The B•LOG

I'm not dead, I'm just holding a baby or two! This is not even a full day's worth. Indeed. If anyone ever diminishes the notion of a SAHD (that's Stay At Home Dad, ftw), or a SAHM (figure it out) in my presence I'll be quick to shoot them down and cover them with a few day's worth of diapers, wipes, genie liners packed to the brim, empty formula containers, used bottle liners, dirty onesies, dirty twosies, soiled blankets, hair-covered floor binkies... and so on and so forth.   And that's just a day or two's worth. I'm not joking.  These twins are eating, peeing, pooping, puking machines.  Is that a fresh shirt?  Hmm, not anymore.  Oh you feel wet, sorry 'bout that.  No, that's not curry on your lap, that would be plain ridiculous.  Yep, its pretty much like that. We've now switched to more bottles and better formula. I've tried to keep track of everything they take in and out but its a lot and it can be hard t

Fire Behavior: The Spring Creek Incident Objects in the mirror are closer then they appear. It was getting on four in the afternoon and almost time to think about our return trip back to the compound after a day of forest patrol and campfire enforcement.  Doug had taken his time to instruct me in the proper usage of our belt weather kit, a relic from days without batteries but a reliable device. Doug was from another generation of fire hounds, he’d started his government career enlisted on a PT boat out of Laos and Vietnam and had “given them hell,” or so he recanted to me time and time again. Doug, a repetitive gnome from times past, deemed a plethora of knowledge to me in my first year on a wildland fire engine. I watched him as he dipped the business end of the thermometer into the water and began to spin the instrument on the string provided. It would end up giving us the wet and dry bulb temperatures within the area, with that we could figure out the relative humidity an

Sometimes things happen that cannot really be explained logically.  These things can take on many forms; Life, love, stress and struggle.  And sometimes true tragedy happens.  This last week has been no exception for me and my family. What you're about to read is an emotional expression of a first hand account of burying a friend. Yesterday morning I had to bury a family friend.  A family member really, one I had only recently come to know.  Its quite a thing to grab a shovel in your hand and know that what you're about to do signifies a great and true finality, an end to something.  Its symbolic both good and bad to sink the blade into the top soil, depress downward and pry up a mound of Earth, set aside and repeat process.  Its quite a thing.  You see, a pet is a family member in my eyes and even once removed, while living in proximity, a pet is still a family member all the same.  Yesterday I was to bury a family member.  Do you express personal disgust at yourself for l

A twinvasion indeed!  A word I made up by cleverly adjoining two words together; "Twin" and "Invasion."  A word I've come to describe the third great chapter in my life, this being my thirties.  Of course I'm already two years into this (and a half!) realm but I'm finding sometimes a period of acclimation is necessary.   A year ago had someone told me I was going to be the father of fraternal twins I would have spit my beer all over them.  Had they mentioned in addendum to that that I would become the defacto stepfather to another set of nine-year-old twins simultaneously I might have taken another swig and proceeded to exhale it all over the individual telling me this.  Had they mentioned that the set of twin black kittens I had recently acquired acted as the harbinger of all of this... well I might have simply stopped believing you.  I mean, how is that possible?   Its true, an invasion of sorts has taken place within the last year, and it came