-13 degrees this morning, it was so cold I could see ice fog, the sparkly crystals floating in the air... literally the humidity freezes at that temperature.
But thankfully we have power (for now), and our home we bought in 2016 has a direct-vent fireplace. I made sure we had some kind of fireplace, after the ice storms of 2007 killed our power in Springfield MO for 10 days. It was the worst winter storm i remember, i forget how much freezing rain we had but it was well over an inch & fell for about 36 hours. The night it hit was one of the scariest nights i've ever lived through, all night long, exploding transformers and huge tree branches crashing on homes all around us. Some fell on our roof but didn't damage it, but the neighbor lady had a big branch go through hers. We had no power or heat, and the temperatures dropped into the single digits after the rain stopped, so after 2 days we bugged out. We drove for 100 miles before we found a hotel that had a vacancy, so widespread was the damage, all the way from Tulsa OK up to Rolla MO.
edit: I tried to prepare: all the generators were already gone in the area, so I ran up to O'Reilly's & bought an invertor, thinking I could just connect it to our car & run a power cord into our house. But the box it came in was taped up... it was the only one left on the shelf. Apparently it was bad & someone returned it to O'Reilly's, and they just taped it up & put it back on the shelf. I am still angry about it, it was our only hope, and with a special needs child, we really really needed power. I've never been back to O'Reilly's since.
