What I have done today...

 ... At this moment, I'm standing at the kitchen counter waiting for my Instant Pot to come up to pressure. Because I'm boiling water! Yay! We're under a boil water notice! Freezes in a small town with old water infrastructure are SO MUCH FUN.

At least it's pretty out there!

This morning, I got up and got some breakfast for James so he could take his meds, then was headed out for a walk when I realized that both D's and James's cars were undriveable due to ice on the windshields. I came back in, got the keys, and went to work on both. D and James both worked today, but while I was scraping, D messaged me that their blood draw had been postponed as the lab was delaying opening for a few hours. 

I concentrated on James's vehicle, then moved it to the street so he could go down our walkway instead of having to walk all the way around the house. Problem there is that the walkway had refrozen overnight, but I did not have time to deal with it before James had to go, and told him to use his crutches in the grass. He made it!

D's car was stuck in the ice, a problem for later.

I managed to get in a pretty good walk. I had wanted to go down to the lake because there was a lot of steam rising off of the water, but I couldn't get down the hill safely. I did a big loop of the neighborhood, saw that D's work parking lot was like a skating rink, and came back home.

I made myself some breakfast and was finishing up when D was ready to go to work. I helped rock the car out of the rut and D was on their way.

We were running out of food and Mal was up and hungry, so I started using the three potatoes we had left to make him some oven fries. In the meantime, I used two heels of bread (the only white bread we had left) to make him some cinnamon toast.

D got off of work and headed into town to do labs, and I went outside to try to clear the walkway. Most of the ice was slushy, though some of it still needed a shovel to help it calve off. I spent about an hour banging ice with a shovel, getting up under large pieces and prying them up, and then using a push broom to move it into the grass. Good exercise, and I wasn't even a little bit cold!

The group that usually meets at the library on Tuesdays decided to have a virtual meetup because 1) the library was closed and 2) at least one person couldn't get out of their driveway yet because it's steep. Mal, Canyon, Blake, Kona, and Alota had a nice couple of hours hanging out online!

Leading up to this, Kona had quite the adventure: She'd gone to a friend's house for a sleepover Saturday night and couldn't leave Sunday because of the roads. Things thawed a bit yesterday afternoon, but her parents still couldn't come get her: parents live at the bottom of a big icy hill and friend lives at the top of a big, icy hill. This morning, everything had refrozen and the overnighter had turned into a three-nighter.

Fortunately, Kona's sister has a friend whose dad had realized that by letting some air out of the tires, he could get around in his big truck pretty well. He drove out to Kona's friend's house and waited for Kona at the bottom of the icy hill. Kona packed up her stuff and sledded down to him! 

Back to my day: it was time to start on dinner and, like I said, we had little food. I googled "pantry-friendly pasta sauce" and found this. As I was making it and had decided to do the whole "cook the pasta in the sauce" thing, I received the aforementioned boil water notice, so I spent about an hour boiling 6 gallons of water I had hoarded when I heard our water might be turned off completely. I used the induction burner and the Instant Pot, and can report that the burner wins the speed test on boiling a gallon of water by about 4 minutes.

Good news for Mal is that the boil order means no bath for him tonight (he likes to play in the tub, and I don't want him accidentally ingesting bacteria that might make him sick). They said not to even brush teeth with the tap water until further notice.

Mal spent a good deal of time today walking around the neighborhood, enjoying the last of the frozen stuff. He walked for quite a long time Sunday, to the point that I got in the car to go get him at one point, because he'd been out for almost an hour without checking in, when he'd been sure to pop in every half hour or so before that.

Yesterday, we'd tried to walk and realized it was a LOT worse, having melted and refrozen, so he had to stay in the yard all day Monday.

Today, he got to walk a bit more, and he wore his AirTag this time, in case I needed to verify his general vicinity.

James got home and had dinner, then we watched "Stumble" and are winding down. I'm hoping Mal's gym is open Thursday, because we're at risk of catching cabin fever over here.

The Lost Week

A week ago today, I started to write about Winter Storm Uri. I just couldn't get through it. I'm glad James beat me to the punch (apparently he finished his the day after I started, and I just haven't had the oomph to log back in until this morning). Now I don't have to. But I'll share a couple of things that I want to remember.

First, our neighbors were absolute heroes, and I've heard the same about neighborhoods across the state. My parents' friends who never lost power picked my parents up at the end of their first full day with no electricity, when the house had gotten down to about 50 degrees. Knowing that they were somewhere safe helped me be able to narrow my focus on our household.

For us, our next door neighbor was amazing. James mentioned that he gave us wood. The following morning, he was driving up and down the street with cut wood in the back of his truck, asking people with chimneys if they needed any wood. This was after I'd asked him, "Will you guys have enough to get you through this?" and he admitted, "I don't know. I can't really tell."

Also, Mal's friend's grandma, who lives a couple of streets over, saved our butts. James mentioned a plumber getting here on Sunday, February 21... but that wasn't the plumber I called on February 14. THAT plumber has not been out yet (today's the 27th). We'd be closing out two weeks without water if it weren't for this neighbor.

We'd gone on a walk last Saturday, and she mentioned that the builder who's bought several of her vacant lots and built houses on them was sending out his subcontractor plumber to check the new homes for leaks after the freeze. I wondered if he'd check our house. She texted the builder. The next morning, when I was at my parents', she asked me if I'd heard back from the builder because the plumber was in the neighborhood. I said I hadn't and that if I were home, I'd walk over and talk to him myself. 

She took it upon herself to put our name, phone number, and address on a card and take it to the neighbor's house. James explained the rest; while he was in the neighborhood, the guy came to our house and capped the leak, allowing us to turn the water back on.

We've been fortunate on many counts. Luck, having good neighbors, being part of the actual rolling blackouts (as opposed to many in Austin whose power was cut and left off for almost a whole week), having been prepared for no water, and being in a healthy household situation so that being even more isolated at home than Covid usual was tolerable.

But it was an intense week. The not knowing: how much longer will the power stay on? will our heater be able to keep up when the power is on? what damage is happening right now that we won't know about until later? will the forecast change for the better (or worse)? what will happen if we run out of food and drink that Mal likes (the rest of us could lump it, but he's a little... less stoic than the adults in the family)? is this still a rolling outage or did something else happen? 

I remember thinking, "We only THOUGHT that the lockdown was an intense change. This is out-of-body."

We did have some fun, though, and ultimately we're fine. Here are some pictures from the week.

After the first ice storm on Friday night/Saturday morning 2/13.

Monday, 2/15

The birds were prepared; fat and more than happy to have supplemental snacks.

A couple of sunny days were nice, even with highs in the teens.

Snow ice cream!

No electricity, but we had some battery-powered string lights from vacation.

We slept in front of the fire one night, then realized we were only having rolling blackouts and the bedroom, with its smaller size and lower ceiling, was warmer overall, with periodic power.

Tuesday, 2/16. Our walk to the park in the snow and sun made us sweaty!

Tuesday night; last night of rolling blackouts.

Then it just stayed cloudy and mostly under freezing for the next 3 days.

On Friday, I remembered that we had 40 gallons of water in the front and back yards! We could flush!