Monday Musings - Deep Freeze Edition

I come to you this morning from the land of the Deep Freeze. For the past 36 hours nothing has moved not even a Lyft, Uber, food delivery car or medical taxi. There are rolling blackouts since the grid is overwhelmed although I have not had one yet. My daughter's kitchen pipes are frozen and Biden and the governor have declared a state of emergency. I laughingly told my daughter yesterday that you can tell that it's a real weather emergency because I ordered a two day Amazon prime option item and it will be delivered on Friday.

For all those living in the north for whom this is normal, the infrastructure is simply not in place since this is once every ten year event (our annual snowfall is much less than one inch). If I say that all of Dallas has ten snow plows/ice trucks combined I might be exaggerating for all I know. Houston and Austin have none. We don't have basements so our furnaces and water heaters are more exposed. We don't winterize and turn off sprinklers and all that good stuff and the power grid is used to having rolling blackouts for extreme heat events but this is a different thing. There are all kinds of people in Dallas who own nothing warmer than a light jacket and have no boots.  I am using all of my Colorado skills but still....What would be normal in Colorado or Michigan or Connecticut is deadly here as evidenced by the huge car accidents in Texas and Oklahoma. They even opened up the Civic center a a heating station-and not just for the homeless.

I have all the blankets piled on my bed in case my power goes out, prepared to sit and knit or whatever. All the faucets are at a fast drip/slow stream with the cabinets in front of the pipes open. And I'm trying to decide if with even the possibility of loss of power I should be planning on making soup in the slow cooker or just aim for eggs and canned goods for the day. I comfort myself with the knowledge of sixty degrees by the end of the week, and back to the norm until the Easter chill. I would make a joke about how I should have moved further south except that my friend who lives near San Antonio is having the same weather and Houston is pretty close. I think the Floridians, southern Californians and southern Arizona folks are the only ones managing to skip this one. Every single county in Texas all the way down to Mexido is under a deep freeze winter storm warning.

And on top of it all I expect this could move my second jab in the arm back to next week.

In other news around the Casa, Saturday my daughter came by. To put my TV together, to bring me lunch,and to (in her own words) make sure I wasn't going to turn into a "momsicle" this weekend. Unfortunately my minimal tools were not helpful to her. She is tentatively planning on coming out into the world this afternoon with their drill!  Hopefully we will have better luck.

I got my lab work back and was shocked, shocked I say to see that my A1C (diabetic) blood test had gone down, in spite of my eating habits during the holiday season. Whatever I'm doing I'm doing okay. And my cholesterol is at 137. So overweight and not in the best shape (understatement), I'm still happy over all. Now I just need to get those pesky annual tests done. And back to some kind of swim exercise class post shot recovery (assumng they ever re-open the rec center and or swim club. I may have to wait a month or so for my community pool).

I'm running out of the yarn for both my royal blue cardigan and my pink summer top and am also waiting on some quilt requirements for finishing. Slow shipping will be even slower this week,  so I plan to pull out cotton yarn and begin knitting dish cloths and towels. I have a goal of replacing everything disposable (except the obvious for now) that I can with cloth/knit items one at a time,  and want to get enough towels made that I can eliminate the paper towels except for human and canine bodily fluids. I'm gonna color code (and mainly shape) them differently so that I easily know which ones are for cleaning/wiping things and which ones are for drying of hands and dishes and such.

Also sketching out three new modern quilts with the few pencils on hand (my amazon order coming Friday is set of a hundred oil based colored pencils and graph paper)

Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. In the normal times I would be cutting down both my social media and blogging by a drastic amount. These days any socialization I get is online or Zoom so I'm making some other changes that I'll share later. Tomorrow is normally pancakes, so I am having pancakes at home, and Wednesdays would normally be soup and bread dinners at the church with a program, so again, I'll do my own thing before our weekly zoom (that'll mean I now have three, count em three zooms-all on Wednesday but I am not complaining.

On the reading and watching front, I'm now watching the Nordic Murders, and have started a thriller that is more my style called The Cipher.

It may be time for me to change from my cold sparking water and heat up the kettle for tea and hot chocolate. And remind me to tell you how I can make smores in the oven.......And yes, I am going to start that slow cooker