We may get up to a half inch of ice overnight. I sure as hell hope that doesn’t happen. Trees will be falling, power will be out too.
I’m guessing you live in Houston or South Texas somewhere, as roughly a low of 35/high of 50 are pretty normal during the winter here in Dallas. But a low of -1/high of 19 is extremely unusual. I think the lowest I’ve seen in the 22 years I’ve lived up here was a low of 9/high of 21, and that was a one-night thing.
I live just north of Dallas and, as others have pointed out, the temperatures in our area are unusually low. On Sunday, the electric company was predicting rolling brownouts that would last 30 to 60 minutes. Our power went out at 2:00 a.m. Monday morning. Over the next 40 hours (until 6:00 p.m. Tuesday) we had about 6 hours of power. It would be on for an hour or so and then off for 7 or 8 hours. Tuesday morning it was 3 degrees F outside and in the low 40s in the house. The electric company changed their story to say that due to problems with their equipment, they were unable to rotate the outages, so some places (like us) would have outages of indeterminate length. I determined that the length was too fucking long. But, I know others have it even worse and you have my sympathy. My younger son has a friend whose family lost power Sunday night and they didn’t get it back until this morning.
I have been sleeping in three sweatshirts, four blankets and my gloves. My sons were doing similar. We spent all day Monday and Tuesday wandering around Lowes and Home Depot and Target looking for firewood that might have fallen behind a display. We didn’t find any, nor did we expect to, but it did give us an excuse to hang out in places that had heat.
Starting at 6:00 last night (Tuesday) the off-periods went down to three hours or so and at 9:20 this morning the power came on and hasn’t gone off yet as of 4:00 p.m. Wednesday. My sons are quite happy, but I still feel like I’m in the last act of a horror movie - we think the monster is dead, but it’s going to rise up one more time. Hopefully this is one of those movies that subverts the genre and the monster doesn’t come back.
It should, but I’ve heard the weather faces on TV say it’s going to be 'unseasonably hot" in July.
Southwest Oregon here. It’s been fairly typical winter weather here (40 deg f, rain) but a couple of hours north of here it’s been very bad; they’e had ice storms, snow and wind. Winter’s not over and I’m keeping my fingers crossed…
Yup, with up to 300,000 without electricity at its peak, some for several days. We had to wait for trees to be cleared from the road and were packing the car to go get my MIL when we learned that power and landline service were restored. In her late 80s, she had been sitting in her room in the dark with cold food tray and coffee delivery, with no heat, for 4 or 5 days (following a facility-wide quarantine). Her flashlight went out within a day. The facility had no administrative phone service. She passed the time by watching whether cars of different colors went faster or slower than each other.
Are municipalities where the weather is unusually cold or snowy doing the right thing?
Offering warming centres, distributing cocoa, trying to keep the streets plowed or shovelled, throwing the salt and sand around?
The picture of the fan is from Dallas. Yikes!
Looks like we have the over night power slot, just got power back. Mollusc son 1 read The Martian today we are watching that movie now, all schedules out the window. Our autistic youngest is getting all his scheduled kindle and playstation allocations in from 10 to midnight. I guess that’s a step towards flexible thinking 
Enjoy the electricity~I’m enjoying mine. And I’m crossing my fingers.
Hope all yall having power and heat issues are doing ok
Getting better, thank you. Keep thinking those good thoughts, it is helping!
I’m on an island off the south tip of Korea. Power is good, but it’s rarely a problem here unless the wind kicks up. A bit windy, but not enough to ground the boats or threaten the power. Just below freezing at night, just above by day (pretty normal), but it’s been snowing more or less constantly for two days now which is really, really weird for us, especially this late in the season. The ground is warm enough and the sun warm enough that it isn’t “sticking” in most places, but it still makes driving an adventure. Tiny, winding, hilly island roads with deep ditches where the gutter should be are just a no when they get slick.
Last weekend was a little windy, temps in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit, which is a little more typical. Wild swings between temperatures are par for this time of year, and we’re expecting a warmish three days for the upcoming weekend.
Because of several very mild winters in a row it doesn’t feel normal.
So true. Last year I never ran the snow blower.
Iowa has just came out a period of deep freeze. It’s late for us as that usually happens between December and January. We’ve also had lots of snow that might melt for a day and then another storm would hit. So from January on there has almost always been a beautiful winter wonderland outside my door.
I’m sure everyone has seen the terracotta and tea light candles trick for heat. So I’ll share a tip on how to charge your phones/kindles/chargeable flashlights: power packs for cordless power tools with usb charging ports like
Amazon.com : Cordless Tool Battery Packs with usb
We also have other “prepper” stuff like solar charged lights, solar charged flashlight that also can charge a phone, manual can opener.
Here in Iowa you never know when a natural disaster will hit. Two weeks ago I called Mistermage to tell him the power was flickering and popping on and off. I filled water jugs for just in case. I fully downloaded the next 4 books in the kindle series I was reading. A half hour later the power went out. I lit my pretty smelling candle just so I wasn’t sitting in the dark. I found all of our charged up flashlights. At hour 3 of no power I called him back (thanks deity landlines work w/o power) just because it was getting close to dark and I didn’t want him to have to hook up the generator in the icy, snowy darkness.
He came home and, just as he was heading to the shed, the power came back on. He was 7 miles away and the power only flickered once there. Figures 
I don’t know it. Could you point to how to find it? Thanks!
Here’s a link with pros and cons. If you aren’t able to go to the link, let me know and I’ll copy and paste stuff for you.
Thank you~that was a good read. I’m going to try to scrounge around in the basement and see if I can put together one. Even just for morale the next time my power goes out.
I’m glad I was able to help. Remember, you won’t get more heat from a candle doing this (those pesky laws of thermodynamics apply), but you will be keeping the heat in a more usable form.