The Most Important Meal Of The Day & Yet Another Reason to Back Up Your Data

If you know my work and teaching, you’ve often heard me paraphrase one of my favorite photographers Diane Arbus, “the more personal you make it, the more universal it becomes”.

We all understand the human experience and I’ve lived long enough to know that both good things and bad things can happen to good people.

Every August my wife and I travel to beautiful Vancouver, her childhood home where her family still resides and a place I love. This year we had a very successful Vancouver Street Photographer’s Workshop. But we also experienced a close call.

If you read my “Paranoid About Back-Ups” post on this site, you know that I like to have redundant back-ups…just in case. My paranoia was warranted last Saturday, and I’ll leave it to the picture below to add another thousand words.

Nobody was home. But that was sheer luck because we gathered the family and went for breakfast at a local IHOP, my new favorite restaurant. The part of the story that is unusual for us is my wife’s mom rarely goes to restaurants and wanted to stay home with the baby while we went for brunch with friends. She had actually had breakfast, but decided to come.

Here’s a couple of thousand words to describe the before and after of the room we feed, change and play with our 8-month-old son, Sawyer. It is the room where we eat and talk politics and generally hang out when home. Most scarily, it is the likely place we would have been when a freak windstorm with 90km gusts passed through Vancouver and blew over this majestic old-growth tree form the neighbor’s backyard.

When the tree fell and the damage was done, Sawyer and the gang were all pondering what to order for breakfast.

Though the house might be a total write-off, we all consider ourselves very lucky and protected by a guardian angel who likes pancakes.

And, oh yeah, the back-up your data part. Fortunately for my work, my computer which was left on the dining room table was not damaged. But then I looked for my LaCie 4TB Rugged Hard Drive. Through the debris I saw its familiar orange thunderbolt-connector and snapped this photo with my iPhone.