Snowed in in Life in General

It was 75F outside yesterday. Hard to believe that 4 days ago the ground was completely covered in a foot of snow. Cool Texas.

We are actually super super fortunate that we never lost power here. So many people around us didn’t food, water, or heat. Austin is kind of a “restaurant” city so a lot of people didn’t have groceries in their home ready to be snowed in.

Luckily cooking is one of my hobbies and we had gone shopping not too long before this all started. So we were pretty good on food for a while. I ended up making fajitas one night, beans and rice another night, chicken parmesan another night…etc. No shortage of good meals for us!

I actually ended up feeling super guilty for having power the entire time. Right down the street, there were power outages. So when I went on facebook and saw a post from a friend looking for a place to stay for her and her family, I couldn’t help but volunteer to help. They came right over and we set up our office with an air mattress. It was a bit cramped for them, but it was warm and they had electricity and internet, so I didn’t hear any complaints!

One thing that was pretty funny to me was the mother of the family seemed like a major hypochondriac. I try not to judge, because Jessica deals with a lot of pain issues and people tend to think she is faking it, but the moment they arrived she was complaining about her body temperature being too low and that she was probably going to have a seizure. I mean, she wasn’t shivering or anything and they had just gotten out of a warm car. Kind of hard to believe she was having a body temperature problem. Then at some point during the night she claimed that she’s partially autistic and just listed out a ton of other ailments.

I don’t know, I just got the vibe that a lot of these things are self diagnosed. But again, I don’t know for sure so I’ll just leave it at that.

The morning after they arrived, Jessica and I decided to try and visit a grocery store nearby. Funny story, the family that stayed with us parked in front of my garage since the parking lot was super full. That was fine with me, I figured in the morning they could move the car and I could pull out and go shopping, easy. Well these people ended up sleeping in until like 2pm hahha. I guess they are late risers, or they were really tired, but I mean I don’t think my body would allow me to sleep that long even if I was exhausted. I ended up having to knock on their door and ask the dad to move his car. I felt bad for waking them up, but at some point I was like “okay fuck it these people are going to sleep forever if I don’t do something” haha.

We still had plenty of food but we wanted to pick up a few missing things, like butter. (I also wanted to see if they had any sparkling water hehe). Well we got to the store right as they opened and holy cow they had a long freaking line waiting outside. I guess since they only had a few clerks at the registers, they wanted to control how many people were in the store. makes sense, but we ended up waiting outside in 10F weather for over an hour. It wouldn’t have been so bad but I didn’t anticipate that and hadn’t really dressed in layers or anything. Whew that was cold.

Well luckily when we got inside they still had a lot of stuff. The dairy aisle was cleared out (likely due to a loss of power spoiling it all), but they still had plenty of frozen stuff and a lot of dried foods. I picked up some pinto beans, bread, jelly, the very last tub of fake butter (the brand was def sketch but I’ll take what I can get), and various other things. Didn’t seem to be a big shortage so it wasn’t a big deal.

Honestly the worst part of the whole trip was the driving. People just don’t understand how slick things were out there. When we pulled into the first grocery store (we visited more than one, more on that later), I was very careful not to pull into a parking spot covered in ice. And sure enough, as we left, I saw some dude in a prius completely stuck in one of those spots I skipped. And then, on our way back home, I decided to top off my gas tank at another one of the grocery stores that had a gas station. Well, I decided to pull off the main road and take a neighborhood route to the store, because the only entrance to the store from the main road was on a steep incline. Sure enough, we make it to the store and there are two cars stuck on the incline, actually sideways. They may have even hit each other. I couldn’t tell for sure.

Well anyway, that’s my story about the snow. I did fall a few times while walking Bear but it was because I would accidentally step on the sidewalk which was completely covered in slick as hell ice.

So the reason I had to get some gas on the way home was because I had a wedding on Saturday. It was in my old hometown and when I have a wedding there I always drive out a day before, I wouldn’t ever want to risk driving out the same day. If anything happened I wouldn’t have time to find a replacement.

Well my mom is in a full blown panic when she learns about his. I assure her that the snow will begin melting on Friday so I could just wait until later in the day and just drive then. She is not having it and asks if there is any way I can get someone to cover my wedding for me. Well yes I technically can but the cost is astronomical and I just don’t have the money for it, I’d have to pay someone like 1000 bucks. Well she actually ends up offering to cover most of it to keep me off the roads and while that’s a nice gesture I don’t like the idea of it still because I have never had a wedding covered before. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to get the shots I need really, but with my mother being like this, I really didn’t have a choice.

Well guess what happened on Friday, the snow melts haha. My mom says “okay so is there just a way that you can still come here and shoot the wedding now?” NO. I already booked someone else to shoot the wedding, that ship has sailed! I dont get to say to another photographer “hey, you know how you kept your Saturday free for me because I had a job for you? Nevermind, enjoy sitting home and doing nothing....” That’s just super tacky and would ruin my reputation amongst all the other shooters in the area, probably making it impossible to have someone to cover for me.

Anyway, the shooter I picked out was named Alexis. She’s actually a student I used to teach at UTTyler, so I knew she was super nice. But it turns out she’s actually an incredible shooter too, based on her instagram. However, her shots all looked kind of staged and set up, so I was worried that the candid shots wouldn’t really be her thing and the wedding would feel too contrived. Well, I haven’t seen the images yet (outside of a few previews) but the bride called me the next morning completely ECSTATIC over how good she did. She’s super young and energetic, so I’m not surprised she made a good impression. And the images do look really good, so at least it worked out. I’m still upset I couldn’t just shoot the wedding myself though, thanks a lot mom haha.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that’s going on around here right now. Just trying my best to get more weddings booked. If you know any engaged couples, send them my way!!!!