On Tuesday I thought I was heading down to Dallas for a quick in and out trip. But that changed up big time yesterday when it started spitting ice and drizzle early. And it went from bad to worse. Now the whole area is covered with a half inch of ice and the power is out. And they have no infrastructure here to deal with winter weather.
The whole area is pretty much shut down. I haven’t seen a plow yet. I don’t think they have many. I went by a auto parts store yesterday to get some anti-gel stuff for the diesel and there was a sign on the door that said they had no ice scrapers or de-icer. At Home Depot, there were selling four Dura Flame logs for $25. I saw a guy by four boxes. I asked him if he thought that would hold up for a day and he said he didn’t know or really care. He just wanted to appease his wife.
The woman, Melissa that helps Sue’s mom out, doesn’t have any heat in her car, no defrost, because her heater core was leaking. She was trying to remove the ice from her windshield with a plastic cap off a jug. I told her to use the windshield wiper fluid to loosen it up, but they don’t use wiper fluid that goes below zero here. I had a jug of Rain-X fluid that went down to -25. I told her to start trying the wiper fluid after the engine melted the wiper supply hoses. I’m going to hook back up her heater hoses and try some Bars Leak this afternoon to see if that will stop it up and get it functioning again.
On the internet, it shows the electricity going back online at 7am tomorrow. Man, that seems like a long time, but I guess there are a quarter million people with no electricity here.
I’m going to install some grab bars in Sue’s mom’s shower today. I spent a fair amount of time crawling around on my chest in the attic trying to find the location of the studs under the ceramic tile. Man, was I itchy last night. I’m going to be using a cordless drill, so the lack of electricity isn’t an issue.
Okay, that is about it from frosty Dallas.
It took quite a while to get this frozen mass off the front of my van.
I saw lots of these on the short drive to electricity at Starbucks.
Starbucks was pretty iced in too. They don’t really have any rock salt or snow shovels in this city.
This is my buddy Rod Lake’s dog, Camo.
Rod had “an extra” Zip 404 taking up space in his garage. He just moved from Allen down to White Rock Lake. He’s gonna have to start riding more now that the White Rock loop is at his doorstep.
This was Wednesday, nearly 80 degrees, big change.
I grew up in Dallas and began riding at the White Rock lake area. There was rumour that the course record was 16 laps in one day (10 miles per lap). Man, that would have made me dizzy.. Dallas definitely gets paralyzed by ice in any form. When I was growing up, it was quite brave to drive at all given the native complete lack of ice driving skills + all vehicles being rear wheel drive at the time. That’s a Perfect Storm.
81 degrees on Thursday and freezing rain Friday. You gotta love Texas. We
at least have electricity in our part of the Metroplex so the “Tour de Garage”
is still on. Indoor riding is still barely tolerable.
” I haven’t seen a plow yet. I don’t think they have many. ”
That’s a good one Steve. We do have a plow… for the airport runways.
Nothing but sand trucks here. They will dump so much sand here on the bridges, that after the ice melts Sunday, We will have a dust storm.
Come-on Steve, They have been telling us this storm was coming for a week. We don’t have any snow equipment down here.
They are getting power back up quicker than the Manhattan area did in the 2007/2008 ice storm. My area of town was without power for close to a week. I gave up when I walked in the second day of no power and could see my breath. I packed up the cat and some clothes and drove the 20 miles over to my parents out around Milford. They had both power AND hot water.
Bars Leaks works wonders with a leaking heater core! Fixed mine about 25 years ago, lasted for 5 years before I moved on to another car.