with my kids. Mark is my step brother, a generally good guy who was the closest thing I had to an older sibling growing up.


I would have to say all things considered, if you can be the oldest sibling go with that. Nothing wrong with Mark, per se, I just don't like being on that side of that power dynamic. Then again, there is no joy quite like irritating an older brother, so maybe I will have to re-evaluate.


Back to the wee ones. While Daddy sometimes attended boring lectures on space and time, Team Elf Kicking, Inc. managed to find plenty of time to hit the town. We had lunch with margaritas, toured the local children's museum, went to the LBJ presidential library, and visited the University of Texas alumni club and Bevo museum.

The girls do love their quesadillas and mommy and daddy sure loved their margaritas. Check out the picture of father and child gracing the very top of this blog. Can you say pupil dilation?


Here is the gruesome twosome at the children's museum, standing on some sort of platform with a tree growing out of it. Inside. Good going, Austin, now my children don't know where trees grow.

And is that Kayla playing a piece of corn like a clarinet? Kayla, that is a grain not a woodwind! Dammit, this means another 12 hours in the learning tank...

Er, I mean, "napping box."

Having fully planned out my daughters' future we took them to their first presidential library so they can start to get a feel for the position. Well, only one is going to be president and the other will be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But someone besides her presidential sister will have to appoint her. I will not have my girls accused of nepotism. Who will be prez I will let them decide among themselves. Probably whichever one gets a photograph taken while using a corn cob bong, well, they'll have to settle for Justice.

The LBJ library is nice because it has an actual reproduction of the Oval office: 7/8 scale.

That's right, 7/8. Why make one so close and not just do it 1 to 1? (Yes, I know, probably because it had to fit in the building already there.) The point of a scale model is to build it to a different SCALE. Imagine building a scale model of a battleship to 7/8 scale. It would be awesome because you could also use it as a battleship. Only it would cost more to build than the battleship it is scaled to, as it requires bizarre 7/8 parts.

The LBJ presidential library is located on the University of Texas, also home of some sort of impressive cattle ranch. I mean pictures of cows are EVERYWHERE here. I wasn't entirely clear whether they milked them or slaughtered them for hamburger, but clearly that building behind the girls can hold a lot of big bull behind.

They also have a Bevo museum below the Alumni club where we grabbed some food. For the mascot impaired, Bevo is the name of the Bull that UT people love so much. More specifically, they love his horns. As, in "Hook'em Horns!" Then for some reason they shake their hands in the surfing term, hang loose. Or the rock and roll praise for the devil. It's two fingers up is all I know, and that is a dangerous place to be.


Supposedly the origin of the Bevo name is that Texas A&M grabbed poor Bo, as he was known at the time, and branded "13 - 0", the score of A&M's 1915 win over Texas on his rump. A creative U of Texas fellow, rather than live with such ignominy, altered the brand so it read "Bevo" instead. Like all good stories this one is completely false, but in the presence of a good story vacuum apocryphal tales reign supreme. <-- This could be confusingly mistaken for a terrible mishmosh of a metaphor, when in truth it is merely a proven scientific fact.

That's right. Science. If you can't handle it, get out of the beaker.

Anyway, here is one last picture of the cuties, Kayla up front. Holy Creh-Ap they have grown. If I changed that much in a year I could be a Satyr by now.

Some people suggest I may already be one. [Suggestive eyebrow wiggle]

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention our final night in Austin, where Candice and I grabbed a baby sitter, dinner, and a movie. But not just any movie, but a full, bad-to-the-bone, Elvis sing-a-long. If you have not seen the '68 Comeback Special I would strongly recommend it. Not only does it have some of the greatest live Elvis performances ever captured on film -- just raw, growly, powerful, and awesome in a way his radio relase stuff doesn't even glimpse -- but it also contains perhaps the most surreal, bizarre, funny, and oddly revealing (and not in a good way) pre-recorded musical sequence (Trouble/Guitar Man). He fights people in a bordello using Kung Fu, I shit you not. Staggeringly awesome. I am not at all the Elvis demographic and it blew me away, all the way from the folk/blues pure live stuff to the ultracampy musical extremes.

Austin is kind of a quirky town, holding out as best it can against the raging storm of TEXAS that blows all around it. Check it out but stay away from Hippie Hallow.

Dem peoples is nude.