Reading this thread with concern for our Texans and Nebraskans! This situation is crazy with the power outages. I feel for y’all (from Northern CA where we have had rolling blackouts and our share of natural disasters).
Regarding the water pipes - can you just keep the water running slightly? I recall that being an option for short spells of freezing temps, but not sure if the current situation will allow that.
If your TV is old enough, it will not be able to understand the signals coming in from an antenna now that everything is digital. We have a converter box that we had to buy when we decided to get rid of cable so as to be able to get TV the few times we might need it (we don’t watch it, like, ever); if you were in this position when the transition happened to all-digital, you could get the government to pony up the $40 or so for the device, but we had to pay for it ourselves. It’s been a long time since we did that, and I’m not so sure that Best Buy would even have them in stock any more. It would probably just be more practical to just get a modern TV to plug the antenna into.
Not to go too off thread, but there are two separate components of this: Old TV and old antenna
Old TV’s won’t work no matter what as they don’t have the right electronics to decode the digital signal. But an old antenna will still work since the broadcast signal is still using the same TV spectrum of VHF and UHF frequencies. An old antenna can pick up the TV frequencies just like a new antenna can.
It may be too late for this situation, but it’s good to have a cheap antenna on hand for emergencies. If the cable/dish/internet goes out, you might still be able to receive the local broadcast channels.
The old antenna jack still works the guy roommate, he has separate living quatersand his old fashioned tv is on antenna he gets 2 channels. He has been splitting and delivering wood all day. He hasn’t been home. The other lady roommate is staying in town. We’re on 15 acres. We have goats chickens ducks. Bee hives, gardens and pigeans. We had just started tilling them. This Chris’s maybe last trip. I sent a big electric heater with a fire place with a fake lighted flame so it looks nice and gives off quite a Beeit of light to his brothers. He’s on a generater too. But him and wife are 70 plus years and his brothers wife had a stroke a few years ago. She like a child. She was still cold.
Fires. are going in 2 smokers and the cast iron stove is raging. We’re having pork loin chops, deer jockstrap and dove wrapped in bacon on the grill, mashed potatoes a big pot of pinto beans with jalapeno cornbread and ice tea.
So far 45 or 5 are coming maybe more they didn’t have food or electric
My neighbor gave me a package of those depend undewear. I needed a package of diapers not any to be found, I got the duck tape and I’ll modify. I am s glad Raygar can’t understand what he’s saying. I know its going to look funny. Got to make coffee. It’s get moving.
Good Luck and God be with ya, Broomstick, Jane Doe and everybody else riding the storm out. The Doors and Stevie Ray are cued up.
If. A tornado warning comes up or winds over 50 or anything a joke… Post away.
Regards
OK, I’ll bite. Either that (bold) is a typo, or WTF??
I hope it’s “deer jerky.” 
deer backkstrap cut like fillet mignon steak wrapped in bacon and grilled. Google spell check strikes again.
OK, that sounds a lot better. I thought that may be some weird Texas thing. 
Take it easy and stay safe!
Delicious
Cooking dinner in the fireplace:
Luna still isn’t a fan of the snow. But she sure takes a good photo!
Interesting tweet thread about the problems here in TX:
Unsurprisingly, the politicians here in Texas are already falling all over themselves to express outrage and cast blame (the better to preempt being blamed themselves) for the failings of the state electrical grid.
And relevant to the thread title, Austin Energy finally this evening shut down major industrial users like Samsung and the big semiconductor manufacturers. They’re also taking a ton of shit for the fact that all of downtown is still lit up like Christmas, including the enormous office buildings that are presumably sitting empty since no one can get to them (because the city has no ability to clear the roads). The downtown business alliance sent out an email to building owners asking them to shut down all nonessential electrical uses, especially exterior building lights – i.e. “turn off your fucking floodlights, you morons, or you’re gonna get us all shut down.”
The HVAC systems of big buildings are designed around the reality that a lot of lights are on a lot of the time.
IIRC during the various energy crunches, oil embargoes, etc., of the past 50 years that there was a lot of outrage about well-lit office buildings over the weekends or at night. But if the lights were turned off en masse, the workers came in on Monday morning to a building that was 60 degrees inside and it’d never warm up.
Nowadays with more LED lighting you’d assume the expected heat loading from illumination would be much less. So buildings can turn off interior lighting without triggering an HVAC disaster.
And of course it was and is the case that exterior decorative lighting is a dead waste.
“No one owes you or your family anything,” Tim Boyd wrote on Tuesday in a now-deleted Facebook post, according to KTXS and KTAB. “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!”
People are in serious discomfort and possible life threatening danger, but in this case residents don’t seem to matter. I agree with the OP that people should come before some industrial uses but careful planning is needed. You should be able to rely on your municipal leaders for some support tho.
I almost (but not quite) feel bad for this guy. This isn’t really the sort of thing a small-town part-time mayor is set up to deal with–the problems go much higher. I sorta imagine he had a half dozen people call him and demand he “do something” and he really couldn’t. But rather than just lash out at them, he took the path of a the passive-aggressive Facebook rant, thereby shooting himself and his family in the foot. If he’d just said “Look, Bob, I get that you are cold and frustrated but so am I and I know for a damned fact that you have a brother with a generator so if you’d just swallow your damn pride and move your family over to his house, you’d be fine”, none of this would have happened.
In more enlightened areas of the country, the towns and cities open the schools and community centers as warming centers where people can stay out of the cold and have access to working toilets.
I know. And I don’t actually feel bad for him. And for all I know, Colorado City did have warming centers set up.
It just reads like a rant directed at someone in particular that he was too chickenshit to name–and it backfired because when applied generally, it’s horrifying. But I am sure that this is not a huge deviation from the guy’s normal character,
ETA: I’m well north of the area of town mentioned on this map, and our water has been off for most of the morning.
I’m not sure how many folks are in and around Austin, but we’ll probably see more water issues around the state until things warm up a bit. Fortunately, I have a pretty decent stock of drinking water available. The power came back on recently so that should give some of us time to re-charge and maybe warm up a bit before the next cycle. Fortunately, the power in my neighborhood hasn’t been off for multiple days like a lot of people around the city. Stay safe out there folks!
Honestly, it’s yet another example of why I’m glad I’ve stayed off Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/et cetera.
Tough shit.
I have ZERO sympathy for this “mayor” with zero sympathy for his constituents, the people he is supposed to be working for.
Look, I get that a mayor - any mayor, really, but especially those of smaller cities and towns - have limited resources. But, you know what? Instead of that social media post he could have done something at least a teeny bit helpful. Like a list of things people could do that, while far from great, might actually help people. Stuff like:
He can try to find places that ARE open, that DO have heat, and ask them to take in the most vulnerable.
He can try to pool resources - people who have grills, for example, might be asked if they could cook food for people who otherwise might not have access to warm food right now.
He can give people updated local forecasts (so, for example, people don’t have to get on the internet and ask people a literal thousand miles away to do that for them)
There are a LOT of things you can do with just the ability to broadcast and a central location for people to contact, even if you have nothing else to work with. A REAL leader would do that - he wouldn’t blame the victims and verbally beat up on people in actual danger.
This former mayor is scum. He is incompetent. He has failed the public trust. He doesn’t deserve a job with a tax-payer funded paycheck.