I’m actually right now sitting in room 342 of the Enders Hotel and Museum in Soda Springs Idaho. I’m here for the next 9 days to do some wildlife surveys. We are snowshoeing into the backcountry at night to play pre-recorded owl calls and listen to see what kind of responses we get. It’s mid-April, but there is still quite a bit of snow out here. We’ll also be doing some pre-dawn sage grouse surveys, if we’re able to fit them in. It should prove to be an adventure if nothing else.

But back to the thing.

I know I haven’t posted many photos as of late, and I may well get around to that. But in the meantime I thought I’d share this pretty fun movie that we made with the kids this past Sunday. We had no other plans, so I just threw it out there and the kids went for it. We didn’t have a script or anything, but Anna helped brainstorm the preliminary concept.  The rest was pretty much ad-libbed. The kids took a nap in the middle of filming. I had fun with the editing/production part. Anyway, there’s some fun stuff in there if you sit through it. Let me know what you think!

Untitled from dan gunderson on Vimeo.

December has been busy and I haven’t put any photos up in a while so I figured I had better take the chance now.
I’ll start at the beginning (it’s a pretty good place to start I guess).

A bunch of parents got together and painted Anna’s kindergarten classroom early in the month. It was pretty fun, and came out looking really nice. The kids all got to try their hand at the roller too.

We went and got a christmas tree at a tree farm outside of Boring. The ignitor on our furnace had gone out this weekend, and so we had no heat for a couple of days. It was thankfully a pretty nice weekend, no risk of frozen pipes or anything, but the house dipped down to about 59 degrees. The sun came out, so we figured it was a good time to go get a tree.

I taught Anna how to count the tree rings.

Then we came back and the kids had tons of fun decorating the tree. All the ornaments ended up on one tiny corner of the bottom of the tree at first, but they proceeded to migrate their way around the tree (and the living room) throughout the month.

The kids were playing dress up, and posed for a picture in front of the tree.

We needed a good family photo for the christmas card, so we all decided to get in on the fun.

We made a batch of stamped cards using christmas light stamps cut out of potatoes. We had done this a few years ago and it worked really great. Of course we didn’t make enough…but that is the way with christmas cards. I think we made 30 cards but ended up sending out like 50 in the end.

My parents came out and the kids really, really had fun w/ grandma and grandpa around. My Dad was out for a couple days, but my mom had come out for over a week. Lots of projects and preparations for the solstice celebration and christmas.

Gingerbread house kits from Trader Joes were a big hit (and a huge mess). My God, the sprinkles.

We went up to the zoo one evening for the zoo lights, which is always an amazing spectacle. The kids had fun. We had hot chocolate.

Nicki and my mom took the kids on the Portland spirit for some crazy adventure which involved a cinnamon bear? and a queen or princess of some sort? I think the boat ride was the best part, though the kids really did sound like they had fun hearing the stories and meeting the characters on the boat ride. Milo wouldn’t sit on the cinnamon bear’s lap so he made Nicki hold him and Nicki had to sit on his (it’s?) lap. We got a picture, it’s funny.

Here’s one of the kids with Grandma Jackie, down on the waterfront waiting for the boat.

Some pictures from Christmas day – Milo with his nutcracker present.

Anna with her Grandpa G, eating a candy cane she got in her stocking.

Playing dominoes while the kids napped.

I made stuff out of cardboard for the kids this year. It’s an inspiring medium to work with. I made these little puppets and a carrying case for Anna… I totally stole the idea from some blog which I found on a google search for “cardboard puppets”, which I would love to give credit to right now, but I can’t seem to locate the link now. Anyway, these were really fun to make. I put magnets in the hands so they can hold onto stuff.

I made Milo this little amp, to go with the cardboard guitar I made him for his birthday. He likes it, but I may have made it too realistic because he was disappointed at first that it didn’t really work.

So now here we are, the grandparents have gone and we have the house back to ourselves. It’s gotten rainy and a bit stir crazy, but we are looking forward to the short week and a weekend gathering with friends and celebrating the end of this year and the beginning of the next.
So long for now.

We are back in Portland after a Thanksgiving trip last week to Montana to visit some good friends (and former neighbors). Anna had the week off of school so it was the perfect opportunity to escape the City for a while. Here’s a few photos…

The trip pretty much overlapped the entire time that big storm was blowing across the west, and as a result we had some pretty rough driving conditions both ways, and the temps were pretty cold most of the week while were out there. But when the sun did come out late in the week, we had a chance to get out and go sledding and the weather was perfect.

Milo really enjoyed sledding. Anna was too preoccupied with her winter clothes being uncomfortable, so she really didn’t get in on too much of the fun.
But Milo had a blast, especially when the snow would spray up in his face.

Anna was mostly busy playing with her best friend Nora. The two of them were like long lost sisters. They hardly left each others side the whole week.

There was lots of art/craft time.

The kids made some really nice table settings for the Thanksgiving table.

Milo found a guitar he liked. (This one played “Girls just wanna have fun”)

One random picture…the kids all dressed up at the Children’s Museum in Bozeman.

We took this photo just before we packed up to leave. I guess we’re missing photos of some of the other fun stuff we did…we had a very nice Thanksgiving dinner, a trip to a local hot springs, and plenty of just fun play time around the house…the drive home was a little icy and nerve wracking, but all in all it was pretty manageable. Both the kids did great too…born road trippers I’d say.

Hope you all had a nice holiday….talk to you soon.

Yes I know, it certainly has been awhile.
I suppose I could ramble out a handful of excuses, explanations, apologies. But truth be told I just sort of lost the ambition to keep writing up posts for a while there. I try to keep my extracurricular pursuits within the scope of my (limited) free time and (very limited) creative energy. For a long time, the blog was an enjoyable way to reflect on and distill my own thoughts, and it was therapeutic. When it started feeling like a job I figured it was time to take a break.

But, after a nice break and a number of requests (both subtle and otherwise), I feel like it might be the right time to start back up again. I won’t try and pick up where I left off…you can always check our photo page on Flickr and see all of our photos there.

We are busy with all kinds of stuff, primarily making the Oregonian transition from summer into winter via fall. Anna has started kindergarten and is really very much enjoying it.
She says she doesn’t like weekends anymore, and Monday is her favorite day of the week.
I expect she’ll grow out of it eventually.

Milo is also busy with all sorts of creative pursuits. He mostly loves playing music, drawing, painting, building stuff, and playing with his sister. He and Nicki do all sorts of fun stuff during the week, I couldn’t even begin to describe it all. He is still very much of a singular focus with regards to guitars, and we’re up to 4 guitars, 2 banjos, a ukulele, and 3 mandolins in regular rotation. We have taken to doing family sing-alongs at night before bed which have been a source of much entertainment.

Well, in the interest of restraint, I’ll sign off for now…stay tuned for (hopefully) more updates soon.
Hope you all are enjoying these last weeks of fall.

My mom and dad came to town for a week, which was great. The kids had fun as always having grandma and grandpa around in their boundless energy as playmates, park-walking partners, and bedtime story readers. Got one nice photo of my dad w/ Milo.

My dad and I tackled a few projects in the backyard. We replaced the crumbling, moss encrusted fiberglass patio cover on our back deck, which had been on the to-do list for quite a few summers. (Of course I only have a picture of dad doing the tear-off, no photos of the finished product…it came out really nice) We also whipped up a nice little chicken tractor for our new baby chickens (did I mention we got some new baby chickens? well, we did!). Managed to build up the frame with some old window frames we had taking up space in the garage, and designed the rest as we went. I still need to put a door on the front of the nestbox (and quick too, the baby chickens are growing rapidly, but more about them later).

Nicki took everyone to a tulip festival down south of town one day while I was at work and I think the kids had some fun, though I hear there may have been some napping issues and tired kids.

I had my 33rd birthday a couple of weeks ago, and couldn’t have asked for a nicer day. Had a nice leisurely morning, and then headed out for a hike in oaks bottom, a little wetland and forest kind of right in our neighborhood. It’s one of those places you go by so frequently that you feel like you know so you forget to stop once in a while and explore it a little bit. We had a really nice walk, found a little pond full of tadpoles, some little frogs, played hide and seek, and made a promise to come back with a picnic lunch and spend a whole day down there exploring some day. Our good pal Michael Hurley was in town and he came over for the afternoon and we spent the rest of a lazy spring afternoon playing music in the backyard. Milo and Anna joined in the fun too.

Then the following weekend we were out at the coast for the westwind music/dancing/campout get together we go to every year. I’ve written about it here each year, to the point where there doesn’t seem to be much else to say. It’s in a gorgeous spot right at the mouth of the Salmon River, south of Cascade Head. We had mostly rainy/overcast weather this year, but it didn’t really put much of a damper on anything. (I know I’m about to wear out this “film grain” setting on our camera, but I’m really liking some of the pictures we’ve been taking with it. It does some really interesting things with the light, and I think it does do a pretty good job of giving it a “film” quality).

Westwind was particularly fun this year if only to watch Milo go crazy for all the guitars, fiddles, banjos, mandolins, upright basses, accordions, etc. I brought along Anna’s guitar (which for now is Anna and Milo’s guitar until I get around to making one for him) and the mandolin I just finished and we did our best to get in on some of the little jams here and there. Milo’s always happy to sit and strum for a while.

Here’s one of the few photos I have of the baby chickens where you can actually see all three of them. There’s a barred rock (Kingston), a Rhode Island Red (Rosie Featherfly), and an Americauna (Amarillo). Ok…Amarillo was much yellower as a chick. I kind of hate to say it, but for some reason these chickens are way more of a handful than our last batch. They always seem wound up, and they squawk and dart away and try to escape whenever you need to pick them up. I don’t know if we were particularly lucky with the last batch, or particularly unlucky with this batch, or maybe these ones will mellow out with time. For now they are still living in the brooder in the house, but they should be ready to move outside into the tractor in a week or two.

Last week was Nicki’s birthday. 38! I took the day off from work and we made the most of a weird schedule day. Anna had school which kind of chopped the day in half. We did some fun stuff around town in the morning, but the best part of the day was when we picked up Anna and went out to Round Lake, north of Camas, WA for a hike. Both kids were pretty tired, and the whole hike was actually kind of a struggle until the end, but when we made it to the meadow of blooming camas lilies and wild onions, everything got better. Camas is a native lily around here, it was a food crop for native people hundreds of years ago, and was once so ubiquitous in the valleys that whole fields would bloom and it would look like a bright blue lake. There aren’t many places left where big fields of camas still bloom, and it’s always a treat to see. I’m just noticing that the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. Some things (most things I suppose) are best experienced first hand.

We also had mother’s day this past weekend, but don’t have any photos. It was a beautiful day and Nicki had gone to the coast for the weekend with some girlfriends. We made some brunch for when she got home, but it was late enough that it became dinner instead. We spent a little time in the yard, and then spent the evening with friends. Things seem to be starting to slow down a little now. The weather is getting nice here, and we’ve got some work to do in the garden before all the summer adventures begin.

Hope all is well w/ all of you.

We spent most of our first day at the zoo, which was great fun and also super tiring. It’s really a huge piece of property to cover, and we ended up criss-crossing it several times, taking different trails and side trails. Saw so many interesting things, but the major highlights for the kids were the pandas and the gorillas (especially the baby, Frank). They also have a really cool aerial tram which we ended up riding twice, and was pretty convenient for quickly getting from one end of the park to the next.

We don’t have many beach photos, but we did spend quite a bit of time hanging out on the beaches. The kids had a blast digging and playing in the sand, and it was usually pretty hard to get them going again once we settled in on the beach.

We were down there over Easter, and thankfully the easter bunny remembered to visit our hotel. We had a little easter egg/basket hunt in the morning, and the kids had some fun running around.

We went up to Pacific Beach later in the morning and went to an easter egg hunt they were having at the local community center. They had crafts and games and some of those inflatable bouncing things. They also had easter egg free-for-alls (by age class) where they scattered eggs in the football field and then turned the kids loose to grab as many as they could. Both kids had fun, though Milo was a bit scared of the giant easter bunny.

Next day we left San Diego, heading inland to the desert. Kids did great for most of the drive, but after about an hour of crazy winding mountain roads, Anna was starting to get a little car sick. We took some breaks along the way, and finally took refuge in the little town of Julian, California. It’s a cute little touristy town, mostly famous for its pies. Every single place in town makes pies. We walked around town a bit, then stopped in a cafe for some sandwiches. Of course we also had some pie. I got two pieces to share with everyone, but Milo wasn’t interested in sharing his piece. He was causing a major commotion in the place, so the waitress brought him a pickle (!?) to quiet him down. Milo likes pickles, and it did indeed quiet him down, but it didn’t make him any more willing to share the pie. We packed up and drove onto our destination…the Anza Borrego desert.

We were hoping our timing would be right to see the spring show of wildflowers in the desert, and we weren’t disappointed. There had been some rain and moderate temperatures, and the spring bloom had apparently gone on longer than normal.

We got in a couple really nice hikes.

We also got to experience first hand that 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit northern Mexico. That was interesting. It happened just as we were getting our bags unpacked in the hotel. The kids were running and jumping around on the ground and it felt like the floor was sagging between the joists. I was thinking to myself that I couldn’t believe how poorly constructed the building was, when I suddenly realized what was going on. The water was sloshing out of the swimming pool. We grabbed the kids and ran outside. It kind of shook me up for a little while, not having been in many earthquakes. You never quite settle down after that, wondering if that was just the little one before the big one. There were quite a few aftershocks, some really close to where we were, but nothing as big as that first one.

A few more photos from a hike we took, a couple miles up a canyon to a little grove of palm trees. Unbelievably beautiful.

Anna was pretty interested in taking pictures on this trip, so we turned her loose with the camera quite a few times. We ended up with a lot of pictures with a finger over part of the lens, but also some good ones. The self portrait of her shadow was particularly cool, if perhaps unintentional.

I took this picture on the last morning we were staying out in the desert. Anna was prone to waking up early, and not wanting to wake up everyone else, I would get myself dressed and we would go on a morning walk with the sun just coming up.

I had to put up a picture of the pool, because it was where Anna first learned to swim by herself! Anna has been very keen on swimming since getting into lessons, but hasn’t been big on putting her face in the water or holding her breath. We had been swimming every single day so far on the trip, but while we were there at that pool in the desert she figured something out. She’ll hold her breath, put her face in the water and push off from the stairs and paddle 4 or 5 feet out to you. And she’ll keep it up for hours if given half the chance. It was pretty exciting for everyone I think, but mostly super exciting for Anna.

We spent our last day on the beaches north of San Diego. We drove from the desert out to Encinitas, and then drove south along 101 to the Torrey Pines reserve just north of La Jolla. The wildflowers were again in full bloom, and the views from the bluff were incredible.

A few more photos from our hike at the Torrey Pines reserve.

We spent the night in La Jolla, and got up in the morning and spent our last few hours on the beach in the little cove there. It was the warmest, clearest day yet and we spent some time watching the pelicans and sea lions on the rocks, and wading in the ocean. Caught the airplane (or bearplane, as milo calls it) and made it back to Portland with no big to do. An unforgettable trip.

We had a beautiful couple of days this past weekend, so I took the chance to get a few photos out in the spring sunshine.

I really had fun working through this one. It was far more challenging than either of the guitars so far, and I learned quite a bit along the way.

I’ve been playing it quite a bit these past couple of weeks, trying to get my mandolin chops back in order after several years of neglect. It is sounding and playing great so far, which is a great motivator. The kids are liking it too, as it’s closer to their size so they can get their arms around it easier than the guitars.

It’s always a little bittersweet to finish up an instrument after having it on the bench for so long. I’ve got a couple new projects tumbling around in my mind, but only time will tell what the next creation to come up from out of the basement might be.

I think these photos are from early February at the rhododendron garden. We had a very mild February, lots of nice warm days and not much rain at all (which isn’t really a great thing, but in the moment, it’s pretty nice).

We spent a fun day sledding with Anna’s school at the Mazama Lodge up on Mt. Hood.

Nicki and the kids took a trip to Cincinnati, and Anna and Milo had a bunch of fun with their cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Milo and Nicki ended up getting some bad 24 hour stomach bugs, which kind of put a damper on the trip, but it sounded like all in all the kids had fun.

One Saturday morning after Anna’s swimming lesson we realized we had nothing really going on, so we decided to head out the coast for the day. We drove out to Lincoln City and just spent the day kicking around town and building sand castles on the beach. I discovered this kind of nifty “film grain”-esque setting on our camera and got some pretty nice photos.

There’s a little carousel in town and the kids really liked it.

Nicki has been pretty busy with futsal and outdoor soccer, and both teams have been doing really well. The futsal field is in the neighborhood, and the kids have had fun when we’ve been able to make it down to watch her play.

It’s always nice to get out for some early spring hikes to see the first leaves and flowers breaking out of their buds. These photos are from down in Tryon Creek State Park. The trilliums had already started blooming, and this was early March!

More spring hiking. Elowah Falls in the gorge.

I guess I’ll close it out on this note. I thought these were just too good to not post. Milo definitely appreciates a good laugh.

Hope you all enjoyed the photos…will do my best to keep posting a little more frequently, but with the springtime rapidly approaching I guess I can’t make any guarantees. Hope all is well with you wherever you might be.

First off this photo, which was actually from the last couple days of 2009. A forecasted rainstorm ended up turning to snow and dropped 6 inches or so of snow all over Portland right before rush hour. It caught everyone off guard, and the roads around Portland were in chaos. It was taking people 4 and 5 hours to drive across town. People were abandoning their cars on the interstate. A big delivery-type truck slid down a hill into our truck as Nicki was driving it home and she ended up having to walk to a friends place nearby. While all this was going on though, the kids and I were in the backyard having tons of fun. It was absolutely perfect snowball weather, and we put this huge snowman together in about 10 minutes.

A couple more nice pictures. We took a long hike down in Tryon Creek State Park to start the new year.

Here’s our latest fun inside activity. I’ve been running a microphone into my old amp and letting the kids go crazy with it. Sometimes I’ll plug the guitar in too, and we’ll sing some songs or just make noise. So far the most favorite activity is to run the microphone through the delay pedal for maximum echo and spacey weirdness.

Milo got his first haircut, and that was pretty fun and exciting for him. We have always taken Anna to the same place to get her haircut. It’s a nice place. Nothing super fancy, but always a pretty nice haircut for not too much money. Anna likes it because at the end of the haircut the woman brings out this box of spools of ribbon, all different colors, and ties bows in her hair. Naturally, Milo picked up on the fact that that was indeed the best part of the haircut, and he insisted that he get a bow also. I never did get to see him with the bow in, sadly, but was amazed when I got home how much older he suddenly looked. It didn’t really even seem like he had that much hair to cut, we were just planning on giving him a trim to even things out. Suddenly he looks like he’s 3 years old.

I finished Anna’s guitar a couple of weeks ago. That was big excitement for me (and Anna I think). I realized I’ve been working on it (on and off) for nearly 18 months. I think it came out looking and sounding pretty nice. I’ve had the strings on and off it a few times now, trying to dial in a good set up on it. It’s really going to be too big for her for a while, the neck profile isn’t actually all that much smaller than a standard guitar. She seems to like it though, maybe more so just for the fact that I made it for her and we’ve been talking abut it for so long. Here are a few pictures:

Hope all is well with all of you.