We Survived! And in fact, we made it through barely unscathed when you consider the hardships that so many of our fellow Texans have endured during this last week.
If you have no idea of what I am referring to, I'm talking about the freak six inches of snow we received and the accompanying temps that dipped down to as low as 10 degrees, but mainly stayed around 28 degrees for the week.
You know, we often visit my daughter and her family up in Michigan, and we love the beauty of East Lansing, but we've said that the snow and cold weather is the thing that keeps us from ever considering it as a place to live. Unless, of course, I won the big Powerball and could afford to live in multiple homes. But to find ourselves looking at a snowed in driveway and my Alexa device reporting 10 degrees, in Lytle, TX? That is just Crazy!
I took this picture Monday morning, President's Day. We had no idea what was about to come.
On Monday, it was just really a nice snowy day and a chance for us to take some pictures of the property and for Eva to make a snowman or snowcouple.
She'll need to work on technique during the next big storm.
As we sat at home, warm and cozy, watching TV and hearing about people in San Antonio losing power, we wondered if our little outpost so far south of town would be spared from the rolling blackouts. Meanwhile, my son and his family were without power and my wife had urged them to come stay with us, but they just assumed the power would be on "soon".
This forecast was very, very inaccurate. The lows were much lower!
I can tell you this: There was zero chance that I'd be using the outdoor shower. And in fact, because I guess you are supposed to totally disconnect the shower hose from the heater when it gets really cold, the shower head froze right off! Oops.
Tuesday my son decided to bring his family to our house (wife, two kids, two dogs), and literally, as they pulled into the driveway, we lost power. But, we have a fireplace (wood). So, we got the fire going and set up a tailgating propane stove on the back patio and as it snowed, grilled dinner. The kids played games and between batteries and using the cars to charge phones and portable DVD players and such, everyone was occupied.
The power came back on for one full hour at 930PM which was perfect to get the kids ready for bed and everyone settled. The house didn't get fully warm, but once you are in bed, it is warm anyway.
So the power came back on at 0530 the next morning and we thought, okay, great, it is over. Nope. Thankfully, we got breakfast, warmed the house, showered and poof, back off at about 0930. We did not get electricity again until Thursday around 1100.
Meanwhile, the snow had stopped so my son, his wife and I drove to his house to grab his father-in-law's generator that was in his garage and grab some more supplies. His neighbor told him that they had had electricity overnight, but it was off again. But they had no water. We got the supplies, then headed back home, hooked up the generator and warmed up the house for the kids. We really didn't use the generator non-stop - one because it is loud, and two because we have the fireplace. But we did use it to make coffee and my wife hooked up a toaster oven and a skillet to it and made pancakes for the kids.

By Thursday morning, I was reading in the local news on my phone that most people were getting power back. I went online to the CPS Energy website and reported us as having an outage. In under an hour the CPS guys up and told me we had power. We walked out to the main breakers, and sure enough, the main breaker had tripped. My guess is, when the power came back on, we had too much going with the heater and the hot tub and everything else. So we did it to ourselves overnight. If I'm being honest, overnight is better than during the day.
We had a good laugh at our idiocy and lack of common sense but I posted a note to Nextdoor.com basically saying, don't be a dummy like me. Several people thanked me saying they had done the same thing, and later, I saw on the news that they were telling people to check their breakers, so at least I'm not the only idiot in Texas. Funny thing. My wife found a delayed text from a neighbor from 8:30 Wednesday evening asking us if we had power because they didn't see any lights at our house. Oh well. We are regular survivalists!
Finally, as we were getting back to normal, it started to snow again. But the power was good. With four adults and two grandkids, people were using the bathroom, taking showers doing laundry and all of the sudden, the shower filled with sewage. Our septic was backed up. I called a friend who is a plumber and he came by to auger it, and no luck. He suggested I call Roto Rooter since they have those camera systems. I did.
By the time they came out, my wife had run a load of hot laundry to clean towels that had been used to clean up the - uh dirty water - and magically, the shower drained. Seems the lines had frozen and the hot water cleared them.
When the Roto Rooter guy got here, he did the same thing my neighbor did and concluded, yea, lines were probably frozen. No charge. We haven't had a problem since.
I'm not gonna lie, we had a pretty hectic week, but by Thursday, we were through the thick of it, had power and water (and septic) and aside from the fact that we still have to boil the water (thank goodness for bottled water and Brita filters) we are good. I know this, we have been far more fortunate than so many people, simply because we didn't have pipes burst. I have countless co-workers that are in that situation and as you have no doubt seen on the news, getting a plumber out is tough, and getting pipe is tougher.
I know there is a lot of political fallout coming from all this. I'll pass on that discussion. But what I can say is that we witnessed first hand so many neighbors and strangers reaching out to help one another. A man who I just met a few weeks ago who owns the property down the street from us and hasn't yet built his house called me to ask how we were and asked if we needed anything. Can you imagine what a good neighbor this guy is going to be for years to come?
For every bad thing we saw on the news about the state agencies screwing things up, we saw local and commercial entities like HEB, our local grocery chain, and fast food places, and Tractor Supply and the hardware stores just pulling out all stops to get it done.
I went into the True Value hardware store in Castroville to buy some heavy duty extension cords for the generator. No power at all. A man guided me to another guy with a flashlight who guided me to the power cords. I found the ones I needed, he gave me a price, then I followed the lights back to the registers and paid with a card using someones card reader on their cell phone. People just making it work to keep Texans going.
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I'm sorry for the long delay between posts. I really enjoy writing about the things that happen out here and the work we put into this place. There is a never ending list of things that need to get done, but I can tell you, when the days begin to cool down, we really spend more time sitting in front of the TV.
I hope to post a drone video I took of the yard from the first day it snowed. We'll see how the Internet holds out! UPDATE: You can see the video by clicking here.