Winter Weather Watch

Never thought I'd hear those three words on the news: winter weather watch. But that's what we're having..... another frozen blast of winter. The city of Houston is officially closed tomorrow.... schools are closed and everyone is advised to just stay home. (Not only Houston, but in all the cities and towns of this state that are being hit with below-normal temperatures.)

My husband drove into work this morning and then The Powers That Be there decided to close the buildings and cancel everything for today as well as tomorrow. Unless one works for an emergency service, people have been told to stay home tomorrow. We were just watching the news on TV and there are some teeny drops of sleet falling in downtown Houston. Not a soul is on the streets, not a car is driving on the city roads. When I think of what's been going on in the northeast, what's happening in the Houston area is just a drop in the rain-bucket.

Speaking of buckets..... my husband has had to go to our neighbors J & J for buckets of water. We thought we were doing so good during this latest hard freeze (as the Weather Wizards call it)....... turning off the water at night, turning it back on in the morning. And it was working nicely till yesterday...... my husband went out to the well to turn on the water and the handle broke. It was just so frozen that it broke, plain and simple. We called a plumber but he suggested we wait till Saturday to fix it-- that's when our temperature is supposed to go back to the mid-60s. The plumber was afraid that if he fixed it, the handle would just freeze up and break again. Top priority is now going to be to enclose that pump system so the hard freezes can't do this again.

As if all of the above weren't enough...... I hurt my back two nights ago as I was helping my husband lift the mattress and box-spring from our bed. (A king-sized bed, no less.) We were doing that at 1:30 in the morning. Why? Because there was a bat flying around the house and he flew into our bedroom and hid himself in the fancy-dancy wood moulding over the windows above the bed. The only way for my husband to get the ladder in the right place to capture the bat was to get everything off of the bed so he could position that ladder in the middle of windows, which is right where the middle of the bed's headboard is.

The entire production took two hours, from first-sighting to releasing that bat. My husband managed to get the bat at the end of a long piece of wood... the bat just crawled on the wood and my husband walked slowly down the ladder and out to the upstairs balcony. When my husband hit the piece of wood with his hand, the bat flew off. I was not watching all of this.... I was outside the bedroom door trying to make believe that I didn't hurt my back moving the mattress and box-spring. Then of course, we had to put the box-spring and mattress back. I honestly don't know how I managed to help him do that, but we got everything back in place and fell into bed exhausted. By the time I woke up in the morning, I couldn't get out of bed. Ditto for this morning.

For someone who doesn't take so much as an aspirin, I finally had to give in. I called my cousin L to ask her what I could take for the back-ache...... then called neighbors J & J to see if they could go to the pharmacy for me (my husband wanted to stay home, but I had insisted he go into work for today's meetings). Luckily, J & J had just what I needed in their house and they brought some over to me..... and also checked on the chickens before they left.

I was just as worried about the chickens as I was about my back. The chickens were fine... their water had frozen in the bowl in the coop, but J & J got fresh water out to them, and after the first couple of pills got into my system, I was able to do that myself late this afternoon. I will be taking those pills every four hours till I can bend down and touch my toes, I swear.

We are supposed to get either sleet or snow tomorrow, depending on which way the wind blows and which clouds come over the hills here. The TV Weather Wizards said we could get between one and three inches of snow. Possibly. Maybe. (Do they really know?) Whatever we get will be gone by Saturday as the temperature climbs back up into the 60s, after staying below freezing for the past four days. The plumber will be here on Saturday, and this will all be just a memory. Another winter memory. Second winter in a row that the water pipes, underground sprinklers, and well-water systems are bursting and popping all over the state. Not exactly yee-haaaw moments.