Ice storm hits Austin, Terrorizes Texans

Falling behind on blogging has become a trend...I'm sure most of you know by now that Austin got hit by an ice storm recently. But did you know that cold weather animals also attacked? Here, Joshua and I are trying to outrun a vicious polar bear.

Austin in winter weather is pretty humorous. Everything shuts down and they warn people to stay off the roads. News reporters gets worked up and have you thinking a natural disaster to the scale of Katrina is about to hit. Sunday night they were predicting terrible road conditions, loss of power, and stranded people for the next day. The tricky part of the storm was that it was going to be off and on all day, making it difficult to pinpoint safe times to drive. I, believing my trusted news anchors, begged Kurt not to go to work. I wondered what I would do if he got stranded at the office and we lost power and Joshua and I had to fend for ourselves. So, like a good husband, Kurt stayed home. He was the only one in his office that wasn't there. oops. By the end of Monday afternoon we began to realize the apocalypse was not coming and the media folks were overdoing it a bit for the ratings. They predicated even worse weather for Tuesday, leading into Wednesday. Kurt went on into work Tuesday. The schools were closed, business were closing, and his office closed too. Would you East Coasters believe this-even Walmart closed. Walmart never closes! While the bridges were a little icy, Kurt didn't have any problems driving in with the Xterra.
Tuesday Joshua and I ventured outside. It had started snowing, but by the time I wrestled him into his snowsuit it wasn't snowing anymore. He enjoyed walking around and crunching the grass, but definitely needed a hand to keep his balance. But of course I needed to take a picture of the cute boy in his snowsuit, which would leave him on his own. I tried to convince him to stand on his own, but he would cooperate. So of course, he fell down. That didn't bother him so much, but in order to push himself back up he had to put his hands in the cold, icy stuff (he won't keep his mittens on). This made him very upset and he started crying, so I brought him inside and here he is.

What can I say? He's a Texan.


By Wednesday night, I was getting stir crazy. Since Kurt was driving the Xterra I was stuck indoors (the Mazda is a manual and I didn't think this was the time to learn how to drive it). That night, Kurt scraped the Mazda's windshield. Given the fact it had been gathering all the precipitation over three days, it took a while... I stayed inside sipping hot cocoa, thanking the Lord that I didn't have to scrap a thing.

By Thursday at noon, things began to get back into order. As for the Polar Bears, they didn't really attack. Last Tuesday Kurt had a meeting in Tyler, Texas so Joshua and I went along for the ride. We thought it might be a good time to test Joshua's road trip adaptability. All in all he did great. He had two basic dispositions for the ride:

Joshua and I checked out Tyler's Rose Garden and Rose Festival Museum. (I'll save that for another entry though.) By the time we got lunch, Kurt was finished with his meeting. We then all headed to the Brookshire Wildlife Museum for some wild fun. It was actually pretty impressive for a free museum. I guess the Brookshire's have a lot of money? They owned the local grocery chain there in Tyler. We made lots of new friends (see pics below) and had fun together. Besides lots of stuffed animals, the museum has an old time general store. It is set up just like back in the day. While I feel like I have seen examples of these before, this was by far the most well done.

This was the wildest animal we saw that day...