Welcome, friends, to my very own website, with my very own dot-com, free forever from hosting platforms. It feels like a brand new life, typing in this new font on this new background. Maybe I should be telling some crazy wild story, totally out of character for us, making you believe that we have changed and evolved into something completely different – kind of like when you get an extreme haircut and nobody recognizes you for a while. Alas, it is only me, only us, fully ourselves and barely different at all, unless you’re counting calories or gray hairs.

To clarify – I had to leave Blogger. It served me well for a lot of years, but that hosting site was wide-open, meaning there was lots of unpleasantness all over the place. (Think: ads and scammers and promoters and random visitors commenting ridiculousness.) It feels safer here, I guess, so I finally carved out thirty minutes of my life and made the export/import of the old stuff into the new space and paid a tiny little fee for the privilege of a domain that everyone can find. Everything’s here – all the stories and the photos and the crazy that I call my life. (At least, I hope everything made it. I haven’t pored over each post, or each word yet. I’m just trusting like that.)

Contrary to what my last post would tell you, waaaayyyyy back in May, I’ve been writing like crazy. Our summer was one gigantic ball of stressful awesomeness and I typically write to help manage that stress. Unfortunately, posting on the old blog was a definite no-go – so all those lovely posts are sitting in a draft folder, hoping to be resurrected one day in a fit of nostalgia. In the meantime, please enjoy this brief recap of some of the highlights.

In Which I Went Traveling: The travel industry might be the only reason I’m still functional as a human and that is not an exaggeration in the least. In the space of the last year, I took Emma to Nashville to see my brother and I took her to Spokane to watch Tyrell graduate from the SERE program. Both trips gave me a chance to bond with Emma on new levels, which I will treasure when she’s gone next year. We all went to Colorado again in what is becoming the best family tradition ever invented. I’m not sure why the Flavin family just flings open their doors, their refrigerator, their camper, or their lives for us, but they do and I can never repay them ever ever ever for what they’ve given us. I am the most myself in the mountains, and my kids are finding that peace too, asking every week if we can go back again. Erin, if you’re reading this, I wish I could live next door to you forever and have that easy friendship we have between us as part of my daily existence. Thank you, my friend, times a hundred thousand.

Finally, when I was filled to overflowing with family life and love, I got to escape to the great Minnesota North with Cyndi and Amber. I have lots of words and lots of feelings for them and for our adventures – all of which I am keeping to myself for the moment. I kind of understand that whole “what happens in Vegas” thing – except in our case none of us are doing anything immoral or illegal. It’s just that our adventures are ours; we are living in moments that can’t really be replicated, so if it just lives there, by itself, I can visit it when I need to and feel it, unchanged by the perceptions of others. We did, though, make a TikTok about it, which shall live in infamy.

In Which I Entered The Phase of Denial: Emma is graduating in May. (Insert moment of silence while we all take that in.) I’m not in a full-blown panic yet, but almost. We’ve taken some senior pictures – one batch in CO with Arie, and one batch in MN with Lindsey – and we’re digging our heels into the ground and holding on to every last second we can hold on to. When did she grow up? When?

In Which We Are Trying to Maintain Our Sanity: Speaking of graduation, Emma seems to feel that the perfect venue for that celebration is our backyard. This brings me to the Gudahl Family Stressor of the Year: The Remodel. Please know that I did NOT decide to remodel our house just because the oldest is graduating. This has been a six-year project that just happens to be finishing in 2022. Graduation is purely coincidental, though it is significantly increasing our urgency lately.

Back in 2015, we started on the inside, replacing every floor and painting every room, one at a time, piece by piece. It was easy to do a floor here, a floor there as time and funds permitted. But when it came to the outside, piece-at-a-time-remodeling is not a useful strategy. Every window (25 of them) had to be replaced. Every door (5 of them) had to be replaced. The roof had to be replaced, and the entire house had to be sided. We decided to do it all, in one fell swoop, and we have been in continuous remodel since June. It’s not all the way finished yet, but we can finally see the finish line.

Remodels are stressful. I’m barely alive.

So in addition to this new blog with this new look and its new domain, I’m living in a sort of new house with windows that open at will and seals that keep the northwest wind from whipping through the house. It’s going to be SO pretty when the yellow and brown concrete block is sided in Deep Ocean Blue. I’ll be sure to post pics when we’re done.