Having Fun Again

 The power has been on for over a day now, and the seriousness of the situation has abated significantly. Today I’m having a fun time again.

Darlene had a doctor’s appointment this morning. Even though it has been snowing all night, we have only 5” on the ground. We decided I would drive her to town. We were almost the only vehicle on the road.

At 9:00 AM there were no snowplows out, even on the highway. The little Mazda was dragging bottom badly, and in some places plowing and pushing the snow in front, but as long as I can maintain momentum we move along just fine. The snow is fine, hard frozen powder and is easy to push away, even with the ice sheet on the road surface underneath.

I had to back up and punch through the ridge of snow on the side of the highway, but once I got out on the highway I was able to get up to 55 or 60  on the hard ice and packed snow. There were no other cars around, so stopping distance was infinite. 

When I got to town, the snow ridges were much higher between lanes, and especially in the median. When coming into Durant on West Main St, it is necessary to make a U-turn through the break in the median to turn north onto Westside St., since the freeway ramp offset the road by a couple of hundred feet.

Now we were in traffic, and several were waiting at the traffic light as I approached. The green arrow came on, so I held my speed up to conserve momentum to turn through the median for the U-turn. Sure enough, the deep snow caused my front wheels to skid wide on the U-turn, and it looked like we might hit the ditch. 

Knowing the brakes wouldn’t help me, I grabbed the parking brake lever, held down the button and pulled up hard as I added a little power to the front wheels. Wheeee! The back wheels broke loose and made a beautiful circle around the front wheels. I let off the hand brake, steered back to the right and caught the lane perfectly and drove on down to turn right on Westside St.  Back when I was a teenager in California, we called this maneuver a Brody. Great fun!

I bet those people waiting at the light thought there was some crazy teenager at the wheel. Worse! Some old white haired codger reliving his youth with a wicked grin on his face.

We weren’t too surprised to find the doctor’s office closed and dark. Both Texas and Oklahoma are having rolling blackouts because they are not equipped to handle this kind of weather. Even if they had snowplows, they can’t plow the city streets because they would remove thousand of raised reflective lane markers on the streets. The only snow removal equipment we saw was a road grader out on highway 70 slowly peeling packed snow off the right lane. If he doesn’t get some help, we might get the highway plowed by March.

So we turned back and went back home. The only trouble was at that stoplight by Walmart in the middle of the banked curve. Last time there was a pickup stranded there, but it was clear when I arrived today. Unfortunately the red light lasts about two minutes, and I couldn’t drive slow enough to avoid having to stop and wait. 

When the light turned green, I had to turn to the right and slowly crawl the tires up the bank and across the intersection until I could get a little speed going and find enough traction to continue forward. 

For the life of me I don’t understand why they piled up a tall bank of soil to create a banked curve, forcing side roads to climb a hill to get up to the highway, and then put a stop light right in the middle of the curve. It is so dangerous that trucks are prohibited from turning left onto the highway from the north, because the sudden banked slope tips them over if they are the least bit heavy or fast. Years ago I made this same turn in my RV and dumped all the dishes out of the upper cupboards.

The logical solution would be to tear out the whole intersection and lower the grade about 15 feet, make the curve flat (It’s not that sharp a curve) and allow side traffic to approach on the level. Today, I suspect it would be impossible to climb up out of the What-a-Burger driveway, and difficult to get up the slope from Walmart with out chaining up or have studded tires on a four wheeler. 

Well, I guess that’s enough fixing all that is wrong with the world. We continued on back to the house with no further trouble, as there still were no cars on the road besides us. 

We are snug inside the house again, hoping the electricity hangs on for the next week or so. 

Today was fun, reminding me of younger days in Colorado and Northern Nevada. I got to practice some of the tricks I learned the hard way in colder climes. If you want to hear a long tale, ask me about how many ways I have been stuck and had to winch out, jack out or dig out.

It took me years to convince my wife Carolyn that the whole fun of four wheeling is to see how far from home you can get stuck!

The Big Chill

 It’s not funny anymore! Things got serious here last night. 

About seven PM the lights went out and the furnace, of course, shut down. We already had the water trickling in the kitchen sink because the pipes run along the west side of this house, just inside the skirting.

The skirting is fairly substantial, with rocks grouted to the bottom of the house all the way around, and the hot water heater is at one end of the house, and the kitchen sink is at the other end, so a trickle of hot water will keep all the pipes toasty - as long as the electric hot water heater has electricity.

We heat this house with propane, and I just put 300 gallons in the tank last week, so that isn’t the problem. The heat from the fire is distributed through the house by an electric fan, and we soon started feeling the cold coming through the walls. 

I have a small tailgate generator in the garage, but I can’t find the amperage rating on the fan motor. One of my plans for the future is to hook up that generator and see if it can handle the load. If not, I may have to buy a bigger one. If I hard wire a double pole/double throw switch to an outside receptacle, I could keep just the furnace alive without electrocuting any linemen working on the service feed outside. 

I’ll have to check with a licensed electrician before I make that move. 

I called the emergency hotline to the power company, and I listened to a recorded message telling me that there was trouble in the Kirsey switchyard and they had people working on restoring power, but no estimate on when they would get the power back on. 

When the power dropped out, it tried to reclose three times, but popped open immediately, as if it was a dead short to ground somewhere. No wind was blowing, and no ice was building up on the trees or wires, so I was baffled as to the cause of the outage.

There were two brief minutes of power about two hours later, but the lights went back out within a minute, leaving us in the dark. I went out to the motor home and retrieved a battery powered lantern with LED lights, which will make light for 20 hours or so.

We sat in the dim light getting colder and colder until about five hours had passed and we were beginning to shiver. Wilma, my sister-in-law, had offered us a warm place to stay the night if the power didn’t come back on, and the power company still had no estimate on power coming back.

The hot water trickle in the kitchen sink was slowly going cold as the water heater filled with cold water. It was near midnight when we decided it was time to abandon the house. I retrieved a couple of bottles of alcohol that Darlene had just bought, and I poured a full bottle of each in the toilet bowls for antifreeze, made sure the water was still trickling in the kitchen sink, just hoping that circulating water at ground temperature might prevent a total freeze up.

We drove over to Wilma’s house and woke her up. She graciously offered us couches and recliners and blankets for the night. I went to sleep in a recliner with ugly thoughts of busted pipes and water spraying all over the house when the power came back on and thawed the pipes.

When I awoke at about eight AM I called the power company again and instead of the recorded message, I was surprised to hear an actual live person. She could not tell me about the outage status, but she took down my number if they needed to contact me.

Darlene and I drove back out to the house at 10 AM and were thrilled to see the power was back on in the house. The water was still trickling in the kitchen sink, and I opened and purged every faucet in the house - no ice found - and both toilets were intact and functional. 

The time on the electric range was 6:00, so I know the power came on six hours earlier, at about 4:20 AM. That’s about nine hours and twenty minutes chilling in the dark.

We drove back to Wilma’s house and got Poppy, Darlene’s dog, and also her cell phone. The roads are snow packed and rutted, so we dragged the bottom of the car in town, which had not seen a snow plow yet. 

Wilma’s house is on the other side of a creek (bayou) with a steep grade on both sides, so getting across involved a lot of momentum, because with packed snow and ice there was no traction. I measured the south slope a year ago when I was installing a gate next to the road, and found it’s a 13 1/2 % slope.

Last night on the way into town a tow truck was extricating a small sedan out of the median that had slid off the road near Walmart. This morning there was white Ford pickup in the same spot with his flashers going, because when he tried to move on the banked curve, it just slid sideways toward the median. There is a banked curve there, with a stop light in the middle of the curve. Somebody needs to send a traffic engineer back to school. If you are required to stop halfway around a curve, they should not bank the curve.

I pulled around the pickup when he stopped sliding, and had no trouble on the rest of the trip home. Everybody here likes pickups, but when the roads are icy there is nothing more helpless than an empty pickup. All the weight is at the front and all the wheels pushing are at the other end in the back.

So this morning I’m proud of my little Mazda3. It went everywhere I needed to drive in the ice and snow, and drove around several other cars and pickups with no trouble at all. I’m pretty proud of this old house, too. It came through the freeze up with no damage at all to the piping anywhere. 

I’m ready for a hot shower now.