This is kind of an emergency blog post. My city has been locked in an insane frozen wintery wonderland for the last 3 days. And before you ask, no, this is not normal. We typically get 0-1 snow/ice events per year, with significant accumulation across the whole metro area one every 5 or so years. This is an anomaly.

But on Friday, which I took off from work because it was my birthday, the snow that started falling the night before started sticking and I knew we were in for a doozy. Now 3 days later, it hasn’t gotten above freezing, we have about 10-12″ of snow, topped with ice on the ground, and our power went out at 3am.

At the same time this morning, the “warm” front came through, raising the temperature about 10 degrees and beginning to melt everything from the roads, roofs, cars, telephone wires, etc. We got up around 8am and started shoveling and running both our cars to charge our phones. We even had a neighbor come by and drop her phone off to charge a bit. We were happy to help.

We’re mostly fine so far, but my parents across town haven’t had power since Thursday night and they live on a hill where trees have been falling down all around them. Their entire property is encased with ice and trees and debris have blocked their driveway, as well as the ice.

Since nobody can get out and drive on the roads (some have been rendered impassable due to fallen trees and power lines), we weren’t able to get to them and they couldn’t get out, but this afternoon, we had a stroke of luck. One of their neighbors had a large 4×4 truck and was leaving to go to a hotel and offered them a ride. We decided to do the same and after much wrangling with multiple online reservation sites and dropped calls with robot customer service reps, we were able to get rooms as well. One night in two rooms, then two additional nights in with all of us in one room. We’re trying to make the best of a terrible situation. At least we all now have heat and electricity.

Not sure what we’re gonna do about work, though.

If anyone thought 2020 was going to be the breaking point, might I suggest 2021 is a continuation of much of the overwhelming tragedy and human struggles. Just when we think we’ve made it past one thing, another one raises its head. There will be no shortage of challenges we must face going forward. All we can do is take it one step, one day at a time and hope/pray that others will be willing/able to pick up some slack when we are unable as we will for them when they struggle. This time period is a challenge to all of humanity, not any one of us. We will hang together or we will most certainly hang separately, metaphorically speaking, of course.

Please stay safe out there, and help anyone and everyone you see as much as you are able. You never know who will be the one to give you help when you need it.