OMG, Texas

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UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that squarespace published this well before I was done writing it, and also 12 hours (as of right now) before it was scheduled to go live. If you read this before 10:30 on 20 February, it wasn’t done. IDK what is going on here!

To begin, I want to thank those of you who emailed to check on me, or sent well wishes through Sabrina and others. It means a lot. <3

So… I have a lot to say, most of which I’m not gonna say because I make it a point not to swear in work literature. What I am going to say, though, is that this is not how I would’ve liked to see Texas prove it can do everything bigger and better than any other state to… well, the entire world I guess. I’m also not going to talk about why the Texas grid failed, because if you still aren’t sure you can read about it in this comprehensive post from the fine, fine people at Space City Weather. They are a true Texas treasure. I have one of their fundraiser t-shirts and I love it.

My SCW shirt says Texas stands in solidarity with Louisiana, and that is generally the case where it comes to natural disasters. I understand there are variances here when it comes to sports, but I don’t care about sports. Louisiana got hit hard, too, and I really spent a lot of time worried about my friend Simone over there because she spent the entire storm at the hospital she works at (no relief came for her or the other doctor in her unit), where they didn’t have cool stuff like water or food the whole time. I want to remind people that other states got hit, they simply didn’t have the extra suck of widespread blackouts. My people in New Mexico and Oklahoma seemed to all fare well.

My power was out for the majority of the time from around 2am Sunday night/Monday morning until 1:30am Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I probably really lost power at 1:30 Monday morning, based on Centerpoint Power reports. We had 2 periods of power in that period, which realistically means we were much luckier than most people who didn’t get those breaks so they could charge things and reheat their homes a bit. We also maintained water and good water pressure throughout this experience. Again, we were lucky. Almost everyone I knew in Texas, no matter the city they’re in, lost their water or lost enough pressure that they may as well not have water. Ditto most people I knew with their electricity.

I probably won’t really do much by way of pictures, because that feels like a lot to do and I’m exhausted. I took advantage of this situation in the form of naps, and I’m still exhausted. I assume it’s simply due to processing the enormity of this.

This part cannot be overstated

My family was inconvenienced. We did not suffer, unlike millions of others in the state.

It’s critically important that everyone recognize that the perspective I’m offering is very different from those others hold, and that my views are not representative of most people’s views. Most people impacted by the Texas situation did suffer. Only one person I talked to who lost services was inconvenienced like I was. Everyone else did suffer to some degree.

Why we didn’t suffer

We didn’t suffer because I was prepared years before this storm hit, including training for having no heat in Houston. That, and the massive luck in not having a pipe burst or other such happen to my apartment or to my building. A lot of people lost their homes to fire, too.

My primary suffering was probably the same as a lot of people’s outside the state (and the ones who kept power here in Texas), in that I was terrified for a lot of people I knew that I couldn’t get to in order to help. It’s a lot of helplessness in that, and I’m sure many of you experienced it as well no matter where you are.

Child Tester had a lot of fun. She got to skip a week of school, do what she wanted, play in snow, learn to walk on ice, eat delicious food, learned how to start a fire, learned how to light a lighter if Ross removed the child safety thing (huh! Those actually work!), played board games, and all manner of other fun. We kept it really upbeat for her.

That said, it was clearly very stressful for her, because she wanted to be snuggled to sleep each night. For a 7-year old, that’s a pretty big deal. She also woke up crying in the middle of the night the first night, because the 5 blankets on her bed still weren’t sufficient. I added two more that first night and she fell back asleep quickly, and the second night I layered stuffed animals around her, under all her covers, so they’d insulate her and ensure the 7 blankets were sufficient. That’s a thing you can do when you have no heat: add clothing or stuffed animals, pillows, whatever to the bed to help insulate you.

Ross is pretty anti-blanket, but I think we had 5 or 6 on our bed by the end of it all. I still haven’t put all the extra blankets away, because I see no rational reason to trust the grid at this point. I have put most of them away, though. We’ll give them a few more days before I enter my cautiously trusting state.

Probably no one in Texas will ever properly trust our grid again, is my guess. A fireplace also went, for me, from a want to a requirement whenever we buy a house. People with fireplaces had a much easier time than those without.

How does one train for no heat during a winter storm, you ask?

It’s a good question, and in this case has a weird answer.

When I first moved to Houston, I decided to participate in 4 years’ worth of “No Heat Challenges,” including the year it snowed. Yeah, this is really a thing. Or at least, it was back then. No clue if people still do this, but it was a thing you could sign up for that people did largely for environmental reasons. I did this for an array of other reasons, including preparation for needing it should climate change make that a reality, but it gave me a comprehensive understanding of how extreme weather in a home not insulated for it worked. I didn’t really think I’d use the info I gleaned… well, ever, but glad it came up as useful in the end. My partner at the time did not care for this situation, but I did definitely quip to him when it was done that those challenges did end up being useful like neither of us thought they really would. If he still lived in Texas, I of course wouldn’t have made the joke. Two of those years, that partner travelled during the summer, so I did no A/C challenges as well. Those were hard at first, and harder than the heat ones because of the brutality of Houston summers.

I also had a winter in Utah as a kid where we didn’t heat, and I learned a lot from that as well. A LOT.

If you’re going to train for no heat, definitely be aware that it sucks a lot, and it doesn’t matter what climate you’re in. The methods for dealing with it are pretty much the same no matter where you are.

What you do need to know, though, is that what I’m going to say here isn’t comprehensive, because there are survivalist blogs that do a better job of getting into the intricacies. I’m really just talking about what was helpful to me here.

What do you need?

Blankets are the most important thing. You need more than you think you do. I will count once I finish putting all the surplus blankets away, but I believe I have around 2 dozen blankets. Only 3 weren’t needed. I am making more blankets because I can see that I wouldn’t have had enough if the situation had been worse. I meant to finish my scarf before and during the storm, but I instead worked on blankets. Didn’t wind up finishing my scarf until the storm was done.

You need a way to prepare food, too. Ideally, more than one. I had purchased wood before this storm because I wanted to take advantage of the cold and cook a goat meal over a fire. I miss cooking over a fire, so I wasn’t going to give up that opportunity. I only ended up cooking 1 dinner that way, though we used the fire pit daily.

These goat chops were seasoned only with salt and pepper. The onions and asparagus got that and olive oil. My goal was to let the flames, which are hard to see in this picture, and the smoke function as the primary spice. This meal was amazing.

Fire is one way to cook, but I assume people who haven’t done it before aren’t particularly keen on trying it out in the moment. I also have a tiny propane grill I didn’t use (because fire), and I have 2 butane catering stoves. I used one of those a lot. For almost everything we ate.

Everyone should own a butane catering stove. Don’t get the Coleman or similar camping versions if you don’t have to, as they’re legit not as good as the ones you get at the restaurant supply store (or online). These stoves cost about $30. I also had tons and tons of butane, and that’s important if it’s cold. If it’s cold, the butane canisters depressurize, similarly to how your tires deflate some when it’s cold, so you have to rotate different canisters in and out, depending on which one’s got pressure in the moment. I used 4 canisters total during the 3 days, 2 or 3 of which were partially used when this all started.

Butane stoves can be used indoors, which is why they’re excellent. You don’t have to worry about the carbon monoxide poisoning that killed and injured a lot of people this week, and you do get hot drinks and food from it for a relatively low cost. This is worth saving up for, if you can’t afford to buy them without saving. A case of 12 canisters costs around the same amount as the stoves these days.

A kettle is nice, too, but not necessary.

Other stuff I count as “needs”

You obviously also need water. We had around 50 gallons, though I really don’t know what kind of magic was involved in stuffing that into my shoebox apartment. Although I did fill the tub once boil notices started, I did that solely for toilet flushing if we lost pressure.

Flashlights, batteries, and candles. Really, just fuel in general. My personal favorite emergency candles are the Mexican prayer candles, like the picture below. The tall ones burn for 24 hours and give a generous amount of light (no clue how long the short ones last). We also used flashlights and tea lights, but these candles were our primary source of light. Super handy to walk around with, and if they aren’t brand new you don’t need to cup the flame while walking because the thick glass walls protect it.

If you have children and candles, make sure your children understand fire safety and/or find a way to keep them up high.

If you can’t afford to buy a bunch of candles, try to spend a small bit of money on wicks or twine so you can use homemade oil lamps.

This kind. I only buy the tall ones, and I prefer the ones that don’t have printed designs because I’m not using them for prayer. These cost about a buck each at the dollar store. I never even got into my Shabbat candles, because these are so long-lasting. Gabriella Clare Marino/Getty

Other things that are good are foods that don’t require a microwave or other modern cooking methods. I know people who experienced a lot of hardship over TV dinners and similar without backups.

Coats! Extra coats are good, ditto sweaters. Those of you who live in the South, or places like Southern California are the ones who really need to be told that, since if it snows where you live you already have what you need on that front.

Stuff to do matters: decks of cards, coloring books (including for adults!), books to read, board games, whatever you like to do that doesn’t involve tech. For me, that was largely nalbinding, but CT needed a lot of paper for art and other craft supplies, and she read a lot.

Tech

Charging ports for phones and other devices are things you should have. This is actually where I failed. I thought I had one of these still, but I guess mine had broken and I’d not gotten around to replacing it. Getting a charging port type thing ideally will come in the form of a hand crank charger/light/radio. I couldn’t get Amazon to work on my phone (don’t know my password and laptop was dead; thanks, Firefox and my own laziness!), so I ended up asking my friends Farah and Anji if they could order me one. They did, and it won’t be here until Monday, which is fine because the storm was over.

Also it was fine because I own a car. I have a power pack, but I didn’t end up using it because I used the car multiple times per day to charge so I could check on other people and help anyone who needed it triage problems in the moment, albeit remotely. This is obviously not ideal because it uses a lot of gas. Despite that, I still had to shut my phone off a lot to conserve the battery, as there was a constant stream of texts coming in.

Gas

Yeah, you should have some gas cans that are full. That’s another thing I didn’t have, so when I hit a quarter of a tank, I ventured out to get more. Most gas stations were out of fuel, and in my journey to find one that wasn’t, I saw many wrecks, but also many cars on the side of the road that ran out. I only had to go to 7 stores before I found fuel, but it would’ve taken many more if I hadn’t wandered away from freeways to find a more isolated station. If you don’t have a car, it becomes a lot more important to have a hand crank charger. I spent around $10 in gasoline just to keep tech charged, which is half the cost of the cheapest hand crank I saw.

Odd situations

My friend Anita’s parents live in a house with insanely high ceilings, which is exactly what you don’t want when you don’t have power to heat the home. I worried about her parents a lot, and I hope they spent most of their time in mom’s closet. Her closet is like a clothing boutique, so it’s well insulated and it also had low ceilings. Based on my memory of their home, this was the safest room to be in. So you definitely want to evaluate your home to see what’s gonna be best for the situation.

My home, as I’ve mentioned before, is laden with books. For once in my life, the library was useful in a practical way because it was also insulating. Not useful were our crappy windows we had to keep covered at night, and ideally would have been able to keep covered in the day to help hold the heat in.

Bleach

I think most people who keep bleach on hand use it for cleaning. I largely use vinegar to clean everything but my toilet bowl, so I keep bleach in the apartment exclusively for water purification.

I didn’t need to purify water to drink it, though. If you do, standard is 1/8 teaspoon per gallon of clear water, 1/4 teaspoon per gallon of cloudy.

I needed water to skirt the boil notice once the power was back on and I could use the dishwasher. I did boil water daily to wash dishes before power was restored, but I really hate doing dishes this way.

Actually, I hate doing the dishes period. I’d rather someone else here was the dish washer, and I would happily take over doing the bathroom instead. But, no one else here is the main dishwasher, so here we are.

How I skirted the boil notice was by washing the dishes with soap by hand using the cold water (my boiler room went out as soon as the storm started and was restored yesterday, I think?), and then I loaded them all in the dishwasher. After that, I added somewhere between a quarter and half a cup of bleach to the dishwasher and ran the rinse cycle only, then 2 dry cycles. I am certain I used too much bleach, but since I have no earthly idea how much water is disbursed for the rinse cycle, overkill seemed better. Bleach is cheap, parasites suck and some of them can be costly in terms of medical care and sickness.

I realized that people may not have thought to use their bleach that way, so I texted it to people. Some people told me they copied the text and sent it to all their friends. No one had thought to use this method, though. Honestly, I didn’t even think of it until the power was back on and I had a lot of dishes to do that day on account of what I’d chosen to cook (pasta and marinara). I really didn’t want to boil water again, and that was stalling me on getting the job done so I sat down and considered my resources.

Boil Notices

A lot of Texas was under boil notices because of the storm. A lot. I’m sure there were people who didn’t have them, but I don’t know any of those folk.

So people are clear: no, you cannot brush your teeth with tap water. Some of the smartest people I know missed this detail. You can, however, shower or bathe so long as you keep your face out of the water so there’s no risk of ingestion. This is largely an issue for kids, since adults typically are going to be better at not swimming while they’re in the bath.

When CT argued with me over whether I could take a bath, we looked this up to verify that I was right. She got sad and told me that the rule means she can’t bathe or shower because there’s no way she can keep her face out. That’s true. She swims and plays in there. I just wanted to soak sore muscles and lay there in the warms.

Baby Wipes

Actually, you parents don’t need to be told this, because the existence of your children probably taught you how awesome these are. I no longer have a kid in diapers so technically don’t need these, but I keep them because they can be used to clean up an astonishing array of messes, stains, markers on walls in some cases, and other such. They also can be used to get clean when there’s no other way to do so.

Fun Stuff

I already talked about having something to do that doesn’t rely on tech, and that’s definitely “fun stuff,” but I really mean treats here. All the little things that give you a sense of normalcy is what you should have on hand if you’re expecting a potential crisis.

I obviously didn’t expect the grid to fail, because who would expect that? But I did expect road conditions to be unsafe for days, didn’t think my experience driving on ice was relevant unless it really needed to be (like when I wanted more firewood and needed more gas), and did know I’d be stuck home for days. When I went shopping before the storm, I mostly bought snacks because I already knew I had enough food food.

Ross and CT were shocked by all the fun foods that came in before the storm, because normally I am not big on keeping a lot in the house. I don’t keep them in the house because I have a snack foods problem. Those two are way more moderate, but I bought so many snacks that we still have a lot of them leftover.

Friends

Why friends? Disaster is isolating. Being able to check on people and commiserate matters from a mental health standpoint and can help process the immediate trauma more efficiently. Also, the day Ross went to work to see if his dealership had power again (did not), he grabbed the wood he’d been curing there the last couple of years. It was too big for our pit, so our friend Richard came over with a chainsaw to help out. The chain broke before much could be done, but it did help, and so did the time I got to spend chatting with his partner Stephenie, who is also a good friend. That moment of … fellowship I guess? Whatever you want to call it, it was restoring.

What I have noticed with every single natural disaster I’ve personally lived though is that companionship and fellowship both during and immediately following a crisis matter more than what stuff in your house you did or didn’t have. Humans are not much different from horses or dogs, in that we’re pack/herd animals, so this is probably the most important thing once the immediate physical concerns are met. I’m not from Houston, or even Texas, so the people I know here tend to have lived through more natural disasters than I have. But I’ve been in my adopted city long enough do have done a large handful of them, and it’s always the people you know who are the most important resource you have. Sometimes they have stuff they can offer to help you, but mostly the comfort comes from just knowing someone cares about you.

So don’t discount the import of that, and don’t try to be an island. If there’s a pandemic like there is now, this complicates things, but fellowship in some form still matters. Pets are good, too, if you have those. Flopsy was a massive snuggle bun this week, and Linus the Foster Cat spent nearly every waking moment with Ross.

This song is now stuck in my head, so as usual I’m passing that onto y’all.

“Luxury” Items

Currently, my favorite possessions are the manual coffee grinder I insisted we have for “just in case,” that we used maybe 3 times total before this storm to test it and the manual food processor that Nana gave me a while ago. I keep that Maxwell House International Delights coffee mix in my home, because I grew up with it and like it (though didn’t know until recently that it also has caffeine and isn’t the caffeine creamer I thought it was), but that would’ve been IT for coffee for us had we not had that grinder. My friend Amanda said to edit in instant coffee and powdered/similar creamer and milk. I totally forgot a lot of people don’t keep that stuff on hand, so now it’s here. Also, those little drink flavor squirty bottle thingies are good to flavor your water for a little pick-me-up. Those also come in caffeinated versions, if you need or want that. I believe CT did have one cup of instant decaf during the blackout. She likes chocolate grated into hers, so also chocolate is good to keep on hand.

We also had hot cocoa mix, lemonade mix, and a lot of tea. This is kind of like snacks, in that they’re things you don’t need but that do make tough times feel easier. We had so much cocoa that CT started refusing to drink it. This made me laugh, because she’s spent most of the winter asking me constantly for hot chocolate or cocoa. We also let her have more soda than normal and other fun drinks.

I always drink a lot of hot tea (you have to specify this if you live in the South, and yes I know that’s weird but people think you mean iced if you don’t specify), but it appears I only drink this much tea during hurricanes and now winter storms.

My luxury items certainly will look different than yours, but these are things that should be in stock so they’re there when you need them. I think most people need candy, but I already had leftover king cake that Simone had sent that I could eat for sweets. We still have candy, but I didn’t really see anyone get into it during the storm.

I had never used that manual food processor that Nana gave me until this storm. I used it to make the marinara sauce CT had requested that night, and it was … I don’t really have a good word to describe how amazing it was, but it was kind of life changing. Enough so that I’ll need to be processing something large to use my Cuisinart instead of this manual one ever again. I don’t know that the Tupperware one is particularly affordable (I had no idea the cost until writing this), but based on what I know of that device now, I’d pony up $60 for one. Its quality truly did surprise me.

Wrapping up

I still have so much I want to say, but my thoughts are, as y’all can clearly see, still far too disjointed to continue on with a lot more rambling. Hopefully these are some basic, albeit shockingly incomplete, tips that y’all won’t ever need.

Again, we really were okay in my home and were solely inconvenienced by the blackouts, and no one I know died because of this storm, to the best of my knowledge thus far. There are still some people I don’t have status updates on, but I am making the leap that those people are trying to restore some normalcy to their lives and deal with whatever damage happened to their homes. We still don’t know how many souls were lost to this storm in sum, and especially within the homeless population, so simply not having lost anyone is the real win for me and my family here.

I’m off to continue my processing journey now. Although I am taking next week off of work other than emails so I can complete that process more efficiently, as well as help CT segue back into school on Monday, the blog will continue as normal because I’d already written those posts ahead or had otherwise scheduled reminder posts well before the storm (also why the blog largely was still normal during the storm). Monday will be a reminder post for what people can do with their botched bread loaves, since my email has had a lot of questions about that recently.

Along those lines, for those of you wondering why you can’t find me on Facebook or Instagram to ask questions outside my email, Facebook decided I had violated community standards (I did not), most likely because my account was hacked (based on emails I found in my spam folder from them, and the fact that they seem to be selling an awful lot of ads from my banned account but not my credit card), so they took down my Facebook, personal Instagram, and our company Instagram. Hence you can’t find us on IG anymore, if you weren’t sure why that was.

Since I’m almost at the end of the 30 day review period and they are still declining to give me any information about what I supposedly did, whether I really was hacked (must’ve been), or whether they plan to review my appeal, I assume all of those accounts will result in permanent bans. The only thing they’d tell me is that if I logged out, they definitely wouldn’t review my case, so I can’t even log out to make a work-only account.

This is why poor Sabrina has been having to do so much of my job, and also why some of you have needed to email me due to inability to find me on social media since the end of January. Sorry about that, but you really do have to email me if you need me. Please feel free to complain to FB about this if it’s inconveniencing you. Hahaha, they’re definitely not taking my complaints anymore.

My week off will not include email, so I’m still available through that. Thank you, also, to the many of you who contacted me to verify we were okay. It really meant a lot to see that kind of outpouring from our community members, in ways I’d have to get mushy about to describe.