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.

So, last month we were in the eye of a severe winter storm.

Texas doesn’t ever really get those, so not that many people were prepared for it.

It got to the point that we had a few inches of snow stick to the ground, but ice formed over that, and then snow fell on top of the ice, making walking outside and even driving a car for awhile potentially hazardous. I still remember cars driving down my road at like six miles an hour if they had to go somewhere. The school district cancelled classes for the entire week, which is a rarity given that they are normally dead last at calling in cancellations. The boys’ occupational and speech therapy clinic also closed for the entire week, following what the local school district was doing. And as the storm progressed, water pipes began to freeze, and some of them actually exploded because the people owning the building — in a commercial section of town — exploded, meaning that the stores could not open until they got portable toilets on site.

Talk about completely unprepared for any of this.

Mail stopped being delivered due to this as well, although this didn’t bother me a whole lot since I was only waiting on one thing that I had ordered. The newspaper also stopped coming as well, which I expected… but trash delivery stopping during this was a new one for me, because I thought that they had to find some way to safely transport your unwanted trash. You know, through rain, through storm, all of the stuff that they say.