ICE IN AUSTIN! THE END OF THE WORLD!

Yes, it iced over in Austin something awful this past week. The temperatures were quite low for central Texas and the weather was pretty rotten--so rotten, in fact, that UT canceled school for the first two days of the semester AND delayed the start of school on the third day until 11 a.m. I don't have a TV myself, but my friends who do say that the local news were basically talking about the snow days like the end of the world was approaching.

I won't deny, though, that the weather did suck. I'm sure weather like this is a piece of cake to people up north, but in a place where temperatures rarely dip below freezing, freezing rain is no fun. I had to pull out my fleece-lined pants and woollen socks, which I rarely do in Texas. On Tuesday, it even snowed a little bit:


We also had freezing rain on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The steps to my apartment got pretty well iced over, but I had cat litter to spread over them to keep them from getting too slick:


You can see where I sprinkled the litter. It's not an elegant solution, and now I have lots of cat litter tracked into my apartment, but it was better to buy a little bag of cat litter for less than $2 than to buy an enormous many-pound bag of salt. Those were basically the options I had at the grocery store.

The temperature hovered around freezing, so all the precipitation we had accumulated into big icicles:


There was ice built up on railings and tree branches over an inch thick. This is the railing outside my apartment:


Everything has thawed out by now, of course, and it's back to school, unfortunately. Although I could do without the freezing rain, I certainly didn't mind the extended holiday.