Well, planned posting isn’t taking place as Tuesday afternoon I had the Upper Respiratory Infection (URI) that is going around try to pay me a visit. More on that in a minute.
For all my friends down South, be careful out there. What a lot of Yankees don’t understand is that the South rarely gets snow (mountains excepted) and when it does fall it doesn’t stay snow for long but turns rapidly into ice. One can and does drive on snow. Driving on slick ice is a game for fools. Worse, instead of snow we often get freezing rain, which coats roads, power lines, tree limbs, etc. and brings the latter group crashing down (if not whole trees and light/power poles). Sleet is better than freezing rain (though not by much) as it isn’t as likely to bring down power lines, tree limbs, trees, etc.
I grew up in the South, but my Dad had spent time where there was snow, so taught me both to drive on snow and to recognize ice and not drive. When living in the South, I did have some fun watching northern-types go blazing out onto the “snow” covered roads only to find out they were ice. Low and slow is the way to go people, and if you are in the South and your state allows chains, use them.
As we’ve talked about before here, I don’t get the milk and bread thing. I had friends who never bought milk and bread in normal shopping rush out to buy gallons and loaves if the “s” word was mentioned on the news. My take is if you buy beef and bourbon, you are better off.
Seriously, if you have even a modicum of preparedness you will get by. The second time I was working (contractor) for NASA, we got hit pretty good. Power was out, but I pulled out a few things (mostly camping supplies) and had coffee, hot food, light, heat, etc. There was a knock on the door, and when I opened it there was a young lady from the apartment complex office there to let me know the clubhouse had been opened as an emergency shelter. She looked at the light, felt the heat, smelled the cooking food, and asked if she could come stay with me.
We are going to have cold and some snow, but it’s not going to hit us as hard as it will down South. We have plows, sand/salt trucks, and while we may lose a few limbs, the trees down south (particularly pine) are not used to that structural load. The South does not have the plows, sand/salt trucks, and other equipment and neither the grid nor the flora are used to such weather.
Be sure to drip those faucets! Sub-freezing weather is not the time to have to be trying to fix a frozen or busted pipe. And please don’t be stupid with how you try to thaw a frozen pipe: every year seemed to bring multiple stories of people setting their house on fire trying to use a torch to thaw a pipe. Also, please don’t try to stay warm by bringing your charcoal grill in and lighting it. Yes, that happens far too often still.
Be Prepared. Be Careful. Be Safe.
As for me and the URI, I’m bouncing back. Tuesday afternoon I started coughing a bit, so when I ran errands I picked up some things for that. I also ate a hot/spicy meal while out; but, by the time I got home I could feel things hitting. Started my normal routine of apple cider vinegar shots, extra C, and such. Chills set in fast, so I went to bed and bundled up to ride things out.
Fever is actually a response by the body to infection, an attempt to kill it by raising the thermostat. Problems with fever come from high-temps (particularly spiking) and high-temp over time. I’m not convinced the modern urge to stop fever at the start is entirely good for us. So, I deliberately roasted a bit overnight, trying to sweat the URI out.
Yesterday, I continued my normal routine for such (AC vinegar, extra C, cough tablets, hot/spicy food, etc.) but added in something recommended by my friend Snarksalot, Cold Calm. It is homeopathic and does not appear to have any interactions with anything else I’m taking, so gave it a try. Even though this is not a cold, it has helped and I plan to add it to my “war chest” for such things.
As for the vinegar and hot/spicy foods, years ago I was told that part of the life-cycle of most colds/flu/etc. was in the gut. Change the Ph even a modest amount, and you disrupt that part of the cycle. Since infections depend on viral/microbial load, breaking or reducing the chain drops the load so your body can finish things off. When it comes to the vinegar, you have some who claim the mother has various properties that help; others say it simply provides amino acids that help; or, that it just helps skew the Ph. I don’t really care which it is, it seems to work and the results are what matter to me.
So, be careful out there. Keep your friends and family close, and your things where you can find them in the dark. More soon I hope.
Getting hit by lightning is not fun! If you would like to help me in my recovery efforts, and to start a truly new life, feel free to hit the fundraiser at A New Life on GiveSendGo, use the options in the Tip Jar in the upper right, or drop me a line to discuss other methods. If you want to know some of what it is going for, read here. There is also the Amazon Wish List in the Bard’s Jar. It is thanks to your gifts and prayers that I am still going. Thank you.
It is always the uninitiated who are really dangerous in wintry conditions. I was in Chapel Hill, NC once when they had a dusting . . . just a dusting . . . of snow. It was the apocalypse. I would have simply camped out and people watched it but I was working and had to be out and about in it. I live in SoCal now and my kids ask me what would we do if it snowed at our house – the answer is simple, hunker down and wait for it to melt and the wrecks to be cleared from the roads
And pretty much everyone already has enough stuff in their pantries to last a couple days. It is a rare occurrence that you need a LOT of items. Not that one shouldn’t be prepared . . . Heh, one of my adventures from youth was going to visit a friend at his new cabin in Appalachia, back before weather forecasting was really any good. The ‘it might flurry’ reports turned into ‘it might snow’ and what happened was a noreaster – which due to the particular geography of where his cabin was meant we had 70in of snow. And since he had recently moved in he hadn’t yet laid in supplies in depth. Fortunately squirrels were easy to snipe off of the bird feeders, and we had plenty of coffee. A weekend visit ended up lasting 2wks
With people always dashing out to stock up on bread, milk, and eggs I really wonder if French toast is the national food of blizzards.
I think there’s a business opportunity here for an enterprising sort – when the Weather Guessers predict calamity, especially “snow,” offer to deliver, for a fee, of course, the requisite Standard Snow Supply Kit – bread, milk, eggs, potato chips, beer and toilet paper, all in one handy package.
Iggy
Just an aside for people on older houses. If and when you have to replace your plumbing, PEX is the cat’s pajamas. If the line freezes, it has enough flexibility that it will expand and rarely break. It’s not perfect, of course, I’m sure that there have been cases where it did break, but the real failure mechanism is the expansion pulling joints apart, so when you design/lay out the system, keep joints and splices in the warm areas.
That is all.