Setting the Tone for 2022

This morning started like many other mornings that fell on my days off. The only thing that was different was that today was New Year's Day. I was still planning on doing my seven-mile walk (which takes two hours and twenty minutes to complete), but I wanted to do it alone, as I wanted to include a White Stone meditation during the forest trail part of my walk.

I had no idea what I was going to be in for in my walk. All I knew was that I was going to wait until I got to the bridge that crossed Goose Creek to start my White Stone meditation. Until I got there, I was going to enjoy listening to my music and take some photos, like this one of sago palm seed pods.

When I got to Goose Creek, I took this selfie, fired off a snarky message to a snarky coworker, and then turned off my music, and put my phone on "do not disturb.

I then took three [sort of] cleansing breaths, set my intention to receive my word for the year, and proceeded with my walking mediation.

Well...

...sort of.

I don't think I was too successful with the meditating part. My squirrel brain was much too active, jumping from thought to thought. It wanted to explore. And it insisted the I go check out that body of water to the left of the path.

After reining in my attention, I briefly reflected back on my intention to "receive my word for the year." My attention then got snagged on the word receive.

That's when I started arguing with myself:  

• It was too early in my walking meditation to get a word.

• Maybe another word will come to me.

• Don't go into this already attached with the first word that pops into my head.

• It doesn't have that "ping" factor like the word be had for me in 2017.

.........squirrel!.........

• OK, OK, so maybe receive is the word I need for 2022.

• But, dammit! Wait until I'm done with the walking meditation to claim that word. OK?
• 
  

.........squirrel!.........

Anyhow, I wound up realizing that perhaps this word ~ RECEIVE ~ may indeed be the appropriate word for me. Maybe it is time that I learn to actually receive ~ to be open to receiving ~ instead of running on the hamster wheel chasing that daydream feedback loop in my brain. And perhaps it may be useful to explore my relationship with receiving.

Getting back on track, I continued walking.

Next thing I knew, this bright leafy green seahorse caught my eye.

Of course I had to take a photo of it, do a quick editing job in my iPhone, and then fire off that pic to a seahorse-loving friend.

In the meantime, my mind was whispering:

receive.

Continuing with the walking...ahem...mediation, I happened upon this pond.

Ever since I've moved to the Gulf Coast area, I've been very fascinated with Spanish moss. There's plenty of it here, and I find it quite evocative.

I tried to get a closeup of the egret. The iPhone camera can only zoom so far.

Even though it was on the other side of my pond, it was aware of my presence. What it did not realize was that I did not have the means to come after it. 

By the way, that's a useful thought to keep in mind. Whenever we may be afraid of something, or feel threatened, it would be important to ask ourselves just how real that threat actually is. Just like the egret, who thought that I was going to teleport to the other side of the pond and choke the living daylights out of it, are the threats we perceive realistic?

Approaching the end of the trail (where the rest of the trail is closed due to the animal shelter expansion and construction project) I spied this beauty of a tree shelf mushroom. It practically blended in with its host tree.

Here's the underside of the mushroom.

Having turned around and heading back, I saw a clump of Spanish moss on the ground and decided to get a bit silly.

My mind is reminding me:

receive.

As I approach the bridge that crosses Goose Creek, my little green eyes spy this.

That's a crawfish mud hole.

Crawfish season is almost upon us!

Mudbugs! Mudbugs steamed with corn and sausage with a nice spicy blend!

...receive...

I've arrived at the bridge. The walking meditation is done. I turn on my music and take my phone off "do not disturb" mode. It's time to head back to the Emmett Hutto Parkway circle, finish my walk, and head home. After all, the dogs are patiently waiting for their food. And I want to write the word receive on the blank white stone tile I have at home.

But...

...the grass bank alongside Goose Creek looked so inviting!

And I simply had to explore!

So I followed along the riverbank. The bike tire tracks told me that others have been this way before. But given the small lack of wear in the grass and the small amount of litter, it did not seem that this was a popular and much frequented thoroughfare.

Then I came across this. It caused me to stop in my tracks.

I was blown away by the composition!

Next, I climbed up the site drainage system, and this is what I saw.

At this point I was super excited! Finding something new to explore always does this to me, giving me a huge rush.

Climbing down the site drainage, I continued with my exploration, and very soon I came upon this.

It was another manmade structure, just like the site drainage, that combined brilliantly with nature to create an amazing and dynamic composition! And how lucky I was to come upon two such visual treats in such a short span of time!

Next, I continued to follow the riverbank. And I could not get over the natural beauty that was just a few miles from my house!

More manmade stuff ~ this time a fence ~ juxtaposed with nature.

And more concrete...

I was definitely getting into what I was seeing! And I was thinking that this would be a great place to bring Alice so that she could burn off some energy. (I'd love to also bring Kane and Yoda, but they are elderly dogs who no longer have the physical stamina for such a jaunt.)

But I know that Alice would most certainly love it, and Kane and Yoda would have fun sniffing her and trying to figure out where she went.

I saw this pretty lily-like flower along the riverbank. I'm hoping to get an identification on it.

This bird was a little bit too far away for me to get an idea of what it was.

I've reached a part in my exploration where I felt that it was time for me to turn around and start heading back. It was already close to 10:00 AM, and I did not dare delay my getting home.

As I was heading back, I came across a site where someone had done some illegal dumping. Even the trash had an artful and evocative quality.

Next I came across, amidst the rubbish and the overgrowth, what looked like a part of a building foundation. (Or maybe it was something altogether different.)

As always, when in nature (which really is EVERYWHERE and is EVERYTHING), there are reminders of the circle of life.

I continue on my way back...

...until I get back to the paved walking trail, where this paper wasp nest catches my eye.

It's definitely time to be making my way back home and not adding more time and miles to my walk.

I reflected back on my experiences and realized how this walk set the tone for 2022 by the following:

• Maintaining my commitment to my health and fitness by continuing to get my steps in.

• Examining my relationship with receiving.

• Being open to new experiences.

• Staying curious.

• Taking time to explore new things and reveling in that exploration.

So yeah, this walk in the woods was a good thing. And now it was time to hurry home, especially since it started raining...

...and there were still some two to two and half miles left to go.

Fortunately, it was a light rain that did not last very long.

In no time I was back in the boring fancy-schmancy subdivision where all the houses are monotonous ticky-tacky brick boxes.

The all-night-and-into-the-morning revelers who wished me a Happy New Year have disbanded.

I continued.

Just a random photo of some kid's toy car.

Finally, after nearly three hours of walking, I am home.

I am home. 

The dogs and cat have been fed. 

And I committed my word for 2022 to the white stone tile.

Happy New Year, all y'all! Make it meaningful!

 

Zen and the Art of Hunkering Down: A Personal Chronical of the Texas Power Crisis of 2021

On Sunday, Valentine's Day, I was rather anxious to finish my shift, as I knew that there would have only a short amount of daylight to complete my winter storm prep outside. I had three outdoor spigots to insulate and cover, and I did that in my usual ghetto rigging style, which included using blankets, towels, plastic bags, and large plastic containers. I even sacrificed a plastic trash barrel, slitting it up the side so that it could slide over the tall free-standing spigot, after I wrapped it in a blanket and a large plastic trash bag.

(Yup! There are wrapped and insulated water spigots hiding under those plastic tubs!)

Taking care of the plants was going to be another challenge. During the last snow storm in December 2017, part of the young sago palm in front of my patio got frostbitten. I wanted to make sure that I could protect it, but I could not locate the plastic drop cloth I had bought ages ago. But I did find a bed skirt, and threw that over the palm. (It wound up getting blown off.)

Then there were the plants in the atrium. They have survived winters in the atrium before, and I was crossing my fingers they would survive this storm. I did manage to find some plastic sheeting, which I threw over some of the plants. A couple of bedsheets covered the rest. (Unfortunately not all plants survived, but a good many did. The storm blew most of the coverings off.)

By now, it was already well past seven o'clock, which was also close to my bedtime. I set the faucets to drip, opened up the under-the-sink cabinets, poured myself a glass of wine, and settled down with a good book before calling it a night.

The next morning I woke up to this. There really wasn't much snow. However, the little snow that was on the ground was covered by a hard crust of slippery ice.

After climbing back in bed, I checked my email and came across this.

So, I climbed out of bed to turn the thermostat, which had been set at sixty-eight, down to sixty-five. Not even an hour and a half after that, it happened. The power went out.

In twenty minutes, sixty-five degrees dropped to sixty-one.

In another forty minutes, the temperature dropped another four degrees.

(Note: The time set on the thermostat is from daylight savings time. The actual time is one hour early.)

Anyhow, with it cooling down quickly, I wanted to get something warm inside of me, and I was not going to let a power outage stop me from enjoying my pot of tea. Where there is a will, there is a way. As such, I rigged up a whole bunch of tea lights to heat up my water. Granted, the water did not reach boiling, but it was still hot enough to steep my tea. And I made sure that I put my hot tea in my huge-ass insulated Buc-ee's cup so that it could stay hot all day.

Mind you, there were some folks up north who gave me a slight hard time about my not using my grill. Let me address that.

First of all, I have a charcoal grill, and there was no way I was going to fuss with that with the wind chill being one degree. With a temperature that low, the food would already be cold before I could get the platter to the door.

Speaking of doors, when there is no heat in the house, opening and closing doors during brutal subfreezing temps is not a very smart thing to do. My northern friends who love to grill in the winter have warm houses to go into once they are done grilling. They don't have to deal with having to conserve what little heat there is in the house.

Anyhow, someone commented that he bet that the ground wasn't even frozen. It was. Here I am, standing on a hard crusty layer of ice that is sitting on top of an inch and a half of snow, that is on top above what was thick mud the day before. This photo was taken on Monday morning, about an hour after the power went off.

Did I mention mud? Here I am standing on a frozen clod of mud.

Once I got back indoors, I noticed that the temperature had dropped another degree in half an hour.

How much lower can it go? It dropped another three degree in six hours. This was at 4:30 PM. 

Meanwhile, I was quite the fashion plate with my five layers of clothing.

Of course, with there being no power, I had to go charge my phone in my car in the garage.

For those folks who suggested that I open my garage door and go sit in my car to warm up, that was also a big NYET. Opening the garage door would have brought more cold air into the garage, which would have made its way into the house through the cracks in the doorframe. Just opening and closing the kitchen door to get to my car lowered the interior temperature by one degree. 

(Believe me, given the circumstances that I was faced with,  I had to think a lot of things through to determine if they were indeed appropriate for this most unusual and extreme situation.)

In addition, the fumes from the neighbor's generator were making their way into my garage AND my kitchen. So I had to stuff the cracks to make sure that neither the cold nor the CO fumes got into the house.

(For the sake of ease and efficiency, I wound up replacing all those plastic grocery bags with three pairs of old tights.)

As the day wore on, I texted back and forth with coworkers to see how they were doing. We all had to call to the workplace to see if we had to report to work the next day, and then expressed relief to learn that there was no service. 

This drill of calling the station office had to be repeated the next day, and for as many days as needed until service was restored. (For once I was grateful that I was not a supervisor, as supervisors had to report to the work to man the phones.)

It was the same story for all of us. We had no power. Power came on. And then it went off again. Some had no water. Where I live, the water plant became nonoperational due to the extreme cold and no power. I was one of the lucky ones who had water. But the pressure was so low that it was barely a trickle. 

Along with the no power there was spotty internet and sluggish phone service. Social media would not load. News apps would not update. Text messages failed to send, and never mind trying to send photos. 

(I did, however, learn that there was a "window" at around five in the morning where I could access Facebook and the rest of the internet. But as the day progressed, electronic traffic got bottlenecked, pretty much like cars trying to drive to Cape Cod for the Fourth of July holiday.)

With folks being isolated and hunkered down in their homes, and unable to easily access the outside world through their devices, it was as though Mother Nature was really serious about everyone maintaining social distancing to the extreme.

Anyhow, dark had descended. There was still no power, and I wondered what sort of cold I would wake up to. But I had prepared for that by digging out a couple of sleeping bags and a couple of extra fleece blankets. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Just like my hot pot of tea, I was not going to give up my nightly ritual of settling down to enjoy a glass of wine while reading a good book. Except this night I was going to be reading by candlelight...

...until it was time to hunker down and crawl into the sleeping bag that I placed under the covers on my bed.

When I woke up the following morning, on Tuesday, I was warm and comfy in my sleeping bag. But when I stepped out from out that cocooning warmth, my body was assaulted by the cold air. It was so cold that Kane's teeth were actually chattering. I never heard a dog's teeth chatter before. And no wonder! It was 43 degrees in the house! 

Because it was too cold for even the dogs, they all got sweaters. Kane got to wear an actual sweater, one that my mother had knit for me while I was still in college, and much closer to Kane's weight.

The other dogs received makeshift sweaters that were large crocheted squares that I tied to their bodies with yarn.

Alice, being the rambunctious young'un that she is, quickly tore hers. (This photo was taken before she tore her "sweater.") 

Kane wound up having to get a new "sweater" after he wet the bottom of his original sweater when he went outside to pee.

One of the things I did during this extended outage was focus on my artwork. I was working on a drawing of the sunrise that I would see while operating my train. In order to get the gradation of colors that I was seeking, I was using a pointillist technique (which is very time-intensive when using fine-tipped pens). Before long, the tap-tap-tap tattoo of the pen on the paper, along with the drip-drip-drip of the water dropped me into a Zenlike state where my mind began wander.

     

Thoughts wandered.

The homeless that I see often spend a good part of the day snug in their sleeping bags. I could see why. It's so hard to want to leave that embracement of warmth to face the harshness beyond.

It's much easier to stir after the sun has come up. Even the slight warmth of the sun's rays enough to make a big difference.

All those layers. No wonder they stay on and don't come off for days and weeks on end. 

Going to the bathroom in the cold is unimaginable. Imagine having to strip off all those layers to wipe oneself. No wonder many of them smell. Do I smell?

...tap...tap...tap...

The generator next door is churning away. I'll be hearing it all day long. It belches its noxious fumes that try to make their way into my house. But I won't let them in.

...drip...drip...drip...

It's cold, colder than anything I've ever experienced before indoors. But I'm feeling great. I'm amazed that I'm not feeling worse. I'm feeling strong and healthy. And I am SO grateful for that.

I'm so grateful for my ability to improvise. I'm grateful for my ability to adapt. I'm not some doddering old lady, but a veritable badass chingona.

I'm not going to do anything that will endanger me or my pets. I will get through this.

...tap...tap...tap... 

The dogs, they're so confused and clingy. They don't understand why it's so cold inside. They see their human, and she's not following the familiar routine. Every time I go to the garage to charge my cellphone in my car, they get excited. They follow me and try to get in my car.

How can I explain to them what's going on? How can I assure them that they will be warm again?

...drip...drip...drip... 

Next week it'll be in the seventies. In another month or two this will be a memory.

How long will this last? No matter how long it last, I will prevail.

This could be much worse. And I'm grateful that it's not. I am grateful that I have what it takes to make it through this. I come from tough stock.

My mother, when she was a teenager during World War II, was put on a freight car, along with the rest of the townsfolk, and shipped off to Germany, where she and the others had to work on the railroads. Everyone slept on the freight car. It was winter, and so bitterly cold that she woke up with her face frozen to the side of the freight car. She survived. And if she could survive that, then I certainly can survive forty three degrees in the house. And I could even survive if it dropped down lower.

So yeah, I'm tough too. I'm strong. I'm resilient. I will prevail. That is just simple fact.

...tap...tap...tap... 

Thoughts wandered. They went in circles. They doubled back on each other. And I was at peace.

As the day drew on, the house warmed up to fifty-one.

In the meantime, I was really very excited to have found my head flashlight, and even more excited to have had the proper size batteries for it. Woot! Woot! What was really great was that I no longer had to read by candlelight. 

Power came back on while I was reading, some thirty six hours into the outage. I could hear the furnace kicking on, and soon I felt the heat blowing through the vent. I went to sleep with the anticipation of enjoying a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs.

When I woke up the following morning, I went to switch on the light, only to discover that it pulling the chain had no effect. My phone did not display the green battery and lightning bolt icon to indicate that it was plugged in to a power source. The phone had only charged to eighty-six percent before the power cut out. But at least the house was a balmy fifty degrees.

Going into the garage to charge my phone, I noticed puddles on the ground. That often happened when there would be heavy rains. But it was not raining all that heavily. Then I heard the sound of dripping water. Following the sound with my ears, I saw that a pipe had burst at the elbow joint near the ceiling. (That also explained that loud bang I heard in the garage the day before.) 

Fortunately, the break occurred after the shutoff valve. Not only that, it was a very minor line that was hardly used. Another fortuitous thing was that because the local water plant was still nonoperational, there was very little water pressure. As such, there was very little mess. All I had to do was to throw down some rags so that when the water froze, I would not be slipping on glare ice.

My next door neighbors were not as fortunate. Their pipes broke. Their house was a mess. And they had no water. Being island folk, who have never experienced such extreme conditions, they did not know how to prepare for them. I had my faucets cracked, and was able to avoid such a costly and inconvenient mess.  

Even though it was much warmer in the house than yesterday, Yoda was staying put under the covers. He did not like me dragging him out from under the covers. He liked it even less when I put him outside to go pee, especially since it was raining. But when he realized that I was not going to let him back in, he did his business. And what a full tank he had!

Throughout this whole situation, as I refuse to consider it an "ordeal," I treated it as though I was engaged in winter camping, which I tried once and did not enjoy. As such, it was no big deal to be subsisting upon nuts and dried fruit, along with some fresh fruit as well. 

The day warmed up only by one degree. The interior temperature topped out at fifty one. It was a dreary and overcast day, and I felt chilled sitting by the window working on my sketch. So I went into my dark bedroom instead, where I lit my candles and was going to do some writing before engaging in my nightly ritual (which was not going to include the usual adult beverage, as it was the start of my annual nutritional detox and reset). 

As I was writing, the lights came on after an extended fifty-five-hour outage. I was guarded in my optimism. They flickered once, maybe twice, and they stayed on. When it seemed that the power would stay on, the two big dogs had their "sweaters" taken off.

When I went into the kitchen, I heard a weird noise. It took me awhile to figure out that was the refrigerator running.