In the middle of February a massive cold front from Canada pushed down through the US bringing a week of freezing temperatures and snow to much of the country. Texas, however, was hit especially hard because the state never sees sustained weather like this and the power grid was not able to supply in pace with the demand. The ERCOT energy crisis was the national news story all week.
Fortunately, Amarillo is one of the few areas in Texas on a different power grid, so we did not have to suffer through ongoing outages in below freezing temperatures that many of our friends and family did in other parts of Texas. Poor Grandma and Grandpa Howe had their power off for up to 8 hours at a time. In addition to losing electricity and heat, we also knew people with frozen swimming pools, burst pipes, unsafe water or no water, food and gas shortages, and sky rocketing energy bills. Poor Texas!
While we faired the storm fairly well, here are some things to remember from that week:
- I was glad I decided to stock up on groceries on Saturday, because we didn't end up leaving the house for several days. Our stores did stay stocked when we did finally venture out. In Dallas the shelves were completely empty.
- School and work were cancelled for the entire week to help conserve energy.
- We did have one 2 hour outage, and when the power was restored it fried the circuit board in our garage door and we had to have it replaced.
- The combined snowfall from the storms was over a foot in Amarillo.
- Temperatures were in single digits, or below zero, for a few days. We did not let the kids go outside to play in the snow until about day 5 of the storm when it had a chance to warm up some.
The artic vortex arrives in Amarillo - everything started freezing, and then snow would come a couple days later
Griffin developed a croupy cough on Friday night. It was bad and I thought we would have to take him in to the ER, but the extra cold air helped keep it in check. We probably looked crazy walking the neighborhood when it was 15 degrees out.
On Sunday we woke up to our first round of snow. It continued throughout the day and church was cancelled. It was hard to measure because it was extremely windy. The rooftops were bare, but then parts of the yard had drifts over a foot deep.
We did lots of crafts and puzzles over the next few days to keep busy
By Monday I was really craving snow cones and we finally found a store that was open and had syrups in stock! Dave braved the arctic to get them for me :) They did not have any blackberry flavor, but he did find my second favorites!
The next day I put together a little snow cone kit to share with our neighbors and Dave walked it over to their house. There were no car tracks anywhere because no one had been driving. The wind had also blown the snow perfectly level, so Dave said he almost fell when he got to curb because he couldn't tell where the sidewalk ended and the street started.
When he got back home he brought in these giant icicles that were growing by our front door to show the kids
On Wednesday it finally warmed up enough (20s) to go out and play. The trampoline park was having a contest on Facebook for the best snow creation. We submitted this photo of a "Snoa Constrictor" and won a $15 gift card!
Finally enjoying the snow that they had been staring at for the past three days
By Friday things were finally started to melt out a bit! Scary Frog popped out again in the front yard, and you could still see Dave's frozen footprints from his walk to the neighbors house 3 days before.
I shoveled out a path to our door so Amazon could start bringing us packages again :)
The lovely aftermath of snow play. They always talk about what an ordeal it is to get kids dressed in snow clothes, but I think the clean up is worse.
