"Friday Night (No) Lights"

shall i do a play by play or just give a brief synopsis of the events of friday night? hmmm.....
As you might be able to tell from the post title, we were with out power here late friday night into saturday morning. The power outage was due to the over and increased use of air conditioners in the 115-120 degree heat here in LA....especially here in the west valley.

We were cautioned on thursday by authorities for every one to cut down on power between the hours of 4pm and 6pm to conserve and avoid power outages. Surprisingly every one did so and there were no outages...The news reported that the Dpt of water & power was actually surprised, that the requests were met and the demands for power were kept low. Well, I guess the good people of LA thought the same request didn't apply for friday, an even HOTTER day. So, sure enough around 4:15pm.....CLICK.....everything goes out. the air shuts off...my studio goes silent right in the middle of work (for some reason, my expensive backup power unit failed to kick in). At first it wasn't a full power outage, it was a brown out...so a lot of electronics in the house were buzzing and clicking on half power. So we went around the house unplugging everything we could so nothing would get damaged. And if anything was going to get the little bit of power coming in, we wanted it to be the fridge.

So...being that i had plenty of work to get done...i was kinda ticked that I wouldnt be able to do so. So we sat and hung out and I said...look at the bright side...."it happened late in the day and it's only going to get cooler as the sun goes down". Boy was that a statement I wish i could take back. At the time of the outage it was 100 or so degrees outside. Thinking that opening any doors with in that first hour or two would let in the extreme heat...we opted to keep the doors closed and keep the cool air that was in the house, in as long as possible. Well...that didn't last too long AT ALL....before we knew it, it was getting pretty darn stuffy in the house. So we started opening all windows and doors....we wanted to make sure the boys had a cool room to sleep in that night. Preparing them for bed we just left them in their diapers...opened up their windows and hoped the 'not so hot breeze' that was outside would keep the house some what comfortable. Well shortly after laying them to sleep...the power went completely out, not that the little we had was usable anyway. Oh yeah, and that slight breeze i told you about...gone! We can tell the boys were not too comfortable because through out the early evening they were fussy and sweaty.....we felt horrible that we could do nothing, short of packing everything up and going to a motel. We thought, if we could get them to sleep, we could tough it out.

Tracy became concerned about the many many many ounces of frozen breast milk that sit in the freezer. So instead of wasting all that hard earned pumped gold...we decided to locate a freezer that was currently being powered. We called our friends Tim and Janet (who live in Burbank w/ power) told them our predicament and they were extremely kind to let us use their 2nd freezer, as a temporary home for the liquid gold, my boys call food. They were also kind and offered for us to sleep there, but i declined saying the boys were sleeping already, and if they can stick it out....so can we. At 8:45 I took off for burbank and was back in 40min to sit in the 90degree sauna we called home that night. We hung out for a little bit and i gave in and wanted to go to bed, just to take the heat off my mind, as I was growing more and more irritated with the situation. Since the windows were wide open in the boys room we thought it would be nice in this situation if one of us slept on the floor in the room with them. Tracy opted to do so. Lucky for her...it was the 'lesser of the hot rooms'. I on the other hand slept in the hotter room. Didn't get much sleep...either of us. Tracy, getting up frequently to nurse and console, me tossing, turning, sweating, tossing, sweating....and finally taking a cold shower at 12am to help...well it didn't help. IT WAS COMPLETELY UNBEARABLE!!!! I fell asleep chanting to myself "the power will be back on in the morning, the power will be back on in the morning" the good ol' "Secret" method...even though i don't buy that stuff...i figured, what the heck.

At 6:15 AM I woke up to the sound of birds chirping their melodies, christmas bells, and angels singing...or that's what the sound of electricity kicking back on sounded like to me at that point in time. I shot out of bed like it was christmas morning and I was 5 years old. turning on lights as if it was a miracle from the heavens. I checked the thermostat at which point I wondered why we were so hot during the evening....the temperature dropped all the way to a cool 86 degrees. HAH! well needless to say the A/C has been cranking all day and is still not down to 80 degrees and it is now 10pm on saturday. But it's a cool 80 as opposed to no A/C and it being a hot 100.
I told tracy if it happens again....we are finding a cool place to spend the day and evening. I will not subject the boys to something like this ever again if I can control it.

hot dogs

so where do they come from?

go vote...

for me photoblog :-)
If anyone could spare a moment, go rate my photoblog over at coolphotoblogs.com.
Now that I am maintaining a daily photoblog, I am doing what I can to drive traffic to it. So I started posting it on some photoblog community sites in order to amp up the visitors. The higher and more ratings I have the more chance people will visit.
The reason I'd like this to happen is, when other photographers (sometimes pros) who also have blogs visit other's sites the routine is to often leave comments pertaining to that daily photo. Comments can range from positive feedback to constructive criticism. So I figured in order for me to grow as a photographer, any and all input would be helpful.

Thanks everyone, and while you are there, check out some other blogs...there are some crazy good photographers out there, that are not even pros.

39. 52. 71. 93. 96. 126

Things I'm looking forward to....

39 days until the Clerkins arrive in California.

52 days until my brother arrives in California.

71 days until Kaeden & Quinton get dressed up for their first Halloween.

93 days until Thanksgiving, my second favorite holiday of the year. (Easter is my favorite for those wondering.)

96 days until we decorate our house for Christmas.

126 days until Kaeden & Quinton's first Christmas.

Importing CD's into my MAC(aroni)

For those that have been to our house you've seen our living room. In our living room is a shelf of nothing but CD's...and lots of them. Kevin and I are sick of this shelf...it looks sophmoric for our oh so mature lives that we're leading. :-) Kevin came up with a brainiac of an idea....import the CD's into our computers! Here I am thinking how easy it will be to import 867,423 CD's. Well, I started at 8pm .....9pm is approaching....so far I've only imported 8 CD's. I'm tired and the only thing running through my head at this very moment is a line from a book that Kaeden & Quinton like so much.... "the moon is high, the sea is deep, they rock and rock and rock to sleep."

photo blog

The more and more i photograph, the more and more I desire to hone my skills at it. Not only with the camera but also with the post processing of the images. So in order to share, what i think are some cool and interesting photos, I have started a photo blog. If you are interested, there will be a different image posted daily for viewing. Hopefully the photos can remain less mundane and a tad more interesting than the usual gallery of pics i slew around the intra web. This will also force me to pack my camera up and take it with me more often when I leave the house. Even though a certain some one thinks I do that too much already :-)

The blog's daily link will be posted in the right column here on this page under the title [gathering of pixels]. ENJOY and feel free to leave comments on each and any of the photos!

Lazy J.

Yesterday we ventured out to a new park, Lazy J. Ranch Park, in West Hills. We still have no idea why it is call such a name. It was one Tracy heard about through one of the mom groups she belongs to here in the valley. Considering how beautiful it was here yesterday, you would think the park would be filled with a decent amount of patrons...possibly one or two more than us. But nope....we had the entire park to ourselves. It wasn't a huge park...but was a nice quaint park nestled in a really nice neighborhood. We parked at the farther end of the park so we could have a nice walk, the length of the park, to the other side where the swings and playground were. Tracy was hoping the swing set would have a few swings for infants...sure enough it did. The boys are still a bit small to really enjoy the swings, but we threw 'em in anyway. Well, maybe placed them gently and safely in the swings. It was a good time. The boys seemed to really enjoy the spontaneous outing. I wonder if Daddy went with them to the park...? He isn't in any of the pictures.

More pics added to Misc Gallery

Misc. Pics

More pictures added to the miscellaneous gallery.