Snowpocolypse 2021: Quarantine, but now add survival skills

It started with an ice storm on Valentine’s Day. 

It got super cold!

I made it for a last minute grocery pickup as it started.  There were icicles on the backup camera.

Patrick cooked us heart ribeyes, and Lexa made a chocolate cake. 

Apparently Hugh thought the ice looked good to eat.

This tree draped down to make a neat cave.

Frozen flag

Then the snow started. It was about a foot deep, more than I’ve ever experienced in Texas in my life. The kids bundled up and explored the winter wonderland everyday for a week. It was cold!

Lexa really likes finding big icicles.

The heavy ice tree hung way down over Patrick’s truck. Fortunately the branch didn’t break all the way through.

We had some long stretches without power up to about 8 hours. It got down to 50 F in the house. The kids were forbidden from opening the door or the refrigerator during them! I’m glad that Patrick had stocked up our pantry during the early days of the pandemic. Even when the power was on, you never knew if it would go off in the middle of cooking, so all the granola bars and protein shakes came in handy!

Will’s Headlamp that he loves to wear also came in handy! We never lost water, and no pipes broke. The first day we had the pantry door closed, and the washing machine pipe froze in there next to the door to the garage, but we were able to thaw it running one of our space heaters from cowboy town in there while the power was on. The only thing that broke was the garage door because parts of it had been glued instead of bolted together. We got that fixed after the storm. We were very lucky. A few blocks north of us in Leander had no water for days. Sara had no power at all for days and then had to boil water. That was something to not only be sequestered because of the pandemic but also to be iced in from even driving anywhere at all, and not having any warning about the electric grid’s fragility beforehand. We thought about taking the kids to the nearest little hill to slide down it on something, but it was all the down our street plus a little more and the sidewalks were so slippery, plus how and what would we bring to slide on, so we didn’t end up doing that. 

When the power was out for one of the longest stretches we put all of our food from our refrigerator in all of our ice chests out in the snow.

(Thinking of cowboy town, we were just lucky that we weren’t there for this with its complete lack of insulation and all of the pipes exposed! Our old neighbor from across the street there said power was out for days. )

Meanwhile, inside we played a lot of chess and made blanket forts. I read Enders Game to Timmy in the window light and then by flashlight. Will and Hugh slept in his tent in the living room because it was warmer. 

We had quite a lot of broken oak tree branches fall down. Then Patrick sawed off all the half broken ones.