Hello readers, what a wild summer we're having here. Well not in terms of fetish, but in terms of weather.

We're spending the summer in Texas, and with the kids out of school we haven't had the opportunity to shoot any new photos. We do had a backlog of photos from our May trip to Germany, and this week we post two galleries, Karada Lotus and Maid Service.

We haven't had enough privacy to shoot anything new, and we've spent the last two weeks doing ranch repairs from the massive flooding in the Texas Hill Country on June 27th. The counties upstream of us had 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain in 7 hours, causing the the river that borders our property to rise 40 feet (12 meters) in 4 hours, inundating more than half of our property, flattening much of our cattle fencing, and overflowing all the bridges in our area, converting our ranch to an "Island Property" for a half a day.

We were lucky, though. Our fence survived enough to keep the animals in place; none of our buildings were flooded, and our electricity stayed on. So we were able to weather the storm in comfort. This was a flash flood, meaning the water rose high and fast, but our roads survived and were passable later the same day.

Many of our neighbors were not so lucky. The Marble Falls community right next door lost public water for a week, and the Lake Travis area is still underwater two weeks later. Several people were killed trying to drive over flooded bridges and low-water crossings, and lots of houses and cars were washed away. We've only started to clean up our pasture, and so far we've found a TV set, a water heater, a refrigerator and a kitchen sink.

The most jarring thing has to be the media attention. On our drive to breakfast the next day, we passed three TV trucks just down the road from our house. For days afterwards the local stations showed video of our property whenever they ran stories about the flooding. There was even a shot of our place on the AP newswire, so the nationals showed the river overflowing our property. And you know you're in trouble when Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel is doing a live shot from your area.