It’s gray and drizzly today and generally very blah, which is kind of how this week has been. I got our taxes done and filed, which always takes longer than I expect. But it’s done, so yay for being responsible.
We have a formal dinner with a friend coming up next month, and Mr. M needed a new suit, so we decided to try our luck at Goodwill last night. Friends, he got a suit that looks tailored to him, plus a brand-new suit jacket that matches some pants he already had, a waistcoat, and a pair of dress shoes for less than $50.
I’m so jealous. The women’s section was, let’s say, less good.
Luckily, I have a clearance dress arriving today, which will either look ’20s glam or like a shiny bathrobe, and only time will tell. 😂 I did also order a safer backup dress, so if it’s shiny bathrobe, at least I’ll have options.
We rarely dress up, so it’s a fun excuse to look fancy, and the dress code said to err on the side of too much rather than not enough. I’m thinking about buying a fascinator, like I’m a duchess or some such nonsense. Ooh, and one of those long cigarette holder thingies, never mind that I don’t smoke and never have. I can just wave it around while I bemoan the peasantry.
I love it when a plan comes together. 😂
Do you dress up on the regular, or is it a rare event? Also, do you own a fascinator, and if so, is it awesome?
After waiting nearly a year and half from our reservation, our new car arrived last week! We replaced our aging, fifteen-year-old Nissan Cube—which remains one of my favorite cars ever, quirks, terrible transmission, and all—with a brand new Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV.
Look at how cute it is! And it’s so easy to get into lawbreaker territory because unlike the Cube, which had obvious wind noise that let you know you were going fast (aka the “windometer”), the Ioniq is quiet even at highway speeds.
It’s also quite a bit longer than the Cube, which meant we spent Saturday afternoon cleaning up the garage and moving stuff around, which needed to happen anyway, but isn’t my preferred way to spend the weekend.
So on Sunday, we decided to have a fun day and do a little mini roadtrip down to Lockhart for BBQ. Lockhart is a small town of about 14k people, that was once named the “barbecue capital of Texas.” There are three main restaurants, and tons of family drama as one would expect in a small town with three BBQ families each trying to become a dynasty.
Lockhart BBQ isn’t really top-tier anymore, and we could get better BBQ right here in Austin, but it was a nice excuse to get out and drive on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Of the three mainstay BBQ joints in town, we hadn’t been in Kreuz Market in the longest time, so we decided to eat there. Brisket is pretty much the order of the day for TX BBQ, so that was my plan, until I saw the sign advertising pork belly burnt ends.
She is standing on a throne of LIES
Doesn’t that sound amazing?
Unfortunately, I don’t know if it was or not, because they were sold out. 😭
It was a real rollercoaster. I didn’t even know pork belly burnt ends were an option, then I saw the sign (and it opened up my eyes…) and I started anticipating the deliciousness, then major disappointment, all in the span of a few minutes.
Since the sign lied to me, I stuck with brisket and Mr. M also ordered a couple of pork ribs. The brisket was just okay, but the pork ribs were pretty good. The real star of the show wasn’t BBQ at all, but the poblano creamed corn, which was delicious. Overall verdict: meh.
But the roadtrip was fun, and we went to a nearby state park and did a little hiking, so the day was a success overall.
We also got to figure out some of the high-tech features of the car, such as highway driving assist, which only tried to gently murder us once, luckily when no one else was around.
Oh, and there was the lady in the state park who came THISCLOSE to crashing head-on into us because she was driving too fast around a blind corner on the wrong side of road. That wasn’t too good for the ole heart. Luckily, she missed us by inches, and we had our dash cam installed, so we would’ve had proof of fault, but I’m glad we didn’t have to deal with a crash on a vehicle with just 100 miles on the odometer.
What about you? Did you do anything fun this weekend?
After last Tuesday’s ice storm, our power came back around 4PM on Friday, which meant we were without electricity for about fifty-eight hours. And we were fairly lucky because there are still nearly 25k people without power as of this morning.
We tossed most of the stuff from our fridge and freezer. A few things at the bottom of the cooler stayed frozen enough to save, but mostly it was a total loss. After that fun time, we turned our attention to the trees.
We bought a battery-powered chainsaw after snowpocalypse, and this year we added a powered pole trimmer. We got the most dangerous dangling limbs down, but we need an arborist to really get up there and fix the live oak in our front yard. We’re on the waitlist, but I expect it’ll be a while.
We also have some big trees down in our backyard, which is less a yard and more just native trees and scrub clinging to a steep, rocky hill. A couple of cedars fell over and took out a swath of smaller trees, and a few others lost massive branches. We cut up the branches on the ground, but we need pros to deal with the bigger stuff and the limbs still in the air.
While we were surveying the damage, I slipped and fell on a steep section and bruised myself. I’m fine, it was mostly my pride that took the damage, but bruises really were just the cherry on top of this week. :(
Every house on our street has a huge pile of brush on the curb, waiting for pickup. And driving through the neighborhood, it’s the same everywhere. The city is planning to pick it all up, because they use the brush for mulch and composting, but I can’t imagine how long it’ll be before they get to everyone.
The first picture above is our brush piles, not including the big trees we couldn’t handle, and the second picture is our neighbors’ across the street. It doesn’t look so bad until you realize all of those piles are huge. You can use the vehicle in the second picture to get a sense of scale.
To make matters worse, we’re expected to get another storm on Tuesday. Thankfully no ice this time, but there could be “damaging winds” which isn’t great with the amount of broken branches still barely clinging to the trees.
I’m trying to get back to writing this week, since last week was mostly a loss. I had plenty of time, but stress isn’t exactly conducive to creative endeavors. For me, at least.
But I’m having fun working on a tiny little secret project that I’ll hopefully wrap up in the next day or two, then it’s back to the fantasy romance. I’m pretty sure I left those characters in a precarious situation, so I guess I need to go rescue them. :)
Oh, and if you have a chance, the Swoon Awards are happening now, and both Hunt the Stars and Eclipse the Moon made it into the semi-finals! (Thank you!!! 😍) If you want to help decide the finalists, vote here. You can vote for up to five of your faves in each category and skip categories you haven’t read, so it’s easy peasy!
A winter storm hit central Texas late Tuesday night and brought a whole lot of ice. Far too much ice. Our power went off yesterday morning around 5:30AM and hasn’t come back on yet. The power company says it may be tomorrow evening, but looking at their outage map, it may be longer.
Worse than the lack of power is the damage to our trees. It’s simply devastation, like a tornado or hurricane hit. The huge live oak in our front yard is still standing (please, please stay standing), but it’s lost a lot of limbs. Some of our other trees are worse.
It’s the same all over the neighborhood. Worse, in many cases, because the trees actually split in two or fell over and uprooted. We listened to them crack and fall for two nights, and it was horrible. Driving through the neighborhood is just heartbreaking.
Overall, we’re okay. The house temperature is holding fairly steady in the fifties, and we have sleeping bags to keep us warm at night even if it drops lower. We also have a natural gas stove, so we can cook, which is handy. Last night we made dinner via lantern-light. And today we found out that our gas water heater doesn’t need electricity to run, so we had a hot shower. Heaven!
We went looking for dry ice this morning, now that the roads aren’t dangerous, only to find that everyone else had already beat us to it. Our fridge stuff is toast, but we’re holding out hope for our freezer stuff. It’s in a cooler on the porch now, and most of it was still frozen hard when we transferred it over.
Except the ice cream. We had that for breakfast.
Now we’re hanging out at Mr. M’s office and charging all of our depleted batteries and devices. They have lights and heat and internet! Well, they had internet. As I was typing this is went down, so boo.
Wait, it’s back!
Our phone internet has actually done pretty well this time, much better than during snowpocalypse. It went down for a bit right when the power first went off, but it’s been solid since then, which is helpful because for all of Twitter’s many, many recent issues, it’s still the best way to get up-to-date information from local news and government sources.
And I can refresh the Austin Energy outage map every few minutes to see if the numbers have changed. They haven’t. Nearly thirty-six hours in, there are still 152k people without power, and over 1500 outages. The number of outages keeps climbing, even as the number of affected customers is dropping a tiny bit. They’ve called in help from other utilities, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a slow process.
But the ice is melting today, and if we’re lucky, it won’t refreeze overnight. Then it’s supposed to get warmer, so hopefully the worst is behind us.
It’s cold and dreary today in central Texas. Freezing rain is making overpasses dangerous, so if you’re in the area, be careful out there. Yesterday was 70°F and mostly sunny, so I can’t complain too much, but seeing how this is my blog… yes I can. 😂
The cold makes me want to huddle inside and drink hot tea all day, so that’s pretty much the plan. The fantasy romance is over 30k words now, and I’m still having fun with it, so I’ll be trying to make that word count go up this week. Not having a deadline is super nice, but at the end of the day, I still need to get words on the page.
We spent the weekend playing Satisfactory, and we’re almost through all the levels again. If you’re not familiar, it’s a game about building factories on an alien planet to produce widgets for your company. You start with a couple machines gathering a few resources, then you expand as you get better technology.
Last time we played, we absolutely wrecked said alien planet with miles and miles and miles of conveyor belts and pipes running between the resources and the factories. This time, Mr. M decided to use trucks to move supplies, and it worked surprisingly well! They’re finicky to set up, but once they’re going, they’re far better than they were when we played a couple of years ago. And now I don’t have to feel so bad about destroying nature, lol.
You can also tell which factories he built—beautiful, precise, enormous—versus which I built—sort of slapdash, but gets the job done, and takes waaaaaay less time. :)
We also got to drive an Ioniq 5 this weekend, a car we’ve been trying to buy since they opened “reservations.” I’ll spare you the saga, but it’s been over a year, and I’m unhappy with how Hyundai handled the entire process. But the car was lovely! Supposedly they have one that matches our reservation coming in March, so maybe we’ll get a new car this year. At this point, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Now I’m going to make some tea and some words, and I hope that you’re warm and cosy wherever you are!
