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I was busy sanding down the planks all evening last Sunday in that unbearable cold in the garage and just nearly got done when it started snowing. My wife had been lamenting all week about the snow in Dallas and naturally this made her happy. That happiness was short lived though. We started losing power and cell reception that night which only got worse the next two days. Monday morning was spent enjoying the snow and content in the knowledge that our fridge is stocked well to last a whole week but the blackouts kept increasing from a 30/15 interval to a total blackout in the evening. At one point I was timing a 30 second ON time (yup 30 seconds) to heat up the milk to feed my kid. Whatever rotating blackout was going on, it put our neighborhood under complete blackout and kept the downtown and many other places well lit 24/7. We had a cigarette lighter lying around from the housewarming last year that came in handy to light the stove to warm up food and to light up a bunch of scented candles. A scented candle light dinner isn’t as appealing as it sounds. The real struggle was to keep our toddler warm and engaged. She hated all the layers and huddling up for warmth. I was thankful for all the blankets, throws and jackets we had from our Minneapolis days that night! Thinking about my kid kept me mostly awake and I got up at around 3 in the morning to check up on her and found a leak in one of the bathrooms that was about to drench the carpet in her room. Luckily it was not a pipe burst and just turning off the valve to the water closet remedied the situation temporarily. With the cold getting worse and cellular networks failing, we crashed in with a friend of ours who never experienced any kind of power outage through this storm in their neighborhood. Apart from a mild scare of water outage when there was no water for better part of the day, which prompted us to fill the bath tubs with snow, there was no issue with power over there. We spent the last 4 days at their place constantly checking on the outage map and came back home last night when the outage map cleared. We were lucky to have a place to wait out the storm. Not many people were.

The food in the fridge has gone bad as expected except for the stuff in the freezer. The water closet pipe still needs to be looked at sometime today and stock replenished but we have power and all the babies are well fed and warm.

Day 83 - Join Me in #100DaysToOffload