This is a personal note (as opposed to a hair on fire rant about something stoopid that the government has done) about life in Oklahoma City these days.
We had the worst winter weather I recall in my 57 years of life starting on Christmas Eve.
It took me two hours to get to work that afternoon, I left about 1230 PM and arrived at the church, 11 miles from my house, at 230. I then promptly got stuck in the church parking lot, and didn’t get unstuck for 4 days. We had only 35 people at the 5 PM mass, 20 at the 830 PM mass, and 10 at the midnight mass. (This is in a parish of 1600 families!) I spent the night at the rectory, we had about 125 people at the 10 AM Christmas Day mass, and I caught a ride home from a friend with a 4-wheel drive jeep.
Even though the other musicians didn’t make it (well, about 10 choir members showed up on Christmas day(, I just did the music as the program specified. I drafted cantors for the 5 PM and 830 PM masses from the congregation, such as it was, they were both young women who had cantored for me while in high school, who were home for the holiday.
Driving home was something like driving through an apocalyptic movie. Abandoned cars were strewn everywhere on the urban landscape, many facing contrary to traffic, indicating that they spun around 180 degrees before coming to a stop.
My house, however, was fine without me. I was gone 25 hours. When I left it was 65 degrees F inside, and when I got back it was 52 degrees F inside, indicating a decline of only one-half degree/hour, even though the temperature was about 17 degrees F that night, no sun. My extra insulation, and the indoor insulated window shutters I made this year, really helped.
The snow stopped, but it was followed soon-after by very frigid temperatures (for Oklahoma, anyway), with lows temperatures down to 6 degrees at night, and windchills in the -15 degrees F.
This week we are having a heat wave. Highs have been in the low 50 degree F. I’m practically breaking out the shorts and sun-tan lotion and Hawaiian shirts. Well, not seriously, but while this might not be much for our brothers and sisters further north, it has strained our infrastructure to the limits. There have been water main breaks all over town, power failures, and even natural gas outages, that last were virtually un-heard of in the past, but not now in the “new normal” we live in these days. Oklahoma City has only 15 snow plows and 14,000 miles of streets, so you can see our problem. Plus, most people are not used to driving on snow, and their cars are not equipped with snow tires or chains, and we have very minimal public transportation.
All’s well that ends well this time around. We were lucky the blizzard (14 inches in one day, a record for us), only lasted one day and that our usual moderate winter weather hurried back so quickly. Next time we may not be so lucky.
