Bummer about the storm.. I was lucky, no power loss to mention, though it's like the Arctic cold now, which is no fun.
If you are new to shrimp, I'd advise not starting with crystals, lovely though they are. They are more sensitive, and less forgiving of mistakes, and usually do not do well with tap water either. Most keepers use RO water, mineralizing products for that water and one of the special shrimp substrates that acidifies the water, and those substrates can leach ammonia for months before they finish, and you can't have shrimp while they're leaching.
Cherry shrimp or almost any of the other colour variants of cherries, which are Neocaridina, would be easier & more likely to succeed for you, and most are happy in almost any tap water you might have, and any substrate too.
Feeding them is also simpler, they do well on almost nothing, and will breed, as a rule, quite well.
Cherry shrimp come in various colours. The wild form is mainly brown/clear, with hints of colour. From those, selection first gave us the cherry, a reddish or pinkish shrimp, then fire red, painted fire red, now there's even bloody mary.. each one is simply more intensely red than the one before. Females are larger and nearly always have more colour than the males do, but the redder variants have better coloured males.
Neos also come in yellow, orange, blues and green, though the green ones tend to fade and lose colour with age. You cannot mix the colours in one tank, as if they breed with another colour shrimp the babies are most likely going to revert to the wild colour instead.
You can keep them with Babaulti shrimp though, they won't interbreed, and Babaulti come in a nice green, also oranges and other shades. Similar looking, bit longer nose on them, same parameters and live babies.
Yellow Neos may or may not have a back stripe, and you may find you have to pay more for those that do have the stripe.. you might see it called a racing stripe. Only a variation, your choice if you want to pay more for it.
There are even chocolate Neos, a very dark, rich, brown, but they are fairly new and thus fairly costly as well. They descend from blue shrimp and don't always breed true.
Blue Neos also may have some varying colour offspring, not always blue, not always the blue of the parents, but that's part of the fun for some, selecting and culling the babies to get the colours they want in the future generations.
All the red shades and other colours were achieved by humans selecting the best colours from the many shrimp born. You might even get a new colour.. anything is possible.
Shrimp are super sensitive to ammonia and nitrites, and high nitrates, so keep an eye on the parameters. They will enjoy those plants you have, and prefer a few places to hide, but they mainly eat biofilm, plus bits of whatever you feed them. Feed only what they can clean up in a few hours, and not every day. A few times a week is fine, and they can go weeks without food if need be. Also fairly tolerant of cold temperatures, far more so than most tropical fish at least.
