The plans for this week: Opening night of Laurence’s musical on Thursday, followed by performances 1-2x/day through Sunday. Hiking Government Canyon Friday morning. Heading out to the Japanese Tea Gardens on Saturday morning with some friends before my in-laws arrived for the weekend to hang out and see Laurence’s musical.
The reality: Texas had other plans, starting with the cancellation of school and extracurriculars on Thursday. Overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, we lost power a few times, likely due ice on the power lines. Everything was coated in ice, dripping in icicles, and it was only meant to get colder. Friday’s school and musical got canceled, and it got down to 18 degrees overnight. Jason’s parents tried to cancel their flight but weren’t able. They chose not to come down despite that, because at that point, we didn’t even know if the whole production would be delayed. Then it turned out that the musical would continue on as scheduled, and only have three performances instead of the entire run. So at least all that hard work wasn’t for nothing.
It’s really weird to me that we’re now expecting a winter storm at least once per season. My family moved to San Antonio in 1989, and all through my teen years, I don’t remember there being a single winter storm. Jason and I moved to Wisconsin at the end of 2000, and moved back to SA five years later. From winter 2005 to when we moved to Boston in mid-2014, I have photos from every winter storm. There was the ice storm in January 2007, a tiny sprinkle of snow in 2010, a light snow day in 2011, and frozen rain in 2014. Already, the pattern was changing. (Yes, climate change is REAL. And OBVIOUS.)
(all the ice/snow since 2006)
We were only intermittently in SA from mid-2014 to mid-2017, and I know there was some rough winter weather during that time. Once we moved back here, things had changed even more: snowstorm in Dec 2017 – the first I’ve ever seen happen in December here instead of Jan/Feb! – and snow twice in 2021 including the snowpocalypse. And that list of snowstorms doesn’t even take into account the progressively lower temps that are becoming the norm without ice and snow. It used to be that it almost never got below about 26 degrees (and even 26 was abnormal!). Now the low 20s and high teens are happening a couple times per season…
The Zen Leaf 
Yes, climate change is definitely occurring – it’s evident up here in WA, too. Our summers are getting hotter and hotter (it was 117+ degrees here for awhile this summer!) and drier and drier, and while people swore to me when we moved here that there was never a lot of snow, we’ve seen multiple record-setting snowstorms.
My family moved to SA in 1990, and I lived there until I left for college in 2002. I don’t remember any snow, and I can only recall one significant ice storm in that time. Days of cancelled school due to weather were so rare, and we were SO excited! I remember running around the neighborhood with other kids, like “look!! icicles!!”
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I’ve heard that from several of my WA friends! It’s funny – in my freshman year of college, my geology prof told us that climate change was real, but it was happening far more imperceptibly slow than the media made it out, so that it wasn’t a crisis. My 18-year-old self took that as fact, not realizing yet that professors can be just as biased and push their agendas. Now, I can see it for what it really is. Maybe it does move slowly, BUT, like a top that starts by spinning in very tight circles, a tiny change in its trajectory will start it wobbling, only a little at first, and then more and more until it crashes. If he was right, and things WERE moving so slowly as to be imperceptible, we’ve hit the very wobbly heading to crash now…
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