Redhorse cafe

[Toolbox]

Test message. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain for I'm, I mean he, is not real.

[Broken Arrow]

Sending a post reply was answered by an error message but the post was real.

Is there somebody playing games with us.

[wardancer]

So ????? Well one of the post I made posted ! LOL Lets see if this one does !

[OLChemist]

No one move to Texas unless you bring your local electric generating plant with you. We've been burdened with all these people fleeing CA. But, they are coming without power plants (and roads).

It's June, we're not in our hottest part of the year yet. But, our lovely gird operator is asking us to raise our thermostats to >80F. They are threatening us with rolling blackouts. It's not in the triple digits yet -- like say July, Aug and Sept. We used only get these notices when it was over 105F. It's 96F and we've only got 3100MW reserve generating capacity spun up. We've turned into blankity blank CA and other third world countries.

(No, I will never be asked to join the Chamber of Commerce for the state of California.)

[wardancer]

It's already way hot here as well ! Oklahoma calls , so a quick down and back over the weekend to finish up some family business. I think about 6 -7 hours each way. Should be uneventful ! (I hope) Everyone stay safe , stay healthy !

[Broken Arrow]

Hot hot for our terms.We passed in some areas the 100°F.

I hope for rain and cooling down.

Stay safe and cool.

I will get an split air condition system at least for the bedroom. Question is this year or next year. I am feeling like in a steam in the night.

[subeeds]

The heat has settled in all over, I think. OLC, could your grid issues be from not everything be repaired from that winter disaster? I can't begin to imagine how people handled intense heat before electricity and fans were invented. I guess they just built their houses well, and got everything done before the heat set in. Our house was built before central heat and air were common, and we've got sets of windows in each room, so no matter which way the breeze is blowing (if there is one), it will blow through the house. The fact that it's a shotgun house helps, too, along with the deep overhangs on the front and back porch, and the trees they left standing when they built the house.

[Broken Arrow]

Thick walls are good to keep the heat out. Overhangs and trees which give shadow to the house helps too.

As corona is declining, I visited with Mom the abbey Mariawald. As there no moks any longer you can visit. Outside, hot and you were sweeting. Inside cooool. OK, in winter it is cold.

Last night we had thunderstorm but I missed hearing the thunder and seeing the lightning. I awoke when the rain was falling, it was a lot of rain but nothing dangerous.

It has cooled down a bit but I think that wan't hold for much more hours.

[OLChemist]

My folks visited there when Dad was working with AEG Westinghouse. Sometimes he'd take mom with him when he went to Germany. They'd play tourist on weekend and in the evenings. My mom loves any church built between 1300-1600.

I must confess that the building, at least what I saw in the pictures, fits my very American stereotype of old German architecture. Whitewashed thick stone walls, steep roofs...

When I visited London many years ago, I saw some of the original windows from Mariawald Abbey. There are a number of panels in the Victoria and Albert museum. (The church and cloisters had panels of stained glass depicting scenes from the bible, saints and local nobles. During the French Revolution, the abbey was closed, the windows removed and sold to private collectors. A group of them were ultimately donated to the V&A.)

Thanks to the proclivities of a college humanities prof, I cut my medieval art history teeth on 15th century French and Italian stained glass. She completely ignored the rest of the continent. (She also had her Eleanor of Aquitaine/Katharine Hepburn days when she lectured wearing a barbette, fillet and veil.) So I was used to anachronism in medieval art, but I must confess to being tickled by the panel depicting the flight to Egypt. Who knew Egypt looked like the German mountains with palm trees.

[OLChemist]

Sorry, Subs. I didn't see your post at first.

Yes, there are some repair issues. Apparently about 5000 MW of capacity was offline during parts of last week. Ercot has declined to explain why so much capacity was unexpectedly offline. It's unclear how much of the outages are due to Feb damage and how much was heat related problems. But, I would think that plants still down from Feb would not be an "unexpected outage."

The cracks are showing with the grid more than in the past. We came close to a repeat of the Feb disaster in April on an 80F day. It seems for some reason there isn't the ability to bring enough plants online to support demand. I've gotten more conservation notices from the grid operator this year than in the past five.

Feb was a freak. We don't get weather like that but once in a decade. And then it usually isn't the entire state. I can understand things falling apart under those circumstances. But, this is Texas. We get hot in the summer. We've gotten hot in the summer since God made Texas. And we're not all that hot. We're not setting records. This is routine hot.

I'm usually a big fan of free market and deregulation, but this system seems to need tweaking. I can pick and electric company and plan to get pricing. But I can't pick the company that maintains the lines or runs the grid. There is no market incentive for the distribution companies or the grid operator to do aggressive (expensive) pre-emptive maintenance. For the generating companies, electricity being in short supply is best because the money they make goes up. Just a hint that the system may be over stressed and the prices go up. It seems that would incentivize shortage rather than keeping an adequate reserve.

[Broken Arrow]

When I visited London many years ago, I saw some of the original windows from Mariawald Abbey. There are a number of panels in the Victoria and Albert museum. (The church and cloisters had panels of stained glass depicting scenes from the bible, saints and local nobles. During the French Revolution, the abbey was closed, the windows removed and sold to private collectors. A group of them were ultimately donated to the V&A.)

French Revolution in 1795 the Abbey was closed by the French and sold. In 1861 the Abbey was bought back has been used as Quarry and only a quarter of the 1483 Abbey was standing. What you see today is a reconstruction of after 1861 and 1945.

Now there no monks any longer. They began as in 1476 Cistercians and after 1892 became Cistercians of the Strict Observance.

Some stained glasses are still existing. The Abbey was not as plain as it should have been though it is by far not like other cloisters.

Their pea soup is famous. It was a good day.

The Chappel of Michael has five windows with stained glass rosettes.

[OLChemist]

The window I was discussing:

[OLChemist]

Rose wandering into the weeds and boring everyone else to death while she beats a dead horse....

The other interesting thing about the windows is that the over painting is generally done on much less intensely colored glass than windows in French and Italian Medieval churches. There is much less of the saturated, jewel like reds, blues and greens. In a French window, the sky features would have been painted on a darker cobalt blue glass. These are on a faintly blue glass.

I wonder if this is a function of the weather conditions and light intensity differences. Or a result of differences in the kinds, colors and costs of the base glass. Or if the relatively high level of background detail. The most similar French windows I can think of are the Vendôme Chapel windows at Chartres. They predate the Mariawald windows by about a hundred years. But they have a lot of detail on the painted glass. But you still have the intense blue background. (Excluding the modern replacements from this consideration.)

I'll wander back out of the weeds now, LOL

[Broken Arrow]

I can't tell you because I do not know.

My Uncle or his father have known. He died some years ago. He restored the windows in Aachen Cathedral.

[subeeds]

Sorry, Subs. I didn't see your post at first.

Yes, there are some repair issues. Apparently about 5000 MW of capacity was offline during parts of last week. Ercot has declined to explain why so much capacity was unexpectedly offline. It's unclear how much of the outages are due to Feb damage and how much was heat related problems. But, I would think that plants still down from Feb would not be an "unexpected outage."

The cracks are showing with the grid more than in the past. We came close to a repeat of the Feb disaster in April on an 80F day. It seems for some reason there isn't the ability to bring enough plants online to support demand. I've gotten more conservation notices from the grid operator this year than in the past five.

Feb was a freak. We don't get weather like that but once in a decade. And then it usually isn't the entire state. I can understand things falling apart under those circumstances. But, this is Texas. We get hot in the summer. We've gotten hot in the summer since God made Texas. And we're not all that hot. We're not setting records. This is routine hot.

I'm usually a big fan of free market and deregulation, but this system seems to need tweaking. I can pick and electric company and plan to get pricing. But I can't pick the company that maintains the lines or runs the grid. There is no market incentive for the distribution companies or the grid operator to do aggressive (expensive) pre-emptive maintenance. For the generating companies, electricity being in short supply is best because the money they make goes up. Just a hint that the system may be over stressed and the prices go up. It seems that would incentivize shortage rather than keeping an adequate reserve.

Did they ever settle with those people who had chosen to have their bills measured by demand? I remember hearing something about people getting bills for tens of thousands of dollars because they chose that route.
I'm not a fan of power companies. They can do what they please because they know they have you over a barrel. Shortly after my mom died, the power company sent us a $400 overdue notice. I had been helping her write out her bills, so I knew there wasn't a past due bill that large. I took it, and the bills for 6 months before it, to the power company and got nowhere. All they would say it that the computer said we owed it. Talked to the hubby about it, and since we had just gone in with a couple of neighbors and purchased a cow through the local meat market, we really didn't have a choice except to pay it. As much as I wanted to thumb my nose at the power company, I didn't want to let all that beef go to waste.

We have rabbits back-we think. We've been seeing a couple around the edge of the back yard for a few weeks now. This is exciting to me because the fox and coyotes ate them all and we haven't seen any in several years. They used to be all over around dawn and dusk. I hope they are making a comeback. I just hope the couple we've been seeing are male and female so they can work on making more baby bunnies. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that something doesn't swoop down from the sky and get one, either.