My new website

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to say that I finally got a chance to work on my own personal website. It's mostly finished, and set to host my photography. It's been hand-coded in PHP and although most of the cool stuff is on the back end, it promises to be pretty cool.

I still have some work to do but for now, the home page shows a random assortment of 6 (out of 13) photos of Sage's birthday party. Hit the 'refresh' or 'reload' button on your browser to load some others.

www.ChristopherJMcDowell.com

It will be refined over the next couple of days. Later!
-Chris

More Photos

Here are some photos from Yosemite, when Amy's friend Jessica and her fiance Peter came to visit for a bit. We climbed 1,000 feet to the top of Vernal Falls and Chris almost died in the process.

Here is a photo from when we were moving. And yes, that's a (nother) brush fire, that broke out about a half mile behind our house a few days before we left. It was put out within a few hours though, unlike some of the others which have raged for a week or more.
And finally, photos from our anniversary trip to the coast. We stayed in an airport area hotel (so was able to take a ride around the airport on their train and get a cool photo), then we drove down the coast all the way to Santa Cruz, where we saw the shut-for-the-season boardwalk amusement park.

(can you say 11 pounds of hand picked organic strawberries?)

New Pics!

Mommy here. Here are some new Sage photos for you all.

From an oh-so-rare rainstorm. He was shivering like crazy after about 10 minutes, but it was really, really hard to get him to come in! I think we ended up bribing him with chocolate.

A trip to Bass Lake and boating with Grandma and Grandpa.

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One of Sage's famous matchbox car convoys.

On Daddy's birthday we rode the train from Fresno to Hanford (about a 30 minute ride). Sage had lots of fun!

Hugging a Hanford palm tree.

What an exhausting day!

Until next time!

Finally some new photos

Hi folks,

After a long absence, here we are with some more photos. We took surprisingly few photos over the winter, but now that it's warmer we've been taking more.

Here is Sage in his winter gear going to Oakhurst Park:





And here is Sage at Donna's arena:





Whoops! Ran out of energy.

Now we've moved into our new house.


At the Easter Egg hunt in Oakhurst:

Got warm in a hurry!


From Dad's trip:

On the steam train in Jamestown, CA


At Ironstone Vinyard:


Poof, out again:



At Bass Lake:



A few shots at the end of the trip:



That's all for now!

Here comes a Christmas Present

Well, it's been awhile - but finally here are some pictures of Sage & Company from Toronto, Halloween and Sage's 2nd birthday. It's been a busy 3 months for all of us, and are looking forward to getting some rest in after the holidays!

Enough yammering, on with the photos!

Just about to leave for San Francisco for the flight to Toronto - let's get this show on the road!
Sage & Gram

Bird bath!

Whee!
Thanks for the lift!

Chris & Sage by Lake Scugog, Port Perry

Sage & Pappy

Great view from the train!

Splashy splashy

Leaf fans!!!

Upsie Daisy

Party time!

Sage with his great-grandma & grandpa

Whadda ya looking at?

Sage & John playing the drums

Sage hiking

Chris, Grandma & Grandpa

Our ride home from Chicago to San Francisco

Sage and a giant dog - no matter what we told him, he kept calling the dog 'horsey'

Amy, Sage, and San Francisco's 'painted ladies'

2 shots from Las Vegas

Amy & Sage at Bass Lake

Sage & Chris & Bass Lake

Halloween - Scary monster!!!!

Sage & Mommy

Sage & Daddy

Up visiting Amy's Grandfather & Aunt in Walker, CA - Sage & Oscar ('Oxer')

Just after falling over

Amy along the edge of the Walker Valley

Amy & Sage exploring the Bodie ghost town

Sage's 2nd birthday - Sage after some chocolate birthday cake

Sage getting yet more cars!

Some more presents for Sage

What's in this one?

Sage at his cousin's birthday party at an inflatable funhouse

He was enjoying himself!

Merry Christmas everybody!

Ultra-Photo Blog

We're sorry about the loooooong delay in updating the blog, but life has been pretty crazy for all of us lately. Chris is working long days, plus has about 5 freelance projects in the works. Amy is working part-time for an online tutoring service and working on her masters degree via a correspondence course, and we are finding it takes more and more energy to keep up with the mini tornado, who turned 21 months old yesterday!

So here are some pictures for you from the last several weeks. Hope you enjoy them!

The first group of pictures is from a trip we took to Oregon at the end of July. We drove the whopping 14 hours each way, but it was a lot of fun! We got to escape the horrible heat we've had here all summer, and the beaches in Oregon are so clean and beautiful!

We couldn't keep Sage from scaling rocks and hills any chance he got! This kid has feet of leather!

Left to right: Irie, Chivonne, Adam, Azriel, Amy, Sage, Chris

This was the first time we've gotten to spend time with Amy's brother and family that Sage has been able to keep up with his cousins. He had a ball!

Amy made home-made faux-stess cupcakes for Chris's birthday. Man were they complicated, but they tasted fantastic!

Sage helped. :)

Donna and Terry took us to Old Sacramento and boating on the Sacramento River Delta for Chris's birthday. It was great! Here is Sage with 'Amma in Old Sac.

All tuckered out from the exciting weekend and the long drive home.

Stay tuned for pictures from a super-fun trip to Vegas scheduled the weekend after next! Chris will be photoshopping it for four days, and Las Vegas has one of the largest children's museums in the country, so Amy and Sage should have something to do, too! Then the weekend after that...well, we're going somewhere. ;-)

Lots of love!

Chris, Amy & Sage

More of the same...

Here are some more photos for you. Enjoy!

Sage noticed a kitten sitting in his cart and had to go push it around. Just so you know, this scene lasted an entire 2/5 of a second. Good thing I was ready!

Upside down!!!!!!

(Amy took this one)

Just 5 Pictures

Here are 5 photos taken in the past little while - 3 of Sage, 1 of a mountain meadow on an afternoon drive up into the High Country above Bass Lake, and one of one of our kittens (aptly named White Shoulders)

I've been thinking that it's time to create something of a photo gallery for myself - so I'm going to start throwing together some PHP code to make it happen. I'll let you know when I get anywhere.

Update

In the last post, we mentioned that we were going to wait until we had an offer accepted before posting our plans. Seems we should have listened to logic. The land was listed at $91,000 - we offered $80,000, expecting to settle somewhere around $85,000 which was what we had in the budget for the land. The offer also required detailed info on the feasibility and cost of a septic system - we had budgeted $6,000, as originally stated by the seller. The counter offer was $91,000, with no given information about the septic. We did hear from our contractor that the septic options were so limited on that property that an engineered septic would likely be the only feasible option - at a cost of at least $30,000. So with the additional cost of the land + the additional cost of the septic totalling at least $30,000, we just can't make it work.

So that is where we stand - it was certainly a nice dream while it lasted.

Big Big News!

For the last couple of months we have been looking into buying some property and building a very unique type of house. Well, we've found our property, we've found our house, we've gotten pre-approved for a construction loan. And tomorrow we're putting in an offer (cross your fingers)! We were going to wait until we had an offer accepted before posting this, but we couldn't wait...and we've had a couple of desperate pleas for pictures. So here we go:

View of the building pad from the driveway

Looking down the driveway

The building pad from up on the hill, and a peek at our view

Just think: in a few months time you could be sitting on our deck looking at this view! Go make those airline reservations now!

Sun goes down, lights come on in the Central Valley.

We are getting a yurt! This is a custom-designed, wood-paneled, eco-friendly round house. It's built in pieces in Oregon and shipped to us on a semi truck, then we assemble it ourselves (with a little help from friends and family)! The company is Oregon Yurtworks

We're going pretty simple to begin with and getting a single-story, 31-ft diameter yurt. It will have an open-concept kitchen/living/dining room, a bathroom, bedroom, and loft. With the loft it will be about 1000 square feet.

This is what a wood-paneled yurt looks like from the outside:


And a couple interior shots:




Right now we're working on a website for Oregon Yurtworks to help us design our house. It will have all kinds of pictures and plans and details. We'll let you all know when it's up. Until then, wish us luck!

P.S. We realize you've had NO new pictures of Sage in months. We're very sorry about this. We've been very busy. So here are a couple to tide you over and we will post more when we get the chance.

Happy Spring, Everyone!

Lots goin' on with the Sage-Man these past couple months. After taking a very, shall we say, casual attitude toward the idea of walking, he started taking steps at about 15 1/2 months. Now he's all but given up crawling for the unique thrill of perambulation. But you all come here to see pictures, right? Here ya go!

At the beginning of February we had a spot of very nice weather and so we took Sage to Woodward Park in Fresno.

A couple weeks later the weather turned decidedly different!

Sage has gotten quite adept at building towers! And yes, it was him who put that hippo on top.

With cousins Azriel and Irie at the Chaffee Zoo.

Sage started playing peek-a-boo with the shower curtain during his bath last night, so mommy called to daddy to grab his camera and we ended up with a great bathtime photo shoot!

Aaaah! The joys of naked time!

Video of Sage standing and walking

Well, after seeing the photo of him standing, you must have known this was coming...

http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h118/chrisnamers/?action=view&current=walking.flv

Click on the link above to load a video of Sage standing and taking a trippy stroll around out messy house. Before today, he hasn't taken more than a step, but he just went crazy walky today. Enjoy!

By the way, because I know people will ask, our kitchen chairs are turned upside down because Sage has the tendency to climb on them and then the kitchen table with hilarious results. So hilarious that we turned the chairs upside down. No one told me that about parenting! Nor did anyone tell me that if toilet paper was left on the rolls, it would soon ALL end up on the floor in a big pile.