I sometimes think that I’m funnier than I actually am. When referring to something unlikely to happen, rather than saying that it will occur when hell freezes over, I jokingly replace hell with Texas, a hat-tip to the god-forsaken summer temperatures here. Har, har, right? Well, possibly a lot of really unlikely stuff is about to happen.

February started out innocuously enough. We quietly celebrated my birthday. There’s still not a lot of celebrating going on in general, but I baked a cake I’ve been wanting to try. Sean ordered us some fancy sushi takeout. The kids bought very thoughtful gifts for me. As pandemic birthdays go, it was just fine.

We were gearing up for our cool pseudo-camping trip at Lake Bastrop over Valentine’s Day weekend. We were renting airstream trailers complete with plumbing, heat, stovetop, a TV. The kids had Friday and Monday off school, so we were going to make a fun long weekend of it. As we watched the weather app on our phones predicting colder and colder temperatures, we kinda thought, “Well, at least we’ll have a warm trailer.” But through the week, precipitation warnings were becoming ever more alarming.

Then on Thursday the 11th, the freezing rain came. The trees were coated in a gorgeous, glistening layer of ice. We watched as the limbs on our trees sank slowly over the course of hours under the weight of that accumulating ice. Around 1:30 in the afternoon some of those drooping trees around the neighborhood must have finally gotten into the power lines. We lost power and were more off than on through the rest of the day. I remember thinking that we were like 9 or 10 hours without power, and that it was by far the longest outage we’d had since living in Texas. Around 10:00 that night, the tree limb hanging over our bedroom crashed down to our recently replaced roof. We were already in bed trying to stay warm in our power-free house. We later discovered that it appears to have caused little damage, but it was tough to relax again after it happened.

We were supposed to leave on Friday for our trip, but Friday morning, while Sean had no trouble driving around the city, the more out of town roads were treacherous. We made the decision to cancel YET ANOTHER TRIP. The kids were really torn up, and honestly, I was disappointed too. But a winter storm warning had been issued for the entire state of Texas. Really. It seemed foolhardy to attempt the trip.

Friday afternoon and Saturday were largely uneventful. We had intermittent power outages. The kids received valentines gifts from Grammy and Grandpa and from Lolli and Pop. Lolli, it turns out, has been filling her pandemic time with lots and lots (and lots) of crocheting. Over the past year, she’s made each of her four grandchildren a personalized blanket. Maya’s is green and blue and has a dragon on it. Ian’s is pink and purple and features unicorns! They are incredible.

On Saturday, the kids spent some time outside examining icicles and peeling vein-embossed ice layers from leaves. Another thing our Texas kids finally got to experience: ice-coated trees and icicles.

I apparently had some sense that things could get bad with the storm Sunday evening, though of course I had no way of knowing how bad. I managed to bake a heart-shaped pan of brownies for Valentines. I made a double-batch of Ian’s favorite butter chicken. I made sure Mom and Dad had a good stock of gin punch cooked up. Sunday long after the kids had gone to bed, we watched as the snow came down hard. Not the usual sputtering you see around here, but real, heavy snow. And from the cold temperatures the previous few days and the ice layer, the ground was good and cold, so that snow wasn’t going anywhere.

We woke up Monday to no power to the house, 5 degree temperatures, and a 6-8″ layer of beautiful, blinding-white snow covering everything. We checked the city’s outage map and discovered that the power had blinked out just before 2:00 a.m. and it stayed that way all day. We learned later in the day that this was part of the rolling blackouts that needed to occur to account for the state of Texas’s monumental, unprecedented power demand. Only one of our thermostats is battery-backed, and the lowest reading it registered that day was 58 degrees. It was definitely colder on the bedroom side of the house, but we had no good way of knowing how cold.

I joked that we were well prepared given all our canceled vacations this past year. Sean had bought a couple of backup batteries that we could use to recharge devices as needed during our Disney trip (March 2020, canceled – attempted reschedule for October 2020, also canceled). We had stocked the kids up with some extra thermal clothing layers for our Moab trip (December 2020, canceled). And we had just picked up from the grocery store a bunch of easy-prep and cold foods to take on our Lake Bastrop camping trip (February 2021, canceled). That first day, while we were cold, it could have been worse. We boiled water on our white gas backpacking stove for tea and hot chocolate. We had packets of cereal and pop tarts for breakfast. We had cold-cut and PBJ sandwiches for lunch and dinner. We had a couple of lanterns. Before it got dark, we had the kids pooling their resources and gathering flashlights and other illuminating devices.

At some point that evening, AISD had the good sense to cancel classes through Thursday. I don’t remember when, but they later extended that through Friday.

The other thing that helped us a lot during this mess is that we have done some backpacking trips in the past and have taken the kids camping a couple times. We had four good warm sleeping bags that we spread out on the beds and then topped with our normal blankets. The warmest we had been all day was snuggled up in those sleeping bags that night. In fact, it was almost sweaty-hot.

We woke up the next morning (Tuesday) to a power-free house. It was 7 degrees outside, having only gotten up to the teens at the high point the day before. The warm side of the house was at 51 degrees. We were supposed to have started back to work that day, but of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Sean’s management is in Texas and was in the same boat we were in. My management had been in our situation before and was likewise understanding. We were very fortunate to be able to focus only on keeping everyone safe and fed, and not have to be concerned with work and school.

On the previous Wednesday, we had gone around and made sure all our outdoor spigots were as insulated and covered as we could make them. We had been leaving the water trickling at taps throughout the house. We were lucky to never have lost our water and we don’t appear to have sustained any damage to our pipes. However, our water pressure had dropped considerably. One of our neighbors reported being without water entirely. Given all that, we filled all of our water bags (hooray, backpacking!) and a few random jugs with water, just in case.

We set up a card table in the garage so we’d have an easier time cooking with our camp stove. On one hand, we couldn’t use the electric garage door opener with no power, but on the other hand, the garage door wasn’t frozen shut, so score!

Then, at 11:08a, the power came back on! The thermostat on the cold side of the house sprang to life and reported a temperature of 47 degrees. We hustled to get all the devices and battery backups on chargers. We made a super-quick lunch of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese – ordinarily not my favorite thing ever, but it was hot and I had cooked it inside. No complaints here.

We let the kids bundle up and play out in the snow for a while, since the house was finally heating up. I had been apprehensive about letting them out the day before, because I didn’t figure we’d have any good way to warm them back up. Sean snuck outside and snapped a few photos of the yard before the kids went out so he could capture the unmarred snow. It’s a good thing too, because the kids seemed to be on a mission to cover the yard in footprints. I wished like crazy we had had sleds or toboggans. We watched some of the neighbor kids try to find good things to use as sleds. Apparently small inner tube shaped floats were a nope, but boogie boards were a yes. Alas, we had neither.

None of us believed that this power would last, and so we behaved exactly as if it wouldn’t. While the kids and Sean played in the front yard, I went in the back yard and cleared away enough snow so that I could 1 – get my grill out from under the awning so I could cook safely and 2 – so I could make some piles of seed for our starving birds along the rock wall in the back yard. We had so many bird visitors during this mess. (New birds at our feeders and water baths: robins, cedar waxwings, yellow rumped warblers, and pine siskins. There may have been more, but it was hard to tell.) I had been keeping the feeders full, but once the ice made that impossible, I had been making piles of seed on the ice. And once the snow made that impossible, I felt I needed to clear some of it out so we could keep them fed.

The power had been blipping on and off some, but it finally shut down for good around 2p. We have gas water heaters and the house had warmed up some, so Sean took the opportunity to hustle the kids through a hot bath both to warm them up and to get a few days worth of stink off them. The power did not come back on.

We wound up reheating butter chicken and rice on the camp stove for dinner, and it was glorious. Gin punch, by the way, tastes just as good cold as warm.

Maya is a wiggly sleeper and seemed to have had some trouble negotiating her sleeping bag on her big tall bed the night before, so for sleeping arrangements Tuesday night, we inflated one of our smaller mattresses and let her sleep on the floor in Ian’s room. It kept her from falling out of bed and they both enjoyed the slumber party novelty of it.

I woke up early on Wednesday to no power and a 53 degree house. I had brewed my normal 3-cup ration of tea the day before during our power up, so I drank cold tea and let my stiff body wake up a bit. I looked out to find that we had been blessed with a thick sheet of ice overnight. I didn’t go measure it, but it was at least 1/4 inch thick and looked well on its way to being a 1/2 inch thick. The beautiful fluffy snow became treacherous with that thick crust of ice, and there were even more tree branches sagging and broken. I wound up placing a second layer of bird seed on top of the ice on the rock wall. I had to hack away some of the ice in the back so I could safely cook with the grill.

I wasn’t sure how well the old charcoal kettle grill would work in the 20-something temperature. I loaded up my trusty chimney starter, and it wasn’t long at all before I had a good set of hot coals going. I managed to grill several sets of burgers (some for storage) and a pot of beans. I even had leftover heat to boil water for a nice cup of tea. I grilled Ian a couple hot dogs since he’s not a fan of burgers. Maya, staunchly refusing grilled food even during a days-long power outage, settled on another PB&J.

We spent the afternoon playing board games and card games with the kids, trying to conserve device battery life for after dark.

I had given up entirely on the power coming back on that day when at 5p, it came back on! We had our steps down pat at that point. Plug in devices. Cook up a fresh batch of gin punch. Cook a very truncated version of chili. Use the plug-in pump to inflate a second mattress. And then the power went down at 5:50. We were disappointed, but we had gotten a few good things done. It would have to work. We turned on our lantern and ate dinner in the semi-dark, appreciating the warm meal, but wishing the power had held out just a little longer.

After dinner, we moved down to what had become our standard huddle under the covers in the living room formation. We let the kids have their devices and we settled in to read. Then, like a gift, the power came on at 7 and stayed that way till bedtime.

After the second layer of ice had coated everything and broken a few large limbs in the back yard, we started worrying about the limb that hangs over Ian’s room. It looked ok, but we figured we’d err on the side of caution, and set out the two inflated mattresses in the living room and let the kids have their sleeping bag and blanket slumber party there.

At 9:15 that night, a city-wide boil water notice was issued; we received both text messages and phone calls about it. A treatment facility lost power for a while. Between that and water main breaks and leaks all over the city, reservoirs were more or less drained and there was concern over the quality of the remaining water. We wondered how we’d boil water if the power went off again.

Since we still had power when Sean and I went to bed, I figured there was half a chance I’d get to work the next day, so I set my alarm for 6:00, like normal. I was sad to find the next morning that the power was off again. Sigh. But then, around 6:20 it came back on! I puttered around the house for a bit just to see what would happen. It stayed on for a while, so I took a crack at working.

In between trying to dig myself out of my work backlog, I boiled water and made sure we had sanitizer in the bathrooms to use as needed. We used the water I had bottled up earlier in the week for drinking and used the boiled water for cleaning dishes and washing produce.

We discovered the day before that the refrigerator in our garage appeared to have shut down. Once the power had come on Wednesday night and stayed on for a while, I went ahead and relocated as much of the stuff from the garage freezer to the inside freezer as I could. I spent Thursday and Friday trying to cook through the rest.

Sean noticed some fallen branches in the middle of our street. We had initially assumed they were ours, but it turns out they had fallen from the neighbor’s trees. We took a crack at walking out to retrieve them, but it was way too slick on that hill, and the memory of my broken wrist was a little too fresh for me. Sean wound up strapping on crampons (hooray backpacking!) and walked out to move the branches from the road.

With the pandemic going on, we have been largely getting only curbside pickup for our groceries (supplemented with monthly in-person trips to Costco). We knew the temperatures were supposed to go up over the weekend, so we attempted to place a curbside grocery order on Sunday. There was nothing available, anywhere for a week or more. We were doing fine. We had proteins and grains and plenty of fresh fruit, but we were about to run out of kid-approved vegetables and a smattering of convenience foods.

Friday was hectic but ok. We felt we no longer had to worry about power. We had to boil our water, but at least it was still running. Our normal tree service managed to come out right away on Friday, and we were astonished and relieved to find out that they’d be able to come take down damaged limbs already on Monday. A lot of the ice melted from the street, but our driveway was still heavily coated in ice and snow. Sean dug a path out from behind the Prius so that if we would be able to get out and buy food if we needed to the next day. We had a freeze again overnight (27 degrees), hopefully our last for a while. AISD announced that schools would be off Monday and Tuesday of the following week so damage from the freeze could be assessed.

On Saturday, we finally turned off all our trickling taps. The temperature got up to 54 degrees. I took all the plants that had been living inside for a week and a half back out. Sean braved in-person grocery shopping at a couple stores and replenished our supplies.

The garage refrigerator managed to come back to life as well! It turns out that it’s equipped with a temperature sensor that tells it to shut off if the outside temperature is low enough. Unfortunately that sensor is calibrated for the refrigerator’s temperature, not the freezer’s, so that stuff started to thaw.

We reasoned that everything in the back yard had had a chance to thaw and no more limbs fell from the trees, so finally on Saturday night, we moved the kids back to their rooms.

It was 73 degrees on Sunday. Any remnants of snow and ice were gone, gone, gone. We were still boiling our water, but pressure was starting to return. It almost felt normal again.

Finally Monday around 3 in the afternoon the boil water notice was lifted for our particular area. The tree people did their work, finding extra stuff to trim out. They were meant to haul everything away, but hadn’t planned on the bulk from the extra broken limbs, so we will have a brush pile in our front yard till probably early April, whenever the city does their large brush pickup. By the following weekend, we had deemed it warm enough and safe enough for the kids to build their little spring gardens. We deemed ourselves mentally recuperated enough to have our bubble family friends over for dinner.

One thing that left me a bit speechless through all of this was how many people reached out to us and offered help. “You could come to our house and get warm.” “You could sleep at our house.” “We have a four wheel drive; is there anything we can bring you?” “Are you ok?” So many kindnesses. I’m happy our house held up as well as it did. I’m very happy we had that old, half-rotting tree removed last fall. I’m pleased that our kids weathered the inconveniences with a minimum of whining.

Now, back to our normal program of pandemic concern and vaccine tracking. In late February, Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use. It’s a single-dose vaccine that doesn’t have the same stringent refrigeration requirements that the two mRNA vaccines do. I have found myself frustrated at the slow roll-out process thus far, and I’m so hopeful that this changes things. Sean and I still aren’t in the groups that are currently prioritized to get the vaccines, and none of them are approved yet for the kids’ age group, so regardless, we probably have a while to wait.

Coronavirus numbers have been looking less terrible, probably now that we’re well past the holidays and are starting to see folks becoming fully vaccinated (7.2% as of 2/28 according to the data Google compiles). Travis County – 01/31 68,731 cases and 655 deaths – 02/28 75,636 cases and 743 deaths. Texas – 01/31 2,376,344 cases and 37,074 deaths – 02/28 2,653,013 cases and 43,697 deaths. United States – 01/31 26,185,357 cases and 441,319 deaths – 02/28 28,605,523 cases and 513,091 deaths. The World – 01/31 102,944,487 cases and 2,227,568 deaths – 02/28 114,065,230 cases and 2,530,712 deaths.