Winter Storm Fern

Let me just preface this by saying i was aware winter storm Fern was coming. She wasnt a surprise. Everyone in a 500 mile radius was running around panicking buying every single item in every grocery store whether it was foot fungus cream or light bulbs. They just felt we needed to buy. Buy everything in order to prepare. Im constantly amazed by the panic buying. What the **** is extra light bulbs or memory foam shoe inserts going to help you with in a winter storm people?! Slow down and come back to earth. While everyone was panic buying i was making a few preparations of my own. I brought the home depot bucket toilet inside from the shed, got the old down comforter out of the shed (because its straight feathers rather than the newer blends of feathers and foam), bought an extra gallon of water to put with my 6 three gallon water jugs i keep around in case of emergency, and started covering everything with plastic where i intended to put the chickens. I did go to tractor supply and get some water bottles for the chicken crates but they wouldnt hold any water. They were cheap and they just emptied it all onto the crate floors in rapid dripping streams. I had to go to stoneware bowls instead. The take away message here is that you dont know what you done know. Im a firm believer in the sentiment that each new winter storm teaches you something, and it does that, mainly in the form of breaking new shit that you hadn’t previously envisioned as a potential problem up until that moment. So you can probably see where this story is going, but i’ve left out a bit of context here that is pertinent to understanding the full scope of the adventure that was weathering winter storm Fern at our house. One of the dogs had a partially torn ACL and wasnt supposed to be running or jumping at all until February 1st, in an attempt to give it a chance to try and heal on its own. This meant that the Australian shepherd had to be let out on short leash only and carried up and down the porch stairs during every potty break.

I settled on the front left corner of the house as the place for the chickens, mostly because it was the place they could do the least damage with poop flinging but also because it would be drafty in front of the door and the chickens had proved in previous ice storms that they could huddle together and make the air in a stock tank 80 degrees while it was 34 in the house so i decided it’d be better to give them that area than the dogs who were probably better off in the area next to the bed sandwiched between the crates and a number of potted redbud, crape myrtle, and pecan trees as well as some herbs, rose bushes, and aloe vera plants. Keenly familiar with the birds’ habit of pooping, and then scratching in that poop looking for bugs and seeds, resulting in the flinging of chicken feces with a velocity that could cover half the tiny house…i took down the curtains, folded them, and placed them at the back of the house. I replaced the curtains instead with a series of trash bags zip tied together, hung from the curtain rod, and taped to the door. I cut several ziplock freezer bags down the sides and then taped them over anything hanging on the wall in the designated chicken area. Then i laid out a plastic drop cloth my artist friend had given me. I tried to have it cover the floor and any nearby furniture, such as the metal basin used as a bath tub. It usually faces the pantry but i turned it sideways to hold the drop cloth out a further distance from the “chicken high-rise condos”. I used a wooden frame with wire mesh stapled to it as a baby gate to separate the dogs from the chickens so there would be no canine type vacuuming of the drop cloth (ingestion of chicken shit and bird seed are both recipes for explosive green diarrhea in the house in the middle of a winter storm…not the time you want that). I set up three crates, put a nesting pad in each one, stacked them on top of one another, and zip tied them in place. I cut off the tails of the zip ties so the chickens would not be preoccupied with sticking their heads through the bars and trying to eat the strange black plastic snakes. I tried putting livestock bottles against the side of the crate, kind of like a bigger version of a gerbil’s, but they dripped non stop without the chickens touching them and i decided i could google how to fix that or just go with the tried and true. I gave the chickens my bowls and they drank water out of those.

Well, here we are headed into the first night of Fern, a friday. I’d finished work and gotten all the outdoor plants watered with 3 watering cans of water because if its going to be 11 degrees, you should make sure everything is over-watered. don’t ask me why but it will keep the tree from freezing to death. I know this because ive seen it work. Covering stuff? Useless. Leave it uncovered. Dont waste your sheets. Drowning it? Worth it. Works every time. I have a couple friends i can think of who know more about plants than me who could probably explain it but honestly i dont care why it works as long as it does. I learned it from a plant nursery. Well anyways, i got everything watered and i was doing a load of laundry because Friday night was the last time the temperature would be above freezing before monday and i figured i had better have something to wear to work for the following week. The dryer vent used to open and close by itself. For the past two years it has been a manual vent. It opens by itself but requires you to close it. No amount of WD-40 fixes the problem so i can only conclude that as the ground has shifted and the house is not completely level (i know because i had a leak in the roof once that was running from the front of the house to the back before dripping down the ceiling because the front of the house is now slightly higher than the back so it ran down hill along the piece of metal that is the ceiling) the frame of the vent is not completely square, and so it doesnt close without human help at this point. So, it was raining, light but steady. It had gotten dark. I had moved the chickens into the high rise chicken condos, and the dogs were in front of the heater. I was waiting out the dryer, ready to go manually close the vent, when i fell asleep in the rocking chair.

When i woke up it was pouring. I wasnt sure how long it had been pouring but i had just woken up and my brain was not braining. I didnt even know what time it was. All i knew was that the display on the dryer was dark, meaning the cycle was over and wrinkle guard was done and now we just had a hole in the side of the house letting cold air in and hot air out for no reason. (In the summer its also a vehicle of entry for scorpions). Anyways, i rushed outside with an umbrella in my pajamas and flip flops to close the dryer vent. As i stepped off the porch into the darkness i went down into ankle deep water. My pants were instantly wet. The umbrella was pretty useless against the wind driven rain which was so heavy and dense that it stung upon hitting your skin. I realized pretty quick i should have brought the head lamp as i could see nothing. But i wasnt sure how water proof it was so maybe it was better in the house. I made my way along the side of the house with the sound of rain hitting standing water as a thunderous applause all around. I snapped the vent shut with wet fingers and turned to head back to the house.

At least in the town where i live theres a lot of rock and dirt. some of the water can get soaked up, even though theres more rock than dirt. In nearby kerrville it is increasingly more asphalt and cement. The first night of winter storm Fern, Kerrville got enough water to flood. I did too but my tiny house is on pier and beam and my sheds and well house are raised as well. Everything is up on wood skids or cement blocks and the well house is on a raised cement foundation. Necessary to avoid disaster in a place that is mostly limestone rock, even though my little plateau is on the top of a hill.

I took off the wet clothes immediately and changed into something dry to keep warm. Then i stood in the kitchen trying to make sense of what happened with my carefully planned storm prep timeline. The conclusion i came to was that i fell asleep. Friday night was when i began feeling really sick but i still spent over an hour out there hauling the watering can three to four hundred feet from the well to each tree cuz a home depot wagon is not in the budget right now (one day); Only for nature to dump an enormous amount of water on the yard and render all that nonsense i just did futile. It turns out several patients at work had covid and i would lose my sense of smell and taste after winter storm Fern so thats probably what i had during the whole of it. That’s right. Amongst the disasters that cropped up during winter storm Fern was the detail that i was mind numbingly sick throughout the whole thing. I was doing my best to remain in charge while high as a kite on cold and flu meds and miserable with coughing and sinus pressure and then vertigo but the dogs and the chickens had no intention of making that easy. I folded the laundry and hung some of it up, set the alarms, then went to bed with the chickens in their high rise tower, the dogs in front of the tractor supply heater baby gated in with a step stool, potted trees, and a wooden framed mesh rectangle, and the window unit and tractor supply heater working in tandem, the freestanding one set two degrees higher than the window unit, to keep the stress off the window unit which was more fragile and prone to past problems with the compressor overheating. That meant the window unit would only kick on when the freestanding heater needed help, thus giving the window unit a break periodically when the desired temperature was reached. I woke up sick as a dog. The electricity was on. I was praying it stayed on the whole time because i, at this time, cannot afford to add a generator to the homestead which would require making a cement platform and then spending over $3000 to get one that could support both the well house and the house. So, without a generator, its imperative the electricity stays on or the heat lamp in the well house goes off. Though nearby bandera electric had a three hour outage. Kpub came through and delivered non-stop uninterrupted electricity throughout winter storm Fern, which i greatly appreciated in my circumstance. The biggest priority was keeping electricity to the well house.

So this is what we woke up to. It looks like snow but its not. Its actually ice. First all that standing water froze. Then precipitation continued to fall on top of it in the form of tiny ice balls. i find snow much easier to drive on than ice. This, was not to drive on. There were many jackknifed 18-wheelers who no doubt had a deadline that wouldnt wait, a 20 car pileup on the highway, and a truck that hit a snow plow and took it out of commission. A coworker just tried to face his car towards the sun in his driveway to melt the ice and went sliding down the driveway and pulled the emergency brake. This was not to drive on.

There was a significant amount of ice accumulation on the trees (i forgot to mention that while coming down with covid, friday night i went around and cut all the low hanging branches near structures, chicken and dog pens, sheds, and the laundry line down so that if the trees sagged they’d have room to not be touching stuff i wanted to keep) and no one knew whether the electric companies were going to be able to keep the power on throughout the storm so warming shelters were set up all over texas.

The sherriff’s facebook page stated that crates were set up and that people shouldnt hesitate to come because they dont want to leave their pets behind because well behaved non aggressive crated dogs and cats were welcome. All i said was “just for personal knowledge, are non aggressive crated chickens allowed at the warming shelters?” The question was not appreciated. I guess warming shelters will never be a thing i utilize. Not sure how i’d get there anyway. I’d probably be better off under the down comforter than trying to drive in this sh*t, and i was pretty sure they wouldnt have appreciated my feverish ass bringing them all contagion anyways. No, we were staying. Chickens still are not welcome at warming shelters so we were in it for the long haul no matter what.

I cant remember if this was day one or day two. Its all a blur with the timeline because i was off my rocker on herbal and western medicine the whole time and had joint aches and a splitting headache ache and the sweats for a whole 24 hours before i got the right combo of meds figured out to keep the fever at bay. Oh, i forgot to mention that this is the time i had blocked out to do 36 hours of continuing education courses online if the electricity stayed on, because i knew i’d likely be cooped up in the house for at least three days anyways. Every two years an occupational therapy assistant has to log continuing education units into a website to prove they’ve learned something new, are keeping up with the times, and deserve to keep practicing in the field. I have to renew in August so i figured id take the opportunity and go ahead and learn something while iced in. I have adhd so i do much better making a hyper-focus weekend out of it with a bunch of tasty junk food snacks than trying to do a course here or there. So i had bought all the junk food and now couldnt eat more than half of it because i was sick and you dont eat coconut sugar or agave when sick unless you want to be more sick. But i ate the potato chips and tater tots, the salty part of the snack food, and trudged on through the courses between cold medicine induced naps. The chickens were a complete and utter nuisance during these courses. Every 30 seconds one or more of the five chickens had something to say, at which point i had to pause the video until they were done squawking or just put my face very close to the keyboard to hear the instructor. It was exhausting and i was ready to end everybody in that little one room tiny house with me by the end of day 2. I finished all my ceu courses and saved the certificates in a folder on the desktop. Honestly, i dont know how. I was absolutely miserable. Refusal to be defeated? I dont know.

During the day the sun would peek out and melt some stuff which would then refreeze but as solid non textured ice rather than ice balls that crunched when you walked on them. Each time it melted and refroze it became slicker and slicker.

Yep, i got to stay home but the nurses and cnas had to go to work, regardless of how undriveable the roads or how dangerous the situation. because they were considered essential workers. The elders’ lives depended on them. So, they dont get a choice whether they want to risk wrecking their car. I just want to take a moment to give them what is due because many people dont understand that they do not get a choice. Someone licensed has to administer meds, doctor wounds, and be there to give resuscitative measures in the event that they are required. If the roads are impassible, the nurses still have to drive/slide them, even if it just means they call 911 and request rescue from a ditch after the car is totaled instead of not coming to work because they’re safely in their house. I live outside the “city limits” of our town so there is no “plow” up here, only ice. The main road of a small town will be plowed but how are you getting to it?

The dogs had to be taken out potty one at a time so they wouldnt rile each other up and cashew had to be on leash and carried down and then back up the porch stairs to avoid leaping. It was a lot of work and opening and closing of the front door, letting the warm air out and the cold air in.

Okay here is where i realized we had yet another problem. The rain had fallen into the window unit, as it always does, but at some point rain had frozen into ice on the inside bottom of the unit, blocking the drain hole on the bottom right of the unit. All further rain that fell in there had no path of escape and unbeknownst to me, had been accumulating in a block of ice in the interior of the window unit. Simultaneously, icicles were forming on the inside of the unit, hanging from the top air vent slots. Those were hanging down and periodically getting chopped off by the rotating blades. Well then the sun came up and started melting the beefy icicles hanging from the tin roof. Those fat b*stards were dripping with reckless abandon into the slots on the top of the window unit and then freezing upon hitting the block of ice inside. The block grew to 2.5 inches in height and it was at this point that the window unit made a weird rattling noise and sputtered to a halt. I turned it off immediately upon hearing it stop. I hurried outside in flip flops to check on the problem that had developed as i was aware our main source of heat had just “stopped” and without warm air blowing from it, the window unit was just a giant rectangular open spot to the outside air. I arrived at the window unit to discover the problem i described above, which i was previously completely unaware of. I hurried to the dog run and grabbed the toy box lid i used to cover the dog bowls. But there was a problem. It was covered in thick ice. I went inside and threw open the tool box to grab the hammer. The dogs were all excited. I ignored them. We had a real problem at bay. I took the hammer outside. I broke all the ice off the exterior of the window unit with the hammer. Then i broke all the ice off the toy box lid with the hammer. I placed the toy box lid on top of the window unit. The damage was done. The interior was full of ice and the temperature was such that any water i poured would have frozen on top of it and added to the problem. Boiling water would have cracked and broken things i needed intact and melted others i also needed intact. I needed the temperature to be above freezing to use water to thaw something that had a drain under 2.5 inches of solid ice. The window unit was out of commission, so why the lid? Well, the window unit was becoming heavy laden with all this extra ice and it was held in the window sill by four screws and some plaster against the window above it. In order to not rip the window sill off, i needed to stop the accumulating extra weight. Every time a large icicle fell or a gust of wind blew i would have to go out and reposition the toy box lid on the window unit but it was naturally a sloped surface so it was draining the excess melt water onto the ground. As the icicles melted in the sun they began falling off the roof in big chunks. They would hit the side of the house or the window unit on the way down and make a loud noise. Cashew thought we were under attack. Normally id just let her outside to see what was going on but i couldnt because she was supposed to stay off her leg and not run or jump. So i kept her inside at which point she started incessantly barking. I put her in the crate. She barked from the crate. I put a sheet over her crate, like people do to put parrots to bed. The sheet was mine, from my bed spread. I see movement out of the corner of my eye and the sheet is being twisted and pulled inwards from the outside to the inside of the crate. Sure enough, Cashew has my sheet in her teeth and is running in a circle in the middle of the crate. I snatched the sheet away from her and told her she was a bad dog. It had slobber all over it. I set it in the laundry machine to be washed another day, hoping she hadnt ripped or torn it. She barked and barked and barked as icicles fell all around us. I covered my throbbing head with my blankets and tried to plug my ears to drown her out.

It was at this point that i checked in with my best friend and neighbor who lived ten minutes up the road by car. The tractor supply space heater was now heating the space on its own and with a giant hole and accordion blind in the window, the temp was going down one degree every five minutes. It was not going to be able to do the job on its own. I checked if there was a way i could close the shutters on the window unit and there was not. They would turn left or right to direct the air flow but it was not made to close. They werent that kind of shutter. They were tall and skinny and didnt reach across to the next piece. I immediately grabbed my bath towel and the towel i used as a bathroom mat, the hand towel and the kitchen towel, an old shirt, and a previous cat sling from last year. I stuffed them against the accordion blind things on either side of the window unit where air was just coming into the house in a rush. I placed one in front of the window unit itself and duct taped it there. My friend asked me how things were going. I said, “not good. The window unit just quit.” I filled her in and she said she had towels and an extra space heater i could borrow. I was very appreciative but neither of us could figure out how the space heater was getting from her house to mine. We argued back and forth about who was not going to go out. She didnt want me to get stranded in a ditch while sick and i didnt want her to wreck her car. I said “its going to be closest to freezing at 3 pm. Its going to be 27 at 3 pm. Hopefully the sun will melt some of this and i can try to make the drive to your house. Im going to lay down for a nap and ill try the drive at 3 pm.” The sun came out for 30 seconds at a time and disappeared for 10 minutes at a time. It melted nothing. My friend made an executive decision without me.

I was trying to get a little rest before the 3 pm scheduled brush with death and car insurance when i got a phone call. It was my best friend hollering about i had to go outside and something about hitch hiking. I was confused. I asked, “you’re hitchhiking?” She said, “no! Your heater is! Go outside and flag them down. They’re coming in a truck. They’re going your way. I told them how to get there.” It took a while to piece together what she was talking about. I think in the moment i understood someone was bringing her heater to me in a truck but i didnt fully understand how that came about until after the fact when she said she heard a truck and went out in the yard and flagged them down and begged them to take the heater to me because my window unit had quit and i had an injured dog and we needed to stay warm. Well, my first thought was that if they were driving on this sh*t, i didnt want them to have to try the hill to get to me. And there was no turn around spot. The road would dead end at the drug and rehab facility if they even made it onto the hill. I wanted to go down to the intersection and intercept them so they could keep the truck on flatter road and facing the direction they were intending on traveling. That’s the first time i ate it. I went down like a sack of potatoes on my right hip and sat there on the ice processing for a minute before hearing an engine in the distance and renewing my dedication to the purpose of getting to the intersection before they got there. Luckily, they were moving as slow as i was so i had some time. I got to the intersection right before a dark colored pickup truck pulled up with a rolled down window. The woman in the passenger seat said “are you laura?” I shook my head emphatically, “yes!” She handed me a bag of towels. I showered them with a chorus of thank you’s. Then the man driving got out and placed a tall skinny box into my arms. It was the space heater. I said, “Thank you thank you thank you thank you so much!” They told me i was welcome. They maneuvered their way through the ice to get back straight on the road and headed on towards bandera while i picked my way carefully up the hill and climbed over the fence, as the padlock and chain on the gate were encased in ice and frozen shut. I carried my treasures back to the house and immediately began setting up our plan c with so much gratitude in my heart and thankfulness i didnt have to try to drive on the ice. I dont know how that couple did it. They were literally the only car engine i heard for probably the span of 6 or 7 hours. They must be from up north and know how or have special tires or something. All i know is that they dropped into my friend and i’s lives like angels sent from heaven. I didnt have to go an hour without before they showed up with a heater and towels and they were complete strangers that had never met either of us before. Good people.

I set both heaters up in the kitchen to combat the air coming through the gaping hole that was now the out of commission window unit. I asked grok if it was temporarily out of commission…if it would turn back on when the ice melted and grok thought it would. Pretty quickly i tripped the circuit. Both heaters could not be on the same circuit so i had only one choice. I had to sacrifice the toilet as a stand for the second heater and start using the home depot bucket as the toilet (the second heater was not like the first heater and the whole thing got hot so you couldnt move it with your hands once it was on).

So now i had a space heater in the front of the house pointed towards the back and a space heater in the back of the house pointed towards the front. It was a plan.

I used the extra towels and some duct tape to further block the cold air from coming through the window unit.

It worked. The temperature started rising again and then i even had to turn down the heater in the back of the house half way or a third of the way depending on the changing temperature outside because it would go above the set temperature. With both space heaters we were now maintaining the interior temperature nicely but given that the window unit was an open gaping hole in the window that the heaters had to work against, i enacted a “open the door minimally” policy which dictated that we all go out potty together. This was a mistake.

I opened the door, clad all in winter gear, one dog in my arms, and the other in tow. Everything went awry when i set Cashew down carefully on the ice and said to both dogs, “wait” which in dog language must have meant “mush!” because before i knew it i was on my ass. I went down hard as she took off full speed, got the wind knocked out of me, landed mostly straight on my left hip and butt cheek, and then got a good road rash on my left palm and forearm where i was trying to hold onto the ice as she dragged me. All the hollering and screaming finally got her attention and both dogs stopped and looked back at me as if to say “you good?” At which point i lost my shit sitting on the ice holding onto the edge of the nearby iced over fire pit, pulling back on the leash as she repeatedly tried to resume “mush”. I cried and babbled about how neither them nor the chickens had listened to me once throughout this whole storm and they should listen to me because i have good ideas, like dont mush, and dont eat chicken sh*t. But nobody listens to me and im so tired and so sick and so cold and i told you to wait and you didnt wait. I finished my loopy monologue and then sat on my butt and cried because i was in a ton of pain and i couldnt tell if it was “tissue bruised” pain or “hip fractured” pain and i guess i didnt want to know yet. I just needed a minute so i sat and cried. The dogs cared not. For whatever reason, my resident nurses that help me through every endometriosis day decided covid was not a thing that required nursing and they were total and utter brats throughout the entire storm. Cashew would pull me down on the ice a total of three times during winter storm Fern. So i ate it a total of 4 times. My butt is a kaleidoscope of blue, green, and purple, and apparently i have great bone density (good thing). Enjoy below some pictures of the yard and the dogs i was mad beyond words at.

Monday it got up to 41 briefly for an hour but it wasnt enough to even put a dent in the ice. As soon as it hit 41 it dipped back in the thirties and was freezing before no time. The ice remained, especially because the window unit was in the shade and the ice was on the inside. I had to call work and say i couldnt make it because the window unit still was encased in a block of ice internally. It was set to make it to 55 on tuesday so i told them i was confident i could make it in wednesday.

The chickens were cold hardy to 17 degrees so as soon as it was only getting into the twenties at night and not the teens, i put those chickens back outside, where all of us collectively wanted their ass*s to be. They were loud and i was too sick for all that racket and the poop flinging was about as charming as you are imagining it to be.

On tuesday around 1:40 pm i assessed that the ice block in the bottom of the window unit had melted enough to turn it on so i decided to try it. I turned it on, the blades whirred to life, and we were back in business with a functional window unit. Add “window unit roof on 4 elongated wooden legs” to the list of things i need to build before next winter. It needs to be covered but not have obstructed air flow. So, i scribbled a blue print on another envelope and i will take that to home depot some month after i pay taxes and recover from paying taxes. Sigh. I felt mighty blessed the thing wasnt broken, i’ll just say that. God certainly did provide every step of the way with the electricity being on, the couple in the truck on the way to bandera, and the window unit not being permanently busted. We were very blessed.

Well, wednesday morning i was about an hour late to work. After eating it on the ice 4 times i just opened the door and said, “you know what, have at it, run jump, do what you’re gonna do. Just do it without me.” I let both dogs out off leash and went back in the house. I figured i was making reasonable time until i realized the only way out from the carport was backwards and backwards was a massive shady spot behind the carport where it was still a thick sheet of ice. I got the car stuck and couldnt angle the wheels at all because of the carport poles. I used kitty litter to make some texture to gain traction. Boy was it a mess when it melted but it got me off the ice, so, worth it. Once i finally got the car unstuck i realized the gate was still chained. Padlock thawed, car freed, i made my way to work on dry roads while the window unit kept the dogs warm at home. It was a grueling week. I was sick for a while and when i quit needing the decongestants and cough suppressants i was just exhausted, like beyond exhausted. I went to work saturday to make up for being gone tuesday. Sunday i was supposed to sleep but i didnt. I got laundry, dishes, cooking, and writing done. Im still no more rested and still full of snot. Winter storm Fern. Memorable. Nice meeting you. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and though it’ll be a lovely year for the peach crop, kindly dont come back.