To those wondering where I've been the past week and half the winter storm last week that brought freezing rain to the area on Monday the 26th and an ice storm Tuesday morning the 27th knocked out power to most of the OKC area and it was finally restored to my neighborhood today. Ice storms are not uncommon in the area but they usually happen in December or January when we're actually getting winter weather here and not late October when the trees have barely begun to change color on their leaves. I was at work during the ice storm so it was relatively safe by the time I got off work, though the rest of the day Tuesday and overnight you could hear with regularity branches snapping off in the neighborhood and then plummeting to the ground. People very quickly moved their vehicles out of driveways to safe areas of streets because of how severe the damage to trees was, at times temporarily blocking streets. It warmed up quickly and we have a gas water heater, a gas fireplace, and a gas grill so living without power for a week wasn't as bad as it could have been. One of the few perks of no power was it meant I didn't have to get flooded with political ads in the runup to the election three days ago (which I did vote in-person). Halloween was kind of knocked on its rump this year from the weather/cleanup and Covid really impacting it which was sad as it's one of my favorite holidays.

The other part of the news during this is one of my housemates tested positive for Covid about 2 weeks ago and the other tested positive a week ago. I went to get tested that Monday during the freezing rain and I tested negative. I've remained symptom free and I and my housemates have been taking precautions here in the house to limit the chance of me catching it. Because I've remained symptom free and because my bakery job means for the most part I can social distance without much issue I've worked 7 of the last 10 days so that has let me spend time outside of the house and keep me less bored than my housemates, both of whom have been mostly working from home this year.

I hope to get a little caught up on art uploads from the past month and I want to thank Nikorokumitsero/Aleu for relaying my power news to a few artists that were working on pieces for me when the outage occurred and LaurenRivers because I've really been enjoying reading her book the past week and I do heavily recommend it.