So if you’ve noticed that I’ve been pretty MIA within the last 24-48 hours, it’s because of the craziness that’s ambushed the Varland house! On my way back home from photographing 2 week old Malachi (who, by the way, is so stinking cute it’s ridiculous…), I found myself driving through the worst thunderstorm ever… I’m not kidding when I say that I thought the hail was going to break through the windows of our van! All I wanted to do was pull into our nice, safe, dry garage and be with my kids.

Unfortunately, that was not in the cards. As I made my way into our subdivision, I was greeted by a flood of water up to people’s knees!!! So of course, I had to turn around… only to find the other entrance of our subdivision gushing water. Forlorn and pretty freaked out, I drove to the nearest parking lot and called home. First thing’s first – the kids were totally safe and not at all freaked out. Our house… not so much. I called only to find out that our basement had water starting to spread over about half of the floor coming from a leaking pipe! Thank God for my amazing family that ran downstairs to save our stuff!!!

After making it home once the waters subsided, cleaning up what we could of the basement, sitting down to dinner, and finally sitting down at the computer to finish blogging the fabulous (and patient!) Jamie and Andy… I discovered that my beloved iMac’s hard drive had failed. HUGE bummer!!! To make a long story short, Toby proved himself to be a master computer surgeon (not that I had any doubts). He (with a little help from me ) took apart the iMac, replaced the hard drive, restored everything, and allowed me to go back to my normal heart rate…

So… despite the craziness of the last 24-48 hours, we are relatively back to normal! Toby and I will be gone shooting the entire weekend, but we’ll be back Monday to answer your emails and phone calls! For now, I’ll leave you with a couple shots of the iMac surgery! I’d love to include a picture of the golf ball sized hail, but by the time things slowed down enough to take a picture, our cameras were already packed for this weekend! Maybe sometime this week!

Thanks to all of our fabulous clients for your patience. And thanks to our amazing family for all of your much-needed help! We are so blessed!!!

- Annie

Toby after removing the glass from our iMac with two suction cups from our GPS:

Reading the online tutorial for how to take the iMac apart… I love that Toby’s a nerd. It’s so cute.

Beginning to disassemble…

Without the LCD:

Removing the dead hard drive:


I’m always amazed at how many tiny parts make up the inside of computers.

Our iMac without the hard drive:

Thankfully, the surgery was a success!!!