One of the reasons that I’m glad that I queued posts about the winter weather storm as far out as I did rather than write about them in the immediate or the near-immediate aftermath is that I am glad that something that frightening will probably never happen again for the rest of my life if I continue to live in this area… that is, unless we’ve really angered Mother Nature and can reasonably expect cooler temperatures around here come winter months. It was actually frightening to have to go through that, feeling the ice crack underneath your feet although it looked as though you were stepping on snow, literally having to trudge across somewhat slippery ice to get to the mailbox (and the mail and newspaper quickly stopped running during this, things got that bad) or to bring the trash bins from the side of the house to the curb. I nearly fell six times while all of this was going on, and I know how to walk like a penguin. I tried hard to walk like one.

And then there was the panic buying of food and other necessities even while temperatures warmed back up… and it was surreal how we went from freezing temperatures, dripping faucets if we were wise to keep pipes from freezing, to somewhat cool or even balmy. Having to make multiple trips to the state grocer to get food for my family because it was literally like playing the lottery what would be on the shelves at any given day. Lining up outside of the grocer on the first and second day just to get in the grocer. Seeing port-a-potties outside of the grocer because the grocer’s water lines had busted due to ice expansion and they had no access to fresh water. Finding out that this had happened to multiple buildings in the whole state.

Finding out that the local school district had cancelled classes for an additional week due to this.

The mail and newspaper did get back to normal once the ice and snow had for the most part melted, but the panic buying did persist for a bit after the fact… and it was the strangest foods that the grocer was either low on or out of. Chips. TV dinners. Strangely, almost everything that was canned was still on the shelves.

I finally managed to get a copy of my favorite graphics program back on this computer (Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro 9… yes, I enjoy working with a program that is that old, don’t laugh at me), because I am now relying on backing up programs that are this old and installing them by copying and pasting them from USB sticks. Truth be told, I’ve used this program for so long that it does everything that I want it to do, and I’m reluctant to make any major changes when this does everything that I need it to do. I just had to find the USB stick that had the files for it on there, and as soon as I did, copy and paste them over to where they were supposed to go. That’s a neat little trick that you can do with old programs, one that I really like doing…

I can see why program manufacturers have made it more difficult to do that, what with the honor system.

I also got some video footage of some… earlier parts of the winter weather storm that we got last month.

One of the perks of queueing posts in here is that I’m not in as much of a rush to come up with something.

This might be the most “life”-y post that I have ever made in here, but one of the perks of queueing posts is that it also allows me to sit on posts that I might otherwise be inclined to make alterations on as the days and weeks until the post’s publish come closer. One such good example of this would be this post when I bring up, again, that our city suspended trash collections during the winter storm, but did not immediately move to resume picking up trash once weather patterns had stabilized. We had to wait an entire extra week for our trash to get picked up. That was not something that should have happened. Don’t paint me surprised.

In the days that followed weather patterns… improving, for lack of a better way to put it, several problems emerged. One problem was that people continued to panic buy food and drink in spite of the fact that they did not need to, which led to there being lines simply to get into grocers, restrictions on the amount of certain items that could be purchased in any one singular transaction, the whole gamut. I had to return to the grocer three times over the course of one month to get the food that our family eats, and a lot of that was because the food that I would have gotten at that one time was not on the shelf and I was hoping that if I came by the next day, or the next, I would luck out and it would be there. When you have autistic children who only eat certain things, this can become extremely stressful, and quickly. Fortunately I was able to get everything that we eat by day three of this, but not all families could literally have been as persistent as I was, nor might they have lucked out to the degree that I did (eating “odd foods”). I am seriously glad all of that is behind me.

Now on to, er, problem number two… yeah, let’s just call it problem number two, why don’t we?

Our water pipe system literally is not, was not, and has never been winterized. This has never been a thing that has happened because we have never gotten this kind of weather before. So when we did, the pipes froze, melted… and in the process of doing so, the contents expanded, which caused them to burst in a lot of places and in a lot of really bad ways. It also didn’t help the state out any that said contents leaked their matters out when they melted. We had whole school districts that had to delay re-opening for instruction due to this. Our own water pressure was off for a little while. Our two main grocers in town had to have port-a-potties (I know one did, so I’m assuming that the other one did) installed outside just to be able to open their doors, because pipes had blown so badly that they had no water access. Holy mother of God.

And don’t even get me started on the massive power outages and the people that actually died during this.

Just do not get me started.