One Year & 4 Months - Post Lemtrada
February 22, 2021
We were frozen in the heart of Texas this week. Last year taught us to expect the unexpected and here we are again. I saw some of this coming; weather forecasters were predicting snow and the extreme cold temperatures for about a week. I had bought some extra groceries and planned to stay home and off the roads for a while but thought we would be thawed out and back to normal by Friday at the latest. The extreme-ness of this event caught me off guard. We were lucky to be on the same circuit as a nearby hospital so we had power and heat except for a few short outages on Friday but we had no water for a week. Even though we had power we were asked to conserve so we had our thermostats down to 65 and had been using as little electricity as possible. I'll say, we were very uncomfortable. My house was not built for that kind of cold so even though the thermostat said it was 65, it was not really 65 everywhere in the house, we were using pool water to flush our toilet, we were reheating food so we didn't dirty dishes (it was cereal, chili, chicken noodle soup and frozen pizza all week) and we had both of our outdoor spigots break so my water was turned off 24 hours before the neighborhood lost water pressure and turned back on 12 hours after we got it back. I say very uncomfortable because it was miserable but others had it much much worse. Some people had no power or heat for 4+ days and we were below freezing for 8 days in a row with lows in the single digits 2 nights in a row. I bought extra groceries and made a big pot of soup and a pot of chili before our water went out but I also had power so I didn't lose all the food in my freezer and I had a way to heat our food. I think it was a combination of the magnitude taking people by surprise and losing their food but there were huge lines just to get in grocery stores, shelves were bare and the roads were so bad (we don't have much to treat the roads or snow plows) that deliveries weren't coming in.
The schools were closed on Monday for President's day, on Sunday they announced school was going to be 100% online for the first part of the week. Once the snow storm hit and everyone lost power then water, the school district canceled school for the whole week. Over the weekend, they canceled classes today and tomorrow and will be 100% online the rest of the week because school buildings were damaged and so many families are trying to clean up and recover.
Events like this bring out the best in people looking out for each other but it spotlights the worst too. We were sitting in a cold dark house to save energy for our neighbors and the downtown areas of Houston and Austin were lit up like Vegas. The cities had to ask the DDA's to ask their "partners" to conserve. The cities had already asked people to conserve that should have been enough, they shouldn't have to make another special ask. As you can imagine, when pictures were posted on Twitter of all the lights people were livid. Over the weekend when it had warmed up but most people still didn't have water, many car washes thought it was a good time to reopen. Again, folks without water 🙋 were not too happy. Again, the city had to make a special request to something that should have obviously applied to them too. People were also reminded that Texas State Legislature had hearings on why the power grid failed after a winter storm 10 years ago and they allowed power plants to voluntarily winterize their equipment and here we are again. I am sure you've also heard about the insane electric bills some people are getting. Sorry about that lengthy discussion but that was a major event.
Since this ended up being long, I am going to leave it here and my next post will be health related.
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