Hiking Chevelon Canyon with my bro...

Well, seeing that I've had such a prolonged absence from the blogging realm, I figured I might as well record a bit of what I've been up to. I haven't forgotten about "the list," and I still plan to finish it out. But in the meantime, I'll toss out a few posts to catch-up anybody who's still reading this weak-sauce blog.

A couple years ago, my brother, Dave, talked me into going into the northern Arizona wilderness to hike our little boots off. Over the course of two and half days, we did around 23 miles and probably a couple thousand feet of elevation change, most of it without trails (thank you GPS:). Oh yeah, and we almost died... (joke... kinda). But I was definitely starving and walking funny by the time we made it back to the truck.

This year we decided we'd head back to the same location, but we only had wife/child-clearance for one night (which was just right). So it was back to Chevelon Canyon on the Mogollon Rim, northeast of Payson. The below video is nothing special, but it shows the beautiful Arizona forests that exist less than a couple hours north of the barren desert of Phoenix.

Bamford Bros Hike Chevelon Canyon from Arizona Bam on Vimeo.

Proud daddy...

Tara just made a short video for her mom on her birthday...

Happy Birthday, Grandma! from Arizona Bam on Vimeo.

Needless to say, I'm a proud papa. :-]

Aesthetic Adjustments...

One of my biggest attractions to the Mac OS X experience is the overall aesthetic feel. It all just flows and renders so nicely. I've always liked all sorts of design, but haven't had much time to dig into it myself since I was a boy. But, I've got this blog, and I figured I should at least have some design-fun with it. So, I've been dinkin' around with different Blogger hacks that I learned at this site, and I decided to pop in an image-based header. It's kinda fun.

After taking a picture of my semi-hollow body guitar, I created the image within Seashore (a great open source image editor for Mac OS X), which has a very alluring pricetag ($free) for those of us who aren't talented enough to justify the cost of professional tools like Adobe's Creative Suite ($CHA-CHING$). I was also tipped off about Pixelmator (more like a $ch-:) by Matt, which I've been impressed with but haven't pulled the trigger on picking it up just yet.

Also, to round things out, I've added some albums that I'm currently listening to on the sidebar as well as a cool javascript element from LibraryThing below the albums. Plus, I threw in a random iSight picture of the fam, just because. Enjoy!

**Update**
I've also just added a "Recent Videos" sidebar element which dynamically pulls from our Vimeo account. After interacting with Vimeo for the past few months, I can't recommend it enough. The interface is clean and simple, and the whole site is just plain intuitive, in my opinion. Now that our video camcorder speaks to iMovie '08 natively, my export-resolutions and file sizes are much improved, so watch for more video output from the Bams in coming months;-).