Wind and what not

I have many excuses for my silence...
1) I am in the midst of an intense freelance project that takes up all free time
2) on top of that I have photoshoots every weekend in December
3) I have two other jobs besides these
4) I have a baby, who kinda likes to hang out with me
4) we had a crazy windstorm that knocked out our power for almost a week. A WEEK.

Well, I'd hate to exaggerate. We didn't have power from Wednesday night till Saturday morning. And for a few glorious hours we had power on Saturday until... there was a loud HMMM then POP and the lights went out. When they came back on, only a few worked. Turned out we had "low voltage," which I had never heard of. So, our large appliances: heater, stove, computer, etc didn't work, but a few lights in a few outlets worked.  That lasted from Saturday till Tuesday night when a neighbor got really motivated and drove around to find Edison guys to get them to come look at our street. Last night they came out to fix it, and after four hours of work, one fireworks show that almost caught our house on fire (which supposedly caused our neighbors dishwasher to explode, it was intense, folks) we finally had power! And it was glorious. We did a little dance, and shed a tear of gratefulness. These Edison guys said they are working 24 hour shifts (8 hours off, 24 on) trying to restore people's power - which, by the way, there are still about 6,000 households that don't have power a week later- I feel for you.

Besides power, our area lost lots of big beautiful trees. The 100mph winds snapped and uprooted trees everywhere. It was surreal driving around. I snapped a few iphone pics.

We saw too many smashed cars, feel terrible for the owners!

the drive the work the next morning lead to many, many dead ends

this is our neighbors house across the street, their house is behind/under the tree