We might have over prepared, but that is still okay by me. We are now in February, and it is starting to look like we will not have another polar vortex bringing North Pole weather all the way down to Texas like last year. In a sense, that is a good thing, many people suffered, and we were exposed as being quite ill prepared for the worst that mother nature can throw at us. Having said this, and luckily for us, we got by unscathed, we only lost power for maybe half an hour at most. I still felt an urgent obligation to prepare for a repeat this year. In the Spring, we went and bought a good-sized generator to keep our fridges and freezers running, if need be. We also bought a set of propane powered heaters, which even if we don't use, are good to have, and they were not expensive. I even bought a small butane stove that is rated to use inside the house. Since I am doing the list, I then commandeered one of our smaller closets to store emergency provisions, such as 5-gallon jugs, which I bought slowly over the summer. We have candles, matches, toilet paper for months, Clorox wipes by the tube, and some food reserves, although I should probably work on that.
Given all that, it is looking like the winter storm this year will last maybe a day or two, and then I imagine we will start looking for the weather to start warming up. I don't mind being wrong, I remember having the discussion with coworkers and even my brother who kept saying he was going to do this and that, but last I checked, he was still sitting on his thumbs, not ordering anything. As responsible adults, and as men, we should be prepared for the worst, like they had said, we were also supposed to experience brown outs during the summer, where we were going to lose power here and there intermittently, to keep everyone powered up, overall. This also never happened, mostly because we stayed cooler than normal. I felt safer knowing we have an alternate source of power, if we do end up losing city power. On a side note, we bought a smaller room A/C, so the generator wouldn't have to run the giant units outside, if that came to be, and we had troubles with our upstairs unit. Wife, being thick-headed, insisted on sleeping in the bedroom, instead of coming down to our ghetto bed in the living room downstairs. The portable unit kept the room quite comfortable; I feel it would serve us well in an emergency.
Who knows what will happen tomorrow or next week, but now that I am a little better prepared, I feel safer and not as exposed to possible needless suffering.
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