Redhorse cafe

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I pray for you. Fight.

[wardancer]

Hopefully you will recover ! My prayers are for you , stay strong !

[ches]

Had the covid. I was in the 3% that ended up in the hospital for 36 hours even though I had had the vaccine. I think the Creator would have taken me home if I had not had the vaccine. The weakness does not go away for 2-3 weeks. I guess I have sbout 2 weeks to go now before the weakness is gone. I pray none of you get real sick if you get the covid.

[ches]

I have not been traveling much yet. I have got to have surgery on the 10th. Church choir is starting back practice on the 4th we have missed it for a long time now due to tge virus.

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After cooled down rainy days now the temperatures are rising again.

The land needs rain. You can see it if you look at the plants in the fields and the trees.

[subeeds]

It's been rainy here. So rainy the cat's mad at the world right now because her Princess self doesn't like the rain. At least it's keeping the heat down.

[OLChemist]

Just to explain what Subs is talking about. Starting in 2018-2019 companies started popping up that allowed customers to access pricing based on the wholesale electric market price. This price fluctuates moment to moment in Texas's largely deregulated market and has a state imposed cap of $9000 per MW/hr. (At this 85F pre-start of business moment, pricing in my county is around $30 MW/hr.) Customers, who opted for these plans as opposed to the various flavors of fixed rate pricing other electric providers offer, were gambling that demand would mostly stay low. Most of these plans also had provisions to maintain a few hundred dollar balance on the customer account, leading folks to set up their accounts to withdraw money directly from their banks accounts.

Just after the biggest of these companies started up, we had a streak of 107-112F weather that spiked rates and there was a lot of ugly media coverage of $800-$100 bills. So, folks who had been in the state for a couple years, knew these plans had the potential to inflict huge bills. Also, a couple days before the storm, the company told customers to get other electric providers. But, many couldn't make the move in time. (It can take upwards of a month to make a transition.) Others thought they'd ride it out and low bills later would make up for this. But, the crisis conditions lasted for days and then even when things eased up the grid operator was accused of keeping the rates high for longer then was absolutely deemed necessary. Under those conditions it wasn't hard to use a MW or two at $9000.

After the storm, all the customers were moved to "providers of last resort". The biggest company running the wholesale plans declared bankruptcy. It is undergoing chapter 11 now. A bunch of customers are suing. The state AG went after the company for deceptive trade practices. (I'm not sure how that works when anyone who wasn't living under a rock in 2019 could have foreseen that this could happen.) The state legislature banned plans like this. If I'm following all the machinations correctly, the company will forgive the bills if the customers agree not to sue or drop ongoing suits.

Texas Monthly article about whole sale electric providers

One take on why the problems are happening:

Texas Monthly: What's wrong with the Texas gird.

[wardancer]

Home safe and sound! All is well. Ceremony was good and everyone had a good time ! My brother would have been proud of us.
I hope the storms weren't too terrible and I hope everyone is safe and healthy !

[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.

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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.

[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

[OLChemist]

The window I was discussing:

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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]

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.

[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.