Surviving the snow? Marry Well.

My father believed a real man must be able to do anything, well almost anything. He didn’t think I should be able to build a nuclear power plant, which I actually could, but he sure believed I should be able to build a house, build a tractor, fix a car, and repair anything else that broke.
And he also believed that when things got tough, it was a man’s job to figure out what to do to protect his wife and family. He taught my brother and I the art of jury-rigging, that ancient magic of using pieces of things that do not naturally belong together to fix something that is broken. The repaired article always looks a little funny, funny both in the laughing sense and the peculiar sense, but it functions until you can buy a replacement
This concept of figuring out a solution to a problem using only what you have available to you has been a centerpiece of my life, and it applies not only to things but also to situations, including snowstorms.
This past weekend one of those test situations came up in the form of a thirty-two inch snowfall that shortly after it started took out the electric to our house, which means we had no heat or water.
About an hour before the electric went out my wife started to fill the bathtub. “What are you doing?” was the question from the man who was supposed to know everything.
“Saving water to use for the toilets if the power goes out” was my wife’s answer.
“We won’t lose power,” was my know-it-all reply, and I shut off the water when the tub was half full.
“Sure glad I filled the tub,” she said as the power went out.
The next morning we were snowed in, with at least two days before the snowplows would get to our road. The only heat we had was from a small gas fireplace in the family room and the know-it-all member of this husband and wife team had changed gas companies the previous day and they never filled the tanks. That left us with just a few gallons of the stuff to wait out the effects of the storm.
I went into engineer mode: Calculating the number of usable gallons in the tank; the number of BTU’s per gallon, searching with a flashlight to find the BTU rating of the fireplace, and then combining it all to figure out how many hours of heat we had remaining.
My wife just quietly went to work putting up sheets and blankets over all the doors from our family room and kitchen to isolate the one room with heat from the rest of the house. When she was finished she made window sealers out of towels to keep the small amount of heat we were generating from easily escaping out the windows.
She then filled some pans with snow and put them in our refrigerator to slow the rise in temperature of all the food we had stored, and then quietly moved some of the things into the freezing garage.
While she was doing all of this I was trying to design a sled that I could build in the basement so that I could drag a four hundred pound propane tank on the other side of our house to replace the one that was about to give out.
As I said, my father taught me that a man should be resourceful in times of crisis, but he also taught me one other important thing: Marry well.