Wonderful! - Wonderful! 170: The Coldest, Wettest Time in Texas

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

We're suspending our usual ethos of unabashed enthusiasm and positivity as we recount our experience during Texas' recent infrastructural collapse. Strap the hell in! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Please consider supporting these various causes to provide relief to those living in Texas still suffering from the damage of Winter Storm Uri: Feeding Texas: https://feedingtexas.networkforgood.com/projects/124201-texas-disaster-response Austin Mutual Aid: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLrfiSNFmiL/ Other volunteering and donation opportunities: https://www.austintexas.gov/help-atx-winter?fbclid=IwAR1U_9fbwP2jglq11rY9wZR2jJePgQoxN934-bOFOPvbcckdRUPOVgK0Znk   MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. You can't keep us down, can you? Y'all thought, this is it. This must be the end of Wonderful. Guess who's back? Back again. Guess who's first floor of their house smells like something died in it. It is us. Shit is rough. It's been a pretty shitty past fortnight hey everybody welcome the remix the remix is here thank you for listening to wonderful and coming at you with a bit of a curveball this week i like

this energy actually right now we got the the door open to the outside because i'm surprised you're allowing this outdoor noise yeah we'll get some outdoor foley. There's a ventilation issue that's quite pleasant. I'm enjoying the good smells from outside. It's about 70 degrees outside because we are being gaslit by fucking nature at this point. Doesn't it feel like Texas is trying to be like, what are you talking about? What? Was it cold here?

Yeah. In the sort of shadowy recesses, like on the stairs behind our house, there's still a little bit of snow back there. Oh, I didn't know that. And I saw it yesterday like, what? And I was like, oh, yeah, it destroyed the state. It was just here. Yeah. the state it was just here yeah it's so we are recording we are recording this um the week after there was just a record terrible amount of snow and ice and cold temperatures yes that basically shut the entire state down we don't have much anything prepared for this episode i imagine we'll be talking mostly about that and it will be a strange one but uh we still are dealing with a lot of

stuff over here like a lot of texans and i do want to put a bit i i wrote up sort of a rundown of our our week uh that i shared on facebook which was strange for me. Yeah. And I, I included the caveat and I'll, I'll mention it here because we are going to be talking about it and probably doing a fair amount of complaining, but I do want to say that we are safe and we were put through the ringer, but we are very lucky in sort of the grand scheme of things of, of having, you know, food and shelter and not so much water, but kind of.

And so I don't want to make it sound like we got the toughest break out of what happened. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like any kind of disaster in that whatever your circumstance is going into it only becomes worse. And luckily we had a pretty good circumstance going into it. Yes. And, and I think our intention talking about it, I mean, not only is to avoid having to research topics,

but also because there's a lot of good stuff, you know, I think, I think those of you that have looked at this nationally have probably seen a lot of the efforts that the people in our community have been making to make this a more livable place for people. And that alone has been inspiring to us and motivating. Absolutely. We're going to probably – we don't have, again, no prep.

We just sat down and started shooting from the hip. But there's still a lot of places in Texas that need help. So we're going to include some links in the show notes of places you can donate. And that would be really great because the snow is gone. But the amount of – we sustained some pretty major property damage here. But we can live in our house. And that's not true of a lot of people. There is an incalculable amount of damage

that is still done, an incalculable amount of food shortage, water shortage in large parts of the state. So still need your help. If you are able, please donate. And hey, do you have any small ones? Small wonders. Small wonders.

Our chest freezer. Have we talked about it? Chest freezer. Listen. Have we talked about that? Our kitchen buddy, our big kitchen frigidaire buddy, it did its best, got it got bad in there yeah it was colder outside of the fridge than it was inside of the fridge which you know in hindsight maybe we should have just thrown thrown wide the gates of of jericho there and let the just let all the air sort of intermingle

it would have been better than what did happen but but that chest freezer didn't, is unflappable. Almost a year. We spent almost a year with this chest freezer because when the pandemic popped off, Griffin was like, wouldn't it be great for us to have a big chest freezer? Yeah. And before everybody had to start isolating and things became scarce, Griffin purchased this for us. Fits very neatly in our little kitchen.

It's a chicken nugget warehouse is essentially what it is if we're being if we're being griffin and i will eat anything you know but but our four-year-old that is not the case uh i'm gonna say stardew valley 1.5 update uh dropped on switch literally two days before the storm hit. Big ups. Big ups to Eric Barone is the name of the developer of that game. Griffin has escaped into this little farming paradise. That's right. Things are going good on Madrigal Farm. We just entered year two, completed the community center, found my way to Ginger Island.

I'm exploring all the new content there and having a great time. We had two uh rechargeable battery packs that we were using for our phone and at one point i had to run the calculation in my head of do i give my switch you know a 15 little bump just to get me through the night or do i save this for our phone to use to call out to emergency services if necessary? Yeah, no joke. I've played quite a bit of it and it's been a salve. It's a good game.

I've tried to sell Rachel on it because you are an Animal Crossing fan, but I think the... I think it's the smallness of it, right? Like Animal Crossing, i can see the little the little cute animal faces oh i see you know like and i can customize in a way that is very like enjoyable stardew valley everybody looks so tiny well you can you can zoom in so that's one thing but i i feel like the thing that might bump for you is the economics of it. I mean, you are managing a small business, essentially.

But I would love to play it with you. It does have multiplayer. So we can talk about that. Okay, all right. So I thought we would just, just to give some context for how all of this popped off for us, it was the evening of Valentine's Day. It was. Griffin had made a beautiful meal.

I had. It was short rib ragu with gnocchi. It's sort of my special dish. Takes a long time to make. Do it in the old Dutch oven. And it's real tasty. Had leftovers. Those didn't make it.

No. At that point, we had known that people were starting to lose power. Yes. And it had been communicated to us that the storm that was coming in was going to be quite bad. And we knew that, what, two weeks? Like, Texas saw that this is an important part of the puzzle. Texas knew that this cold front was coming in very, very well enough in advance to take certain precautions there was there was no preparation that every single person more or less was going to lose either power and or

water or both uh and so we had kind of prepared for it uh but not for a multi-day situation right that weekend we got freezing rain um which sort of drove a bit of a rush that I participated in to go to the grocery store and stock up on things. Which is, on one hand, good because we did have stuff for the next two days, but also all that stuff got spoiled. Yeah, we just didn't think. We didn't think we were getting in for a situation where everything we purchased that required electricity was going to go bad. Right. So, yeah, about 1.30 a.m. on Monday morning, Sunday evening, Valentine's Day evening, we lost power. It was cold.

It was cold. Yeah. I mean, it was cold. Yeah. I mean, it was all, it was in the thirties. I don't know, man. I think it was already in the teens at that point. Definitely Monday night is when it got to seven degrees. Um, so we have a baby monitor and so I had to go sleep on the second floor of the house. So with the door open, so I get to hear Henry cry if, if that was an issue.

If he woke up, yeah. And, uh, when we woke up, it was already very cold inside of our house uh we have a two-story house and the second story at that point was maybe 20 degrees warmer than the first floor um so very quickly that monday we realized that we were going to have to move upstairs move upstairs um because i would estimate it was probably, I don't know, high 40s downstairs inside. And we have a gas fireplace, but it is more decorative than functional. Yeah, with the flue open, we were letting in more cold air than the fireplace could offset. So that was not, unfortunately. But we still had water at that point. Well, yeah, I guess, kind of.

We were doing the thing that, maybe we can share some life lessons also if this happens to you no no joke there are things i wish i would have known like when they say let your water drip out of your pipes that's that's not a joke that's incredibly important prescriptive uh advice yeah and this is something i talked about with griffin like we have obviously been homeowners for a while now, but never outside of Texas. Right. So any kind of issues we've had with homeownership have been Texas specific, which don't typically involve freezes. So we were doing that. To fast forward that particular element, though, it got below freezing inside of our house.

And so we had literal stalactites hanging from the little icicles hanging from the faucets. Yeah, which we thought like, oh, isn't that crazy? So the drip didn't end up protecting us at all. Yeah, at this point, we had no idea how long our power was going to be off and so we thought like let's try and stick it out because the roads are quite bad the roads were terrible we had what half a foot of snow in our and we live up in a hilly neighborhood and uh another thing about texas is that there is no infrastructure to support snow removal and so the streets were not being cleared no and what would happen is every night it would get below removal and so the streets were not being cleared no and what would

happen is every night it would get below freezing and so any melt that may have happened would just freeze would freeze right away worse and worse and worse uh to really drive this home because this was one of those things that was everyone uh to very very very very long story as short as i can the power grid was in danger of fully blacking out which is a tremendous danger and takes you know weeks and weeks to repair everybody who was not on a power circuit that was shared with a hospital or a fire station or other sort of essential building lost power, and those outages were supposed to rotate, but there were no non-essential circuits to rotate to. So basically, if you lost power, you didn't have power.

And there were lots of power generators in the state that failed because they were not properly winterized. Texas has its own power grid to be sort of free of the regulations of the big national power grid. So there was no outside help coming in. there wasn't enough power being generated because natural gas lines and coal lines and some renewable energy lines although a majority of our power came from natural gas which got shut down just froze up because they weren't they weren't prepared uh and the government doesn't sort of enforce what what meager winterization regulations exist already which is going to be a thing that hopefully we are we talk about moving forward so that is why this the power grid collapsed like not not fully but for all intents and purposes for the people affected it went down and it did not come back up so there was nowhere to go because you couldn't get in your car and drive

anywhere especially in our neighborhood and so your only option was let's bundle up. This is why when people, you know, were making themselves sick with carbon monoxide poisoning because they were lighting their gas ovens and just letting that run, we were like people in this state and city were cornered and had nowhere to go and could only wrap themselves up in so many blankets.

But eventually your inside gets as cold as the outside. And and that's what do you fucking do at that point yeah so we we found kind of the sunniest most insulated room in our house and brought a bunch of blankets and spent all day monday uh into the evening in one room of our house uh our son was a real trooper about it we we were lucky in that we had enough power saved up in our devices that we had the ipad we had a lot of toys still uh and the other thing that made things tricky for us though was that we have no cell service our neighborhood right yeah our neighborhood is laid out in that we are completely dependent on Wi-Fi calling. So we would have to walk out onto the street and just be on the street.

We couldn't park our cars on the street because our cars couldn't move from the garage. And just like stand out in the cold along with all of our neighbors. Our neighbors, yeah. So this is the first big wonder I think for me is we met a lot of our neighbors this week. We are terrible, I think, as a lot of people in our generation are, like, actually being in touch with our neighbors. And did a lot of talking.

And I think there was a lot of isolation, COVID isolation, that was, I mean, there were a lot of sort of quarantine protocols that we had to break, like, full stop. And we're not as COVID safe as we possibly could be. But, you know, just talking to our neighbors from six feet away on the street was genuinely nice. And literally everybody was going through the exact same thing. So being able to share, sharing information was huge too. But, you know, coming back in from outside, there was no way to get warm. I genuinely was afraid way to get warm. I genuinely was afraid of frostbite.

Eventually, we had to go. The next day, we spent the night at the house. We lit a bunch of candles. We had like a dozen scented candles, which like big ups to everybody. Erica Huff and everybody who sent us candles. Probably not the usage these candles were intended no i think it probably gave us a few degrees bump in that room that we we uh by the time we fell asleep we could see our breath in the room we were sleeping in which sucks and we woke up with like

black crusty goo coming out of our nose we were like picking gross gunk out of henry's nose because i don't think you're supposed to have that many candles burning all night long yeah no that was a big we're laughing but like i felt like i'd smoked a pack of cigarettes the next day after and we have a nice sort of ombra in our uh in the room we slept in of the going up to the ceiling that was probably the most dangerous uh-huh or one of the most dangerous things the smell they're delightful smelling candles in i in when used one at a time we had a a yoga studio aesthetic uh in our cold wasteland but it smells like a fucking bath and body works burned down inside of our room there um so the next morning we woke up and the toilet water had frozen and we were like we gotta

fucking go yeah our gas stove continued to work and so we were able to like make warm meals yeah uh but yeah our probably the shittiest mac and cheese or uh shittiest uh grilled cheese sandwiches i've ever made yeah we were really lucky because because we went out to the street to get in. Griffin was able to get his car out of the garage when we went out to the street. And we realized we didn't have the energy or ability to find a place to stay on our own just given our limited batteries. I texted the family and said, please, will you please call the area and find a hotel? Amanda, our business manager manager was helping out to basically

all hands on deck and we're very appreciative of that um but there were not very many vacancies um i will also say that this was simultaneously happening in west virginia more or less and so justin and sydney were kind of fighting their battle. That did not make the national news as much as Texas, but West Virginia got hit extremely hard. There are places in West Virginia that still don't have power and they need, you know, just as much help as we do. But another complication is that a lot of hotels lost power. So like a lot of these booking places like, you know, Kayak or Hotels Tonight or whatever, you would go on and be like, hey, here's a room. So my family would like book a room and then call the hotel and be like oh no we have we have no power we are not a functioning operating business right now so they booked like six

hotels and five of them were not functioning hotels and they had to like get you know a refund right away but they found one room in a very sort of ritzy not ritzy's not the hip maybe is the right word yeah so downtown austin was was one of the areas least affected by the power outage and so if you were able to find a hotel room downtown right more than likely it was in pretty good shape so they found one room downtown uh and uh we couldn't check in for a while so we we had to leave our house so we got in and slip slip slided our way across town to our friend's house which to be fully honest was one of the highlights uh where we sort of allowed ourselves to we knew that they were keeping safe sort of covid covid wise and so we all kept masks

on and the kids kept masks on our friend our henry and their kids are friends and so watching henry play with other kids for the first time in a year yeah was tear-jerking i feel like in that we were so emotionally devastated i think by what had happened and were scared of being in this freezing house with our son and like you know hoping it didn't get much colder and hoping we could sleep through it and having this sort of ray of sunlight of like seeing our kids play together was like a lot to handle. Yeah. I think one of our concerns, we've been very fortunate in that we have been able to keep Henry home.

So he has not been in school or daycare for a very long time. And one of our concerns has always been like, is he going to be, is he going to have a hard time relating to other kids after, after this? And it was just really, it was nice to see him play. Thick as thieves kids after after this and it was just really it was nice to see him play thick as thieves again it was it was uh but yeah so at this point it's it's tuesday

and it's like lunchtime and we are just kind of hanging out there yeah because they have not lost power this entire time right they had family coming in town that week so um they're they had a pretty full house. They offered us a place to stay, but we didn't want to, you know, they were also going through it. So we decided to make the trek downtown, which the one major highway in Austin is I-35. It had been salted. It had been de-iced. So we were able to get downtown fairly easily and then slip slide our way to the hotel um which um was they had power or they had hot water we were able to shower which was great um this is when i think the food shortage became really real for us

because they had like three things in their kitchen that they could make one of them was a cheese pizza pizza thank god so henry had something to eat uh because he wasn't going to eat like a super foods quinoa bowl so that night we had food we had hot water we had a warm place to sleep and that was great i made a very stupid choice that night, which was at that point we had heard of pipes bursting and the advice that was going around. Again, like not on any kind of governmental level. No, I was on Facebook. Austin Water was not – it's really tough for me to place blame on citywide agencies, right? Like Austin Energy, people were threatening Austin Energy crews who were like coming out and in 10 degree weather, like climbing up iced poles to

like try and fucking fix stuff. And so the communication coming out of those places wasn't great, but you know, a lot of that stuff was coming from a statewide level that they had no control over. But all that to say, there was no unified voice saying, go out to the street right now. Here's what the homeowner shut off for your water looks like. So I didn't fucking know. So everybody was saying, shut off your water on Facebook.

So I drove back here in what was probably the riskiest driving I've ever done in my life. Because at that point, it was nighttime and everything was frozen over again. And I had to go over the hills and roads were shut down. And I got chewed out by somebody for trying to go down a street I shouldn't have. And it was very treacherous. But when I got here, it was night and I couldn't find said shut off so i just went inside the house and did what i could and i got back to the so at this point our we knew that our power had come back on yes uh because we have a i mean i don't know if we want to plug the particular service we have we have a thermostat that was like hey you have power again it was still 30 degrees inside the house and it was not going to be warm enough to sleep we have an app on our phone that tells us yes like if a thermostat that was like, hey, you have power again. It was still 30 degrees inside the house and it was not going to be warm enough to sleep.

We have an app on our phone that tells us if our thermostat is running. And so we knew that we had power and we knew that once things started to warm up, we were going to get a real sense of the damage. But it was night. Our homeowner in Austin, and I imagine probably in a lot of places too, but I don't fucking know. You have two water shutoffs of the water going from the street into your house. One is the city shutoff and one is the homeowner shutoff. The city shutoff, you need a special tool and not everybody has a homeowner shutoff. So there were a lot of people whose pipes exploded and they were like, my house is actively flooding right now and there's nothing I can do about it because there is

no homeowner shutoff and the city requires you to use a special tool you are not supposed to shut off the city shut off yourself you're supposed to call them but it's fucking you know an ice field outside there's no way that they get out here they are you can't get through to them uh and so a lot of places were just screwed so ours was buried under snow i couldn't find it i did what i could and and drove back home uh the next morning we woke up to a letter under the door of our hotel saying we now have no food so we were like well okay uh shit uh i went out to i found a cvs that opened at 10 a.m it was the only business out that was open i was like i'll get there right at 10 a.m it'll be money i got there and there was a line around the corner. So I waited in line for two hours.

Here's a wonder. Here's a nice wonder. Talk to nice people. There was a nice young couple who was right behind me in line and we talked for the whole two hours. And they were very, very nice. They were sort of, it was kind of, it was nice to complain to somebody who like, the idea that we had a four-year-old and you were, you know, quite pregnant and, you know, we needed food and we're trying to keep our son happy. And like the, we had more responsibilities than they did. Yeah.

And seeing them be like, oh my God, was in a way like kind of like, okay, so it does suck shit. It is fucking bad here. Yeah, okay, thank you. That's quite nice. But everybody was going through it. And it was the first conversation I had had with strangers at length in a year.

And so that was genuinely nice. And it took us two hours to get inside. And when we got inside, there was no food. Griffin came back with some great Valentine's candy. That's it. That's all they had. Recently expired. Still tasted brand new.

Yeah. So a sad voyage. But seeing those people inside the store once, they were only letting in three people at a time. So it was basically supermarket sweep. Just the three of us in there like, hey, what'd you find? They're like, oh, I got some expired applesauce. Cool. I know.

I was texting Griffin like, what are people coming out with? Like, are you looking in their bags? I came home with some Sour Patch Kids, some Reese's Hearts. We got some juice. We got some bad juice, some shitty flavorless juice. So about halfway through the day, the sun had come out. The roads were getting a little bit better. We thought, let's just let's we have power at our house it's still very cold there but it's getting warmer let's go home and griffin had to kind of argue with me on this because i

knew it was a gamble what we were going to find when we got home right and it was still somewhat dangerous because it hadn't completely thawed to get home. And I had that real dilemma of, do we leave this like warm hotel room with power and water? The hotel was tricky because they weren't kicking anyone out, right? They can't. And so we called down like, can we stay an extra night?

And they were like, yeah. Because they weren't taking new reservations. We must have gotten one of the very last ones because nobody was leaving. They couldn't take new reservations. So we had the room for another night, but part of me wanted to free that room up if we could, if we could go home. And the other part of me was we need to be home in case something bad happens. Yeah.

And I had thought since Griffin went the night before and said that things looked okay, that we were potentially out of the woods. Right. Which was a little full hearty so we got everything packed up got in the car drove drove home which was not too bad um and should we leave a little cliffhanger here so oh yeah we do need to go to ads and we can steal you into our house and everything was fucking ruined can i can i steal you away. And we walked into our house and everything was fucking ruined. Can I steal you away? Hey, here's Jumbo Bombs. And this one is for Grant, my love.

And it's from your love, Katie, who hey bubba you are my favorite i know wonderful is my show but you are the most wonderful thing to me so why not share the love i love you very much and can't wait to see where we are living when we hear this hopefully we have a dog by then as well if not let's go out and get one now this is also a signal for me to slap your butt so look out oh gotta keep your head on a swivel there, Grant. Could be butt slaps coming in hot and surprise dogs. It's a real jungle out there. Can I read the next message?

Please do. It is for future Alec from past Alec. Hello, future Alec. You're listening to your favorite podcast and you're doing great, I'm sure. Don't listen to that voice that says otherwise. You're working on your degree and I'm sure you're still running a stellar D&D game with marvelous players who all love you. You are loved by your husband too.

So don't give up. Much love. Past Alec. That is a sweet one. And I'm glad that this is your favorite podcast. There's a lot of good ones out there. Are you sure? We know you have choices when you listen

and we're thankful that you choose us. Absolutely. You're our platinum medallion diamond member. Alright, so. When last we left. We had just returned home and we just returned home i think the first words in my i opened up the door the first floor was still very cold but like you know we could tell that there was power there was power and i think we walked in and like because there wasn't water

at our doorstep or like rushing under our doorstep. I think the first words I said was, well, this doesn't look too bad. And then I listened with my listening ears and I heard our, our, I'm trying to think of how to describe the kind of architecture of our house. The first floor has like a sort of sunken area, right? Where you walk down a couple of stairs and then there's our bedroom, there's a closet, there's a guest bathroom down there. And then there's our master bathroom, which has like our main closet

where we keep our clothes in and a little toilet alcove. And this is like the very side of the house too. This is like when you walk in, obviously there's all of our living spaces and then kind of on one side. About a quarter of our house, right? You think of about maybe a third of the first floor of our house spaces and then kind of on one side about a quarter of our house right you think you think of about maybe a third of the first floor of our house is is down a foot that you

have to go down a couple stairs to get down to the ceiling was gone well it wasn't gone bathroom it was on the floor yeah uh and there was a pipe directly above the hole that was shooting shooting tremendous amounts of water it was not a drippy drip. It was a blast. It was like somebody had knocked the cap off a fire hydrant literally that that much. Yeah, I think so I come from a very quiet home. And so Griffin comes from a louder home. And so it's not unusual for me to hear Griffin make a loud noise. And sometimes it's just like, oh, I got a paper cut. This was a different kind of loud noise.

I knew there was a problem. Well, you're also, you knew there was a problem when you heard the sound of gallons of water falling into it. I didn't hear it until I got right on top of it. Oh, okay. I didn't hear it like front door. So I called 3-1 called the city and like gave rachel my phone while i ran outside to try and find the homeowner shut off uh which i

couldn't i found the city shut off which was under a big sort of manhole uh and i popped it open and there was what looked like there was the water meter right and then there looked like a big sort of steel cast iron bolt so So I ran back inside and grabbed my wrenches, which I had. Which by the way, like that wrench set, how did you, it looked like it had been unopened. And so it was like this miracle thing. No, it looked like it had been unopened, but that's just how it's scored. Oh, okay. I was just like, where did this even come from? I didn't know we had it. Yeah, no, I've used it for a couple plumbing sort of scenarios.

Nothing quite this dire. But that bolt in the city shut off. Again, you need a special tool, which they sell online. And you can buy them at Home Depot. And some of our neighbors had them. So I also got on Facebook really good. This was in the span of five minutes, 10 minutes. And posted like, I need this right now.

Does anybody on our street have it? And then I ran to our neighbor's house and knocked on his door like, hey, I need this right now. Does anybody on our street have it? And then I ran to our neighbor's house and knocked on his door like, hey, I found this thing. Do you happen to have this tool? I also don't know if it's our shutoff or your shutoff. So I don't wanna, so he came up and showed me his homeowner shutoff. So now I kind of knew what to look for on my side

and I got out a shovel and I started digging and under a bush, under a half a foot of snow, I finally found it and turned it off. And after another five minutes or so, the water had flushed from our system and was still dripping quite violently into our room, but not gushing, right? Yeah. And at this point, when we got home, it was like Tuesday afternoon. And so we realized, like, we need to start making phone calls. Right away. If we're going to get anybody

because we knew this was happening all over the city yes uh and we knew also that there were limited business hours left in the day and at that point we had been on hold with 311 for like 20 minutes we we gave up on the city yeah we we gave up on 311 because they weren't and this is like the sort of emergency non-life threatening emergency services number that you call and they were they didn't answer because of how like how slammed they were overloaded yeah and so we did what the equivalent of like taking out of yellow pages is and then we just started calling every number list and like filed a bunch of different like filed their insurance claim and like there's a lot of if you're not a homeowner, there's a lot of stuff you have to do with water damage specifically.

We have no water now, right? Because we had to shut off the city plumbing and we still don't. You need a plumber to fix that. You need a water remediation company to come in and assess the damage. Water damage is catastrophic because it gets in the walls and the insulation and all of that has to go. Based on the fact that Griffin came the night before and things looked okay. Yes. And we got home the afternoon the following day. We have no idea how long this was happening.

There's about a 15 hour period between when i was at the house and then when we came back from the hotel that we don't know so it could have been gushing for 15 hours it could have been gushing for a half hour we don't know we kind of know now yeah the damage is extensive yes and we were fortunate uh for better or worse that we were still kind of in the front runner pack of damage. And so we have- But I mean, it's still, it's Tuesday now. This was Wednesday when we got home.

A plumber is supposed to come today when we're recording. Still don't have water. The water remediation company got bumped and got bumped and got bumped and finally came late last night to walk in and say,'s fucking ruined and we're gonna have to gut basically a quarter of the house like all the walls are coming out all the ceilings are coming out all the insulation's coming out all the carpets are coming out all the uh and they're gonna start tearing the house apart today but again like we don't know if they're gonna actually show up or not and we are lucky like we are the lucky ones there are plumbers who and this is you

know making national news like people getting 300 calls a day with full voicemails and yeah plumbers that are booked six weeks out are are we have a nanny who started coming in again last week even though we didn't have water who's been fucking amazing who has brought in she she has camping gear and so she's brought in like these six gallon buckets of water because we had been melting snow in pots to pour into our toilet to flush them yeah uh and we're we were looking at having to boil snow to drink um and fortunately i found a gas station just down the hill that i was able to drive to to get a pallet of water from um so like that's another thing we've been very lucky about is that we've, we've,

we have not hurt for drinking water, which a lot of fucking people are. Yeah. When Griffin was able to find a water remediation crew and I was able to find a plumber. Yeah. So we had somebody who could destroy our house and fix our water, but we still don't have anybody to fix the house,

which is we have places to live inside of our house, but also we're going to have a baby in like three weeks. Yeah, it's too much to kind of process all at once. So all we can really do is kind of feel fortunate that. We have the stuff that we do have and we have the resources to like get stuff fixed. Yeah. Which a lot of people don't like. Again, like I'm genuinely so grateful for everything that worked out. But it is on a personal level, it's horrible and very scary.

But on a statewide level, like it's unthinkable. It's immeasurable. Everybody is going through this. The thing that Griffin and I keep talking about that you don't always realize if you're not living in a place after a disaster, because Griffin and I are both from areas that are used to cold weather, the power goes out, it comes back on, things go back to normal. But that's just not going to be the case here. And all these people that maybe now have power, it's not like they can just go back to their, their life. Now they have serious damage to damage to their home and their property. You know, the city has basically been shut down for a week.

And so I don't- Oh, we got a, the day we got home, you know, it didn't affect us much because we didn't have water because I had to shut it off because of what exploded inside of our house. But there was a boil, a citywide boil notice from Wednesday through,

I mean, it's still active in parts of the city, because one of the water treatment plants went down. And so now, even if you had power and you did have running water, you had to boil it, which made things tricky for us, because it's not like we could just go to a friend's house, grab some water, start chugging it down, baby. We would have to start we would have to to boil that yeah what what what i guess i i want to communicate is that even though the power is on and it is 70 degrees outside uh the damage done by this uh will take a very long time to repair and so it again it's not like my childhood where it's like oh i got out a flashlight for a night, you know, and maybe I had to throw out my ice cream.

I mean, the reason I bring that up and it gives me a level of compassion that I didn't previously have is people always talk about during a disaster, there is tremendous momentum for relief. Everybody is donating and providing water. And then after a week or two, everyone kind of assumes like they should be good now. And that's just, that's not going to be the case for a lot of people here. Yeah. I mean, the disruption to it, we were in the middle of a pandemic and trying to figure out what bringing a child into this world and our home

was going to look like we're in the we're in the we are in the home stretch of that and that is a lot for for anyone and now we have you know a a quarter of our home that is that we can't really we can't go in so much right now, and we still don't really know what it's going to take to tear that out and fix everything. And that is, at worst, an inconvenience, right? But you extrapolate that out to like, everybody is going through that.

And there are many, many, many, many people who are going through much worse. Austin, thank God, has a okay infrastructure for people experiencing homelessness. And they very quickly expanded warming centers and shelters, and they converted the entire capital metro system to transporting folks to those warming centers and but like you know that's not going to be true in every rural area or even every city in texas yeah i mean there are still people the grocery stores are kind of back up and running after several days where they couldn't get new shipments fucking heb is it's like a like a meme in Texas where like you can't really trust the government to do anything for you because it's been deregulated to the point of being functionally useless.

But H-E-fucking-B will like. Yeah, our governor and our senators are doing almost nothing, but our grocery store was really coming through. Our grocery store. But this is the hugest wonder, and it's also quite sad that the work is being, maybe not sad, right? Like, I don't know how to interpret this. The work is being done by neighbors, and it's being done by local businesses

who are just giving fucking food away heb had the power go out in one of their locations while people were shopping there and they were just like go ahead and leave with your food and don't worry about paying for it not that heb is a particularly small business but like mutual aid funds are saving lives like literally saving lives, like literally saving lives. Putting food on tables and giving people water and safe places to stay who would have died without that help. That is where the help is coming from. And that on one hand is a beautiful portrait

of community and what it's capable of and how strong it still is despite everything that we're going through. And it is also heartbreaking that there's not a more centralized effort to fucking provide relief. It's, it's, it's so frustrating and sad.

And. Yeah, I, uh, so frustrating and sad and yeah i uh there are so many people and circumstances you know you couldn't you couldn't get stuff you couldn't get it delivered to your house like you really had to be like does anybody on my street have formula because you couldn't chance driving out to get to a store that had nothing on the shelves you know it there was somebody looking for similac which is a special kind of dairy and soy free uh baby formula that we had to use with henry because he had a a cow's milk protein allergy which sounds like bullshit but it's like a pretty serious thing yeah uh and we didn't have any more but like when we did have to find it we had to like get it from the babies are us that is now closed and like sourcing that was such a stressor when everything was working right well and

everybody like all of our family wanted to help and they wanted to mail us things but you know like everyone who had those like two day shipping options didn't realize that two day shipping meant a week now because of the way the the trucks had gotten behind yeah um i don't know i don't know how oh henry got also a stomach bug weirdly like yeah a couple nights ago which we think is probably because he either either we pushed our expired food from not expired well you know food that was no longer good because we couldn't maintain the right temperature or because we don't have running water to wash his hands like this circumstance was so bleak and so eye-opening for us like it was almost too much but he's better he's fine now

he had like a fever for like that's not that's not um it was just it was just another thing um uh but yeah i mean i i think the thing i've realized is there are a lot of people around the country that have been through kind of natural disasters and they have experienced a lot of what we are talking about. I think this is the first time that Griffin and I have really had to, you know, uh, weathers some kind of storm that really drastically dangerously impacted our, our circumstance. Uh, and and every it just touched everything it hit everyone and and i there is the extra infuriating element of what could have been avoided if regulation was taken seriously with regards to our text fucking uh rick perry had a statement um because people were coming after the ercot which is the statewide sort of regulation board for the power grid uh and people were coming

after all of i mean basically how power works in texas saying like we there has to be regulation there has to be some sort of redundancy with the national grid there has to be something so that when this does happen again because this is a freaking freak storm it was the longest stretch of uh below freezing temperatures in the state's history ever uh but it's it had in 2011 we had a big blackout and got all of these like warnings basically saying like your power grid is not safe for this you need to do something about it 10 years later we didn't and this is what happened um but rick perry had a quote where he's like the good people of texas aren't gonna let a few cold days keep them

from giving in to the federal regulations that and it's like texas pushes that to the extreme right we have no income tax we we are there is a genuinely huge uh amount of light touch taken to statewide government for business you know like they make things comfortable for corporations to come which makes our state look you know pretty prosperous but when you look but then those businesses don't fucking protect us yeah and themselves from from this weather and and and this is this is what happens so like and and having greg fucking abbott go on hannity and talk about that this is all this is the green new deal like fuck off dude ted cruz leaving like ted cruz is a fucking dipshit idiot loser piece of trash but watching greg abbott go on and immediately start like lying when people are fucking dying because nobody nobody was taking this seriously yeah it's it's it does not make us particularly optimistic

that things are going to change because of the way that texas thinks about like regulating corporate interests it's it's there is there's not a particularly sunny lesson to to be taken there you see like and this is that like dichotomy i think i was getting out earlier is like i saw more people helping people than I have in my entire life and was subject to that help and gave that help in ways that I haven't in my life. Cause we've never gone through anything like this, but it's going to happen again because of this other level of people who could stop it and will not, or at least have given no indication that they,

that they will. And so it's like, well, I guess I'm glad that the community is here, but we shouldn't have to be the ones to shoulder the burden of this. Yeah. Yeah. I,

I, I have always been a believer that there is a strong place and role for government in our society. And I would say that that failed us at every level this past week. the government has to take care of yeah the roads and utility like that's if if if they're not doing that then what the fuck are they doing there's so much more that the the pooling of all of our national interests accomplishes for us that they should be doing but that the very basis of it we need water and power and roads that work and if you can't fucking do that then what the fuck are you doing like what do you do all day yeah it's it's it's it's insulting it's infuriating it is it's a i knew it was bad but when you see shit fall the skeleton of the thing fall apart, I apologize.

This energy is helping absolutely nobody, and I recognize that, but it is so demoralizing. And it's so the antithesis of what we try to do on this show because there were a lot of light points to this, but those light points came as survival mechanisms in the face of a thing that shouldn't have fucking happened. To be as grateful as we were to get buckets of wastewater from people

so we could flush our toilet. Like, it's just like, it's unreal to have that experience in a place that is supposed to be one of the best economies in the country, you know? Yeah, yeah, we see, and there's a cost to that, right? That now like everybody's very intimately familiar with.

I don't know that there's much else to say. Like that's where we're at. This has been a genuinely life-changing event, both from a like uh adult responsibility thing like uh i've never experienced walking into our house to find it flooded and like what do you do with that and whereas i feel like i have quite a bit more know-how i'm glad um glad this baby's still inside i feel i can't even imagine trying to do this with a newborn yeah um i'm glad that we had friends that uh had running water and or power to help us out a shop vac came in clutch big ups to

the minskish for that shop vac holy shit yeah otherwise we would still have standing water potentially in that space downstairs uh we may we haven't knocked those walls out he's surprised we didn't have a little um you know little kiddie pool going on in there um smells like it smells the hell like it doesn't it um we we are going to be okay and there's lots of people who aren't please Please donate if you take anything away from this. When I wrote that thing on my Facebook, I mostly wrote it because I don't think people really understood the scope of what had failed here. Yeah. There are discrete pieces of this that are relatable to anybody.

You know, like people have lost power. People have had icy roads. People have had stores run out of stock. But everything at once made this like a very unlivable place for an extended stretch of time. And I think Griffin really made it clear of like, okay, well, here are your basic needs. And here's how each one was eliminated during this time frame. Yeah. But we're,

we're, we're okay now. Like things, things we're going to be living out of different parts of our house for a while. And probably what is broken in our house will not be fixed by the time the baby gets here. And that's fine.

Cause we're going to be able to give that baby a warm home and recording studios. Fine. Studios doing great. Rug is great. great rug is great lamp is great um brother printer brother printer just fine is doing all right um so like i'm i'm angry and i'm grateful i i feel all these feelings and i feel very self-conscious about them because we're doing okay and yeah this anger that i have should be reserved for the people who don't but i can't help like i'm so fucking angry and i'm so

moved and i'm i'm sad and i'm so we're so fucking tired like we that's not like every night we fell asleep at like the night that it it we had to camp out in the one room we all fell asleep at like, the night that we had to camp out in the one room, we all fell asleep at like 7.30, like some crazy. Because it's just like we were so tired and still are. Like every day, the amount of physical exhaustion of just like hauling all of our wet shit out of that one room and tearing out all the insulation, which big ups to my, I posted a picture on Instagram and everybody called our insulation house meat and house beef. And that was a genuine highlight. I posted this picture, like expecting some sympathy. And literally every comment was like,

that's some good house beef you got there. The house is trying to give you beef, Griffin. Griffin was in the perfect headspace for that. Cause I looked at, when he told me that I looked at like, tried to read his face of like, is this striking you as insensitive or funny?

And it was, it was very fucking funny. And yeah, it's, we're just two people we're three people uh and three and a half people and like there's millions and millions and millions of people who live in this state uh who and family members i mean it is it is a bummer to have family so far away from us but we didn't we didn't have to run down to Nani's house. We knew that she would have power. I am grateful that I'm not trying to chase down an elderly relative right now. Yeah, we were able to just kind of take care of ourselves and our neighbors to the extent of whoever needed it.

And, yeah, I hope that this episode doesn't come off as like poor us. And I hope it doesn't come off as just, I don't know. We try to make a positive show here. And there are definitely things to be positive about. And there are definitely a lot of things that need to change. I was telling when people, you know, we've had a lot of people check in with us because this has made national news. And I've said, like, we are as optimistic as people without running water can be right now. Hopefully by the next time we record, we'll, you know, have running water. we record we'll you know have running we'll have running water like one we've been taking this one step at a time and it's like you know dad has been texting a lot and like checking in yeah and

every time we're like you know we're warm we're safe everything's actually turning around and it's great but we don't have running water and our downstairs smells so bad um and that's that uh hey thanks to bowen and augustus the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. Friendly link to that in the episode description. Yeah, and thank you to Maximum Fun, which is just a true community of artists. And in that fashion, they have been very sympathetic and flexible with our timeline and our recording schedule and keeping us kind of going, which is important. Hey, if you have friends in Texas, check in on them. Because I genuinely don't, I genuinely think that there's a lot of people who underestimate sort of what folks are going

through. And this is, again, not a plea for sympathy for us, we are doing fine, and we'll be okay. But if you have friends in Texas that you haven't heard from, just check on them and make sure that, or, you know, I say just Texas, there's a lot of places that got hit hard. Be that, be that, be that community that, you know, can, can step in and fill the needs that, you know, other places that should be doing it are not. Yeah. And I think to that point, there are still a lot of organizations that need volunteers right now yeah uh and so if you if you have the time that is a great idea or if you know of people that have a certain expertise that would be useful you know like i have heard stories about

people driving in like plumbers from out of state coming in to help it's just like it's well they're also having to start bringing our nanny told us that there's no more plumbing supplies like at the hardware stores in town. So like there's more people here to do the work than there are actual, which, you know, we haven't gotten our stuff fixed yet, so hopefully. There is a lot of room to help and there will be for a while.

Yeah. So again, links in the description. Please think about doing what you can and we'll be for a while. Yeah. So again, links in the description. Please think about doing what you can. And we'll be back next week. We're going to keep doing the show until the baby gets here, which hopefully will be at a prescribed date and time and not a, listen, you listen to me,

and not a second earlier. Not a second before until we give the all clear the green light and uh that's gonna do it and uh stay safe and um thank you for your support and your your all of the worry that you poured our direction uh over the last over the last week that means a lot and um yeah and thank you griffin and thank you rachel my beautiful wife you're you're great you're so great you haven't been able to lift heavy things or scoop snow or do a lot of here it comes physical but no your support here we go. But no, with your support, Here we go.

It's not, it's, you've been there, you've been lifting the heaviest thing, which is... Our unborn child. Our unborn child. Who is not a joke. The heaviest thing. A white fucking big.

All right, bye. Bye. Bye. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.