I knew 2021 wouldn’t be much better. 😂

So I live in Central Texas, which means my family got caught in the Icemageddon of February. The snowpocalypse. The Polar VorTexas. Mother nature’s Valentine to the Alamo.

Now, I know that odds are good that you live somewhere that regularly gets more snow than Texas. Which would be any place that gets any snow at all.  I know, Arizona, that ain’t you. I got you, boo.

It was super easy to kick us while we were down. Yes, Texans deserve to get poked fun at because we FREAK OUT when there’s a single snow flurry, we don’t know how to do literally anything when it gets colder than 50°, our schools close when the roads have a 3% possibility of having ice on them, and our cold tolerance is about that of Charizard.

But this once-in-a-century storm was no laughing matter. At one point it was colder in Texas than it was in Alaska. We’re about as prepared for that nonsense as Greenland is prepared for our 110° summers.

Actually, we get 100°+ regularly every summer, so this was more like a 120° freak storm hitting Greenland.

Snow is so rare in Texas that I’d only seen it twice in my entire life, and I’m 33. At neither occurrence did the snow actually stick to the ground. It was more like a 30-minute window of “OMW THERE ARE FLURRIES GO STICK YOUR TONGUE OUT” and that was it. No snow men and certainly no awkward angels or sledding.

As a result, many homes in Texas don’t even have fireplaces (our first home in the Dallas area didn’t, and they see colder temps up there than we do down here, closer to Austin). So it was all fun and games until the power grid took a Frostbolt to the face, because the only way that many people can get warm around here is by an electric heater.

So it was a little bit less like a haha fun snow day and more like a how am I going to keep from freezing to death in -2° with no way to heat my home day. In addition to no electricity, we also had no internet, cell phone service, running water, or clean water for the better part of a week.

I died. But I survived!

It really wasn’t so bad for my little family, actually, because I’m somewhat of a prepper. Not like a check-out-my-radiation-proof-bunker prepper. More like a level one let’s-keep-some-water-in-the-garage-and-firewood-on-hand prepper. Apparently that’s not a thing most people do. Dependent on modern conveniences much?

Thankfully we didn’t have any pipes burst like many did, including my daughter’s school which was closed for over a week. Thankfully we have a fireplace and didn’t have to evacuate like my grandparents did. Thankfully we had food, because the grocery store shelves quickly emptied and no new delivery trucks could arrive to resupply.

Texas doesn’t have a fleet of snowplows to clear the roads. So no one could drive anywhere for days without taking your own life in your hands (the 133-car pileup in Fort Worth was the most horrifying video I’d ever seen with cars and 18-wheelers slamming into each other one after another without the ability to stop), and emergency services were reporting large numbers of injuries from people trying to walk on frozen sidewalks to get to empty grocery stores. You’d be lucky if an ambulance could actually get to you.

Nor do Texans have clothes for snow and ice (unless they’ve vacationed in Colorado recently). Nor do we own snow shovels. Our homes and infrastructure are not designed to withstand less than 20 degree temperatures, especially for days at a time.

Roads? What road? I can’t even see the 3-foot slope at the end of our driveway.

We used that green tub to fill up with snow and ice. We had no running water so we needed it to flush our toilets. Ignore the upside-down trampoline my daughter uses as a “tent.” And the hole our dogs bashed in the fence so they could be friends with the dogs on the other side. 🤦

The first and only Texan snowman we’ll ever make!

My husband Keanan and our biggest icicle. Our icicles are normally 0.0-0.0001 inches long. Little did we know it would get even bigger as the days went on. I was so scared of it falling! The sound of huge chunks of snow and ice falling on the day of the thaw kept making me jump lol

And yeah, it only took one day to thaw all of this ridiculousness.

Crazy icicles on the fence at our family cattle ranch between Austin and Houston.

The ranch looks good in white! Somehow all of our cattle survived. My cowboy dad said they went into the woods and were just fine.

Photo credit: KXAN News, https://www.kxan.com/weather/live-blog-winter-storm-warning-continues-saturday-as-power-outages-icy-conditions-hit-central-texas/

My favorite pic! Photo credit: Marchele Tubbs, Dripping Springs, TX

Yeah, I live in Bastrop. Thankfully this wasn’t in my back yard. lol   Credit: KXAN.

Made some candles for when the sun went down. Had to use dirty knives to hold the wicks in place–we couldn’t wash our dishes without water. 🙁

My best decision for preparing for this craziness was buying a metal thing that could hold my Lodge cast iron skillet, griddle, and dutch oven over the fire. I made breakfast with scrambled eggs, bacon, and ham, Middle Eastern shish kebabs, chicken enchilada soup, and chili in our fireplace. There’s just something about cooking in cast iron that makes everything taste better. Yum!!

Is this straight out of Little House on the Prairie or what? We didn’t have a gas line in the fireplace so I had to tend the fire Boy Scout style and re-ignite it from the embers every morning. Because I gave some firewood to our neighbors, we ran out after three or four days. We searched everywhere for more but every place was sold out. I will never forget buying firewood from the back of a random hero’s truck in the Starbucks parking lot like a medieval redneck drug deal.

Read more at NotTheBee.com, a sister website of the satire site The Babylon Bee: https://notthebee.com/article/san-antonio-residents-strip-store-of-all-the-water-stacked-outside-while-it-was-closed-overnight-and-leave-behind-money-to-pay-for-it

Thanks so much to everyone who prayed for us during that crazy time! I made plenty of good memories and learned a lot.

Namely, not to depend on the government when the feces hits the oscillating device!