Last time Houston had a winter storm (2021?), we were in the dark but had a fireplace and gas stove so it wasn't horrible. This year we have a gasoline generator that will run a couple of little heaters and lamps. Yay! If the water is cut off again we have a swimming pool full to use to flush the toilets, so I just need to fill up a few pots so we can have coffee.
I looked outside when I was making dinner and Snowmageddon had yet to begin. I looked out a half hour later and my car was already covered. This is gonna be the real deal. As long as we don't lose power and there's not too many big trees across the right-of-way, I'll be fine. I looked for my ice melt yesterday and could not locate it in my 3 car closet, and ended up going to Walmart at 10:30 last night (they close at 11.) I was shocked there were just a few people there. I was even more shocked that there was plenty of ice melt left.
Did you fill the bathtub and some pots of water in case you lose power? And keep some flashlights and candles, too.
I have bottles of water. I haven't had well water since the middle of June when my softener failure brought back bladder sediment & stones (although I'm thinking of using it again.) My neighbors always call to share theirs. I don't think they drink their well water.
No, I must have garbled stuff. Everyone here is on well water. I've been drinking bottled for about 6 months and am considering going back to well/softened. I think my neighbors have always been drinking bottled water, so they are not dependent on their well for their drinking water. I quit the well water in June because the softener took a poop and brought back kidney/bladder stones. Then even after I fixed the softener, I stayed off of the softened water because it put about 400mg of sodium in my diet every day. But I recently had a Wellness Check, and removing that 400mg/sodium a day for 6 months made zero difference in the sodium level in my blood. I was shocked...I still am. The bottles are sort of expensive, but the worse part is dealing with 30 empty gallon jugs every month.
Well things change, used to be you could use last years Sears,Robuck catalogs, but now all the paper is too hard and slick. So no sense in saving them. Even the phone books are hard paper now. Evety respectable out house had a catalog in it in case run out of toilet paper.
I try not to use any plastic container's, threw out my Tuppware replaced with Pyrex glass containers. I don't buy bottles water, we use stainless steel thermos's.
The winter storm has arrived and several inches of snow had one driver struck in the intersection where I live. I was watching as someone was digging around the tires and noticed my sidewalk had been cleared. My son had come by he lives down the street from me.
Looks like we are going to be either right around 32F or below for most of the week , here in northern Alabama. Supposed to have snow by Friday, and since the weather is going to stay cold, it might not go away very fast. Right now, it says 33, feels like 16, and supposed to be worse as the wind keeps picking up through the day. Everyone here is so excited to have the snow, even though no one can drive in it, or has any kind of snow tires. Alabama does not get enough snow for the state to have snow equipment, so even an inch of snow here can shut everything down, with cars and wrecks all over the streets and highways, and stores out of basic food items. Having lived most of my life where we had snow all the winter months, and I had to wade around it the stuff to do my farm chores, feed the livestock, and sometimes pack in 5 gallon buckets of the snow to melt for water; I do not look forward to seeing it on the ground, even in small amounts.
I've thought of going to the larger "water cooler" bottles, but I just don't have the room for it. If I had a 2,400 ft² home or a basement, then maybe I could. Not to completely derail the weather thread, but as we discuss it, another reason I stayed off of the well water is that I keep a roasting pan of water on my wood stove to put humidity in the air. By the end of the season, I've likely gone through several hundred gallons of water (over 5 gallons many days) and there's a high volume of stuff that precipitates out of it...stuff that fizzes when the white vinegar hits it. The same stuff would migrate to the top of humidifier elements and plug them. That's another motive to keeping the well water out of my stone-forming system, even though it tests fine (I assume the stuff is salt.)
I just stuck a ruler on the snow that accumulated on top of the trash cans. It is under 2", but the snow turned to rain and may have washed it down some. We're supposed to have wintry mix tapering off in an hour, then 5 hours of snow starting in late afternoon, all adding up to another 2.5" supposedly. I'll go walk around in a bit to see if I need to shove any trees out of the way before the precip starts again.
I was looking at that whole area on my weather map radar, and it looks like you can get a mix of everything, snow, rain, freezing rain, and even maybe an ice storm. Hoping that things go well where you are at, and that you do not lose power from the storm. Try to keep us updated if you can, because we will all be worrying about how you are doing. I think that you are maybe the one here who gets the worst part of the storm, although others will be seeing bad wether also.
Things are actually fine here. The bad stuff never really materialized. I have no idea how the DC region is doing, the poor bastards. Regarding power: When El Derecho came through 10+ years ago, my electric co-op went crazy in clearing around the power line right-of-ways. I came home from work and the tree line in my front field had been pushed WAY back. Then when they ran fiber to every home, they replaced "marginal" poles that looked like they may be "iffy." On top of that, the fiber monitors the entire power distribution system so that when something happens, they can tell what the problem is and exactly where it's happened before a customer reports it. Of course, when there's hundreds of trees down across multiple counties, there ain't much anyone can do except go grab roadkill firewood.