In my last post, I wrote about my plans for a cold, rainy weekend, and all I hoped to accomplish during the time we were planning to stay home. Sadly, things did not go as planned. As we moved closer to Monday, February 15th, dire warnings were being sounded that this winter storm would be harsh. The weather forecasters were not lying, and they weren’t hyping things. I’m glad that we spent a good part of the weekend getting prepared for the bad weather, because it did indeed get quite bad.

On Sunday night, I was unable to get to sleep. I just couldn’t get comfortable, and my knee was aching, a sure sign that cold weather was on its way. I finally tried to get in to bed around 2 am Monday morning, and just as I was pulling back the covers, we lost power. We would be the dark and cold for the next 32 hours, until 10 am on Tuesday. And boy, did it get cold! Our low at our house, according to my weather station, was 6 degrees, with a wind chill of -15. I can’t remember ever being that cold! We all slept in the living room on Monday night, because we did have a generator and a couple of space heaters that kept us from freezing, along with several blankets and quilts.

We were really fortunate in that we had the generator, a propane grill for cooking, and the gas stove that we found could be lit manually. Overall, despite the cold, we were able to function reasonably well. But I realized about midway through Monday that there’s one thing that would have really helped us, and that was more quilts.

I know what some of you are thinking – that this is a ploy to spend more money on fabrics. Honestly, though, we only had one quilt each, so we were forced to use comforters, electric blankets and regular blankets. All of them helped, but I think that thicker, heavier quilts would have been extremely useful. I’ve been doing some research on heavier batting, because let’s be honest – how often would this have come up in Houston before now?

And like most people, we suffered with a broken pipe. Fortunately, it was limited to the garage, and we were able to get it repaired fairly quickly – the next day, in fact.

As I write this, the sky is overcast, but the temperature is a very pleasant 74 degrees. And it may be a while before we have weather that was as cold as what we saw last week, but I can tell you without any hesitation at all … I will be better prepared the next time a Polar Vortex heads our way!