What a great title from The Onion since the local cable news channel and others always go overboard on this. When it snows here, I just feel dread due to the overreaction it receives. Plus it’s an excuse for some to shirk their obligations when they could just delay it by several hours because we received an afternoon of melting before it froze again; now it’s all gone.
The best news thus far is the pipes thawing when we got home from work. More than two days without water was rough and worrisome; the latter means we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop…did anything burst in the plumbing. I think we lucked out. No water was coming into the house which didn’t experience any heating or electrical problems (we somehow dodge the Perry-Corporate mandated rolling blackouts) the whole time so it probably froze outside. When I took a shower this morning, there was no drop in water pressure with the hot or cold sources. Again, it’s likely the infrastructure held. We will continue to keep an eye out for any puddles surfacing in the yard which I would prefer; anything inside would suck but we have a one-story house, everything comes up through the foundation, nothing is in the ceiling.
The evening we spent in the hotel was a little disappointing. I was too exhausted to enjoy the free wireless-Internet access (obviously from the lack of a post then) and I bordered on experiencing a relapse from the cold I just overcame last week; Somara is currently fighting it. The room being drier than the dessert didn’t help neither. I woke up from dehydration and dread (saw the snow at 3 AM) three times. Catching some Adult Swim and Adventure Time helped me sleep a tad.
Today, everything is 90 percent or more, back to normal. I’m quite glad. Some people asked, “Didn’t you move to Austin to get away from this weather?” I sure did. However, my rebuttal to their snide questioning is this, it does happen here once every few years but unlike where I’m from, it’s over in a day or two, it doesn’t linger until April which is the norm. Now will come all the ignorant statements regarding the “lie” of Climate Change. Weather ≠ Climate is my immediate retort.
As for the relapse, I think I shook it off. I couldn’t wait to get home after work yesterday. Every joint, especially my back, hurt like hell. I passed out on the couch within an hour of consuming some chicken and rice soup. This morning I was congested, a tad feverish but as long as I keep eating on schedule, I think Sunday will be productive and Monday puts me in the groove for the next week: ice skating, hockey games, writing, bookkeeping and clearing the Netflix queue.
One sad casualty was this poor lizard who froze to death on the west side of our house. I spotted it during a lunchtime inspection while the water crisis occupied my brain. It came right off as if it were made of plastic. I took him to work in a container hoping the warmth would revive the unfortunate creature since certain species of amphibians can survive such situations; they don’t experience cellular damage in the thawing process as humans do. A co-worker with a Biology degree told me about this. If NASA could figure out how these creatures do it, we’d have a long-term solution for inner- and interstellar travel. After 12 hours, the little thing didn’t budge so the cold snap preceding the snow killed it. I hope the poor cat howling on our back porch fared better.
If the lizard survived, I was going to turn it lose in the backyard.