Preparedness

Me preparing for a Seven Degree Fahrenheit day outdoors

 

The farm in the snow

 
As many probably know, Texas is digging out from a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm. For someone who preaches preparedness, I was not as prepared as I would have liked, but it all worked out in the end. My water stockpile was not filled to capacity when the water went out, but fortunately I did not have to use all that I had. I had maybe a gallon of gas on hand for the generator. Fortunately the power stayed on, for the most part. My footwear proved inadequate to the cold even with two pairs of socks, but now I know and I improvised.

 I had no busted pipes in the house, because all the pipes in my house are already busted and the water cut off from them. I get my water from a faucet out front, which did freeze up but since I left it running, it did not bust the pipe. My toilet did not become nonfunctional because my toilet is a homecrafted toilet frame into which a bucket filled with straw is fitted into. Once filled, it goes out to the compost pile. Low tech is good, lol. My floors may be dirty from the damned ubiquitous clay here, but they aren't flooded. 

If anything I am about to have a hay/straw emergency, lol, but once the roads are more passable I am going to order a big bale of hay, which I am going to need for the garden beds anyway.

Food, I never lost power for long so I have all the food that I would have anyway. Had I lost power, I have an alcohol camp stove and alcohol fuel stored away.

Had the power gone out, heating would have been my Achille's Heel. I didn't have hardly any gasoline stored, and my generator could have handled only one of the two portable heaters I needed to keep my bedroom at tolerable temperatures. The rest of the house has no heat: there is central heating but last time I ran it I got unacceptable heating bills so I assume that the vents in the roof are exposed. In the bedroom, I put in extra insulation but not in the rest of the house. The bedroom was always going to be my bunker if extreme heat or cold occurred anyway. I also put a spring on the bedroom door to keep it closed, otherwise my cat Mango would leave it partway open and all the heat (or cool in summer) would leak out. Fortunately I DID get that done a couple weeks before the storm hit.

Washing hands on the coldest days was a real problem: my water is stored in plastic "watercubes" and if left out in the ambient temperatures would be ice cold when I needed to wash my hands. On some days I heated water on the stove to use for hand washing. On others I just gritted my teeth and endured the icy water on my hands.

I have, ahem, not bathed in quite some time. Bathing is quite a chore when there is no indoor water. It involves heating up a lot of water on the stove and pouring it into the bathtub. Fortunately for 99% of the time there is no one around to experience my, I am sure, overwhelming fragrance, but getting a bath is high on my priority list once temperatures warm up at least into the sixties. Let me tell you, stepping out of the tub into a freezing cold bathroom is an experience you won't want to repeat any time soon.

I stand a good chance of being marooned here for awhile, not because of the ice, but because of when it melts. There's 350 feet between my house and the County Road, and under wet conditions that becomes a mire, a chunky soup of mud. I am going to have a driveway put in once I find a contractor to do it.

On the whole though I have been very blessed. In some ways the worst day of the crisis was today. Once the faucet thawed yesterday, I filled up all my water cubes to put into storage, and also went out and filled up all my gasoline containers, and did a grocery run, and as a result of all that exertion my glutes... my ass, if you will pardon the expression... is so sore that it is painful to walk. The day I melted snow and all the greasy goop from the vent-a-hood got rehydrated and started dripping on my stove and into my snowmelt was bad too, I had to pour out the water I was melting and clean out the pot and rinse it with snow, that kinda sucked.

On the whole though it was a cakewalk. I just stayed indoors and played Skyrim all day. ;) 

I think the conclusions that I have drawn from the experience is that I was not as prepared as I would like to have been (very little gasoline, water cubes not full when it started,) but also that being low-tech or at least being prepared to go low-tech has very great advantages. No toilet pipes were going to bust, I do my #2 in a bucket. When I first moved here, I didn't have water hooked up so I had a full water purification setup going to purify pond water. When I first moved here I ran on generator power, so I have the generator with a power cord that runs from the outside to my bedroom, and gas cans (though I didn't think to stock up on my gasoline.)

I also need a generator that is twice as powerful as that one, 2000 watts is not enough to fully heat my room at temps around zero Fahrenheit, and it is not enough to run the window AC in the bedroom full blast in a heat wave, so I need to order a 4000 watt generator once the roads thaw and I can get deliveries from Amazon again.

Another conclusion: the Ark is a BEAST. :) After sitting and freezing in sometimes below zero temperatures, with 100,000 miles on the odometer, when I went to go drive to the store it just turned right over. Chevy Express vans: don't underestimate em.

On the whole I was blessed by the Lord my G-d and didn't have a particularly rough time of it, and learned many important things from it. I also am in awe of how large 3 acres is and how many resources are in this land to help me. I feel like a king of my own domain here, though in fact G-d is king and I am just a thankful tenant. :) The land is G-d's: I just get to use it.