daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
Overnight freezing rain transformed our usual drab gray days into a bright, wintry white, and wow, it looked spectacular. Sadly, it’s all slick, glassy ice instead of fluffy snow, so no snowball fights for the neighborhood kids. We’ll be hunkered down at home for the next couple of days while the city more or less shuts down. Stay safe out there, and keep warm!
A powerful, but brief, storm front blew through tonight. I was hoping for a dramatic time-lapse video, but it was rather tame. Oh well, I guess we should consider ourselves lucky there was no tornado or other damage, right?
At about 2 am this morning, the icy tree branches started breaking off like crazy around the neighborhood. Our house backs up to a greenbelt, so there are a lot of trees close to us, and I could hear the wood cracking. Lani was also barking and whining, poor girl. I know she just wants to protect us and chase the animals that are making the sounds away, but I couldn’t let her out because it was so dangerous.
I surveyed the damage after it got light and the damage around our yard wasn’t too bad. But while Lani and I were outside, a large branch came down and scared both of us. Thank goodness Lani was at the other end of the yard!
Soonthe temperature rose to above freezing and the ice started to melt. I made a little time-lapse of the trees returning to their normal shape. Enjoy!
Well, the icy weather has come to Austin! Schools are closed and the city is urging people to stay off the roads. All the trees in the neighborhood are straining under the weight of the frozen stuff, and many branches have already broken and are lying on the ground. So far we’ve been fortunate to only have a couple of small branches come down in your yard.
Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come, so we’re expecting more damage overnight… We’re crossing our fingers that it’s not too bad!
We’ve lived in central Texas for over 20 years now, and we’ve never seen so many tornado warnings. Or perhaps we’ve had plenty of warnings, but this year there have been several actual tornadoes touching the ground near us. It’s pretty scary.
This afternoon, the tornadoes touched down about 40 miles to the north of us in Salado, and a few weeks before that, a tornado touched down about 10 miles away in Round Rock. That’s so close!
Today’s photo is of one of the massive clouds that might have been the one that spawned the tornado up north. Luckily it passed us by without incident.
Here’s a short video of some of the activity that from our backyard window:
Stay safe, everyone!
