The third week of February a snow storm and cold front basically shut down Texas. In the middle of the previous week temperatures started cooling down, and were freezing by Friday. Snow was predicted to start on Saturday afternoon (although it ended up being overnight.) Schools anticipated teaching virtually that week. (Maybe naively? No one realized how crazy it was about to get.)
It's unusual to have more than a day of freezing temperatures, so it never occurred to me (or most people) to prep for winter. In fact, two weeks before I was filling up the water table outside with the hose. So I had to hurry and unscrew all the hoses and get Styrofoam covers for the faucets.
The first 'storm' wasn't terrible-- just regular snow fall. Sunday morning we had a light dusting of snow, but it continued throughout the day and we ended up with about 3". (Obviously church was cancelled, even before the snow started falling.) Over the weekend we had the mattress topper in the family room. The kids had a sleepover and we watched shows on it.
[I should mention we had ice the previous Thursday, which froze, and they cancelled work for Hyrum. There was an awful accident on one of the highways that morning between Dallas and Fort Worth that still give me nightmares just thinking about it. There were about 100 cars involved over several miles, leaving 6 people dead. Surprisingly it wasn't more. There was a cell-phone video of a semi truck headed straight towards it but he couldn't slow down. Oh man!)
On Sunday and Monday I had terrible anxiety about pipes freezing. I didn't actually know where our water shut off valves were, and kept asking friends about their situations and what they were doing. (In short, no one was doing anything.) Several neighbors had frozen pipes. We were dripping water all week, and fortunately have most of our water sources on the house's interior. On Monday I finally called Matt and got some more educated information. But it didn't resolve my anxiety, only made it worse. He basically told me we were all screwed. But he was helpful, and told us to shut off our external water meter, which we have to do at the street because I'm pretty sure there isn't a secondary valve. (We even contacted the landlord, who was completely unhelpful.) We borrowed the tool we needed from a neighbor and shut it off. After that, I was much less anxious, because even if something broke we wouldn't have water everywhere. (I am pretty sure I know where our inside shut-off valve is.) I also found out we are one of the only houses in our neighborhood with two separate water meters, which explained why no one else was turning theirs off.
So instead of waking up at 2 am and laying in bed listening to every little house noise for two hours, completely alert, I got a little better sleep as the week progressed. It was like we did what we could and it was out of our hands.
Starting early Monday morning a LOT of people lost electricity throughout the state. In short, Texas has its own power grid. They didn't plan for so many cold days and were short on electricity, compounded by the fact that gas lines froze, solar sources were obviously not generating electricity, and wind turbines were frozen. They said they'd be doing rolling outages, but by the end of Monday they said if your electricity was out, plan on it being out for a long time. (It ended up being until Thursday, which was sooner than I thought it would be.) But that's a long time to be without electricity when it was only a few degrees at night. Our power never went out. No idea why. Some people had rolling outages, but for most it was either on, or off. Very unfortunate!
Gloria, a man in our ward, was without electricity and ended up at our house. He basically camped in the living room. Enzo gets along well with him, which was fun to watch. We were grateful he was able to entertain himself (mostly on his computer, or talking on the phone in french) but after several days it felt a little cramped because the kids were not using the family room at all.
Despite Hyrum having the entire week off work, it was stressful and we did absolutely nothing productive. It seemed like a missed opportunity, but in a sense also just felt like survival. I was so looking forwards to Saturday when the temperature was supposed to FINALLY get above freezing.
The kids enjoyed the snow a little. The first day, friends were all outside playing in it. Then people were mostly just cold. I was able to bring some warm food to a family down the street without power. We went sledding one day, and nearly froze our butts off. We obviously don't have sleds, and just grabbed whatever we could find -- cookie sheets and storage containers.
Friday afternoon the sun came out and things started to melt. It was like a faucet was on with everything dripping.
(It was bizarre, because the snow came on Sunday, and just sat. Everyone was asked to stay at home because there's no infrastructure for clearing snow. Our street was completely snowed over until Saturday. The main roads got ice, but the city was basically on pause during the whole freeze.)
Saturday the roads were all clear, and everything was wet. It felt glorious to go outside and see things come back to life. We ended up without pipe damage. Hallelujah. Several neighbors had frozen pipes, and I saw an insurance person surveying the house next door so they must have had some damage inside.
By the beginning of the next week we were at the park with weather in the 70's. Texas is so strange.
They said this is a once-in-a-lifetime storm. They haven't had weather this cold in over 30 years. Not glad we were here for it.
The bad aftermath for us was the inability to find milk! I fortunately bought groceries on Saturday before snow started, but 8 days later we needed more milk. My walmart pickup order was cancelled, so I went to the stores looking for milk. Aldi was out. Target was out. I finally went inside walmart and found a few gallons left, thank goodness. No eggs, no meat. Very empty shelves. It took several days for food to get back to normal.
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