I’ve gone from a full house to an empty house in a week. Jonah’s back at college and Steve’s in the office three days a week. I mean, it’s not really empty, because the autistic kid comes home at 3:00, and Jonah is driving home for the weekend. But, by COVID standards, it’s quiet in my house.
With the lower levels of chaos here, I’m working on some long term goals and caring for general wellness. I took a week-long break from stressful things that occupy too large a part of my brain, like Twitter and local politics. I braved the cold for a nice three-mile walk yesterday.
Here are some things going on here:
When picking though the book stacks to pick out good ones to sell on Etsy, I came across this seemingly ordinary copy of a Hemingway book. It didn’t have a dust jacket, so I was planning on selling it as part of a low-cost decor book stack. Good thing that I checked, because it’s actually a first edition Hemingway. It doesn’t have a dust jacket and isn’t a first printing, but it’s still worth around $500-800.
Want to see Gwyneth Paltrow’s California house? (She’s got more elsewhere, too.) More pictures and subtle snark at the Daily Mail.
Shopping: I tripped over the cord of my hairdryer and smashed it. I wasn’t sad. It was time for an upgrade. My nieces convinced me to get this hairdryer/straighener/brush. My hair isn’t salon-level straight, but it’s not bad.
Watching: Yellowjackets (finished that last night; uncomfortable but excellent), Bobafett, Ozark
Cooking: Pasta with a short rib ragu — My favorite Italian restaurant in NYC does this. And Chili (here’s my recipe).
PICTURE: Ian at the tutoring center. How many hours of my life have I spent in waiting rooms for Ian?
Apt. 11d 
We have a snow/ice day today. It’s not that cold and it’s not going to last that long, but there’s a bunch of yucky ice on sidewalks and roads, and it’s going to be here for a couple days. Our grocery sold veritable mountains of firewood in the week before this. We got a firewood delivery, bought a bag of “all purpose” sand, and managed to get an Amazon delivery of firewood tools, as Lowes was sold out. We’ve lived in this house almost 9 years and had never had a fire in the fireplace and didn’t own a fire screen or a fire poker…but we do now!
The K-12 school is closed for today and possibly tomorrow, and my husband and college daughter are doing remote. Husband is teaching his classes by Zoom. College daughter has a couple of asynchronous classes today. One of her professors put it to a vote and the kids apparently unanimously voted in favor of asynchronous.
I heard a funny story from the college kid. Apparently, there’s a quiz in one of her classes, but she’s exempt, as the professor put a note deep in his syllabus that if you send him an image of a mythological creature, you don’t have to take this quiz. (It’s a mythology course.)
Read the syllabus, kids!
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Before the storm, husband and I were doing a survey of everything in the garage that we can burn. It turns out that it’s a lot. First up: the 11th grader’s large homemade catapult.
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One of my annoyances about the past few years is the concept of doing a survey of the garbage to burn (which doesn’t work for us anyway, because we have a gas fireplace) equivalent. For me, it has been the research of power backups. Wind is big in Texas and solar in California, and both have reliability issues.
We rely on hydro, which is, generally reliable, but only if the power lines are working and there is a lack of investment in the local infrastructure, with power outages increasing.
I don’t want to buy firewood (very polluting) or diesel generators (likewise) as backup power sources. But are folks really willing to power down regularly? In Texas, consumers are buying power that can be turned off when the grid is overloaded (part of the market solutions). I’m not — I want regular reliable power.
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Well, I guess it depends on what you’re using the power for.
So heating, or refrigeration. Nope, I want reliable supply.
But I’d be OK with ripple outages for battery charging the car.
If you can be in control of deciding which of your appliances you need to be hooked up to the grid, right now – then that can work.
But, don’t know about you guys, but power in NZ is either ‘on’ for the house or ‘off’ (well, there is the exception of hot water cylinders, which are on ripple charge (water heats overnight) – one reason I have gas hot water….)
We have the whole power source issue here in NZ as well. (don’t let the clean green label fool you).
Most power is hydro or geothermal. We do have some wind and solar (solar is mostly individual households). All of those (except geo) have reliability issues (no wind, too much wind, low lake levels, not enough sun, etc.). So there is back up generation using gas and coal.
Since the Labour/Green government banned gas prospecting, price of gas has shot up; and we import the coal for the coal-fired power station (NZ coal is exported at a much higher price). Last year, we had a record usage of coal-fired power generation (combination of increasing population, increasing demand (heat-pumps weren’t a thing when I was a kid), and low rainfall (so low lake levels for hydro)
Now, there’s a push to switch to electric vehicles – but the power generation grid is maxed a fair chunk of the winter. So, in reality, you’ll be using ‘dirty’ coal to fuel your ‘clean’ electric vehicle. Not exactly a win for the environment…..
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bj said, “We rely on hydro, which is, generally reliable, but only if the power lines are working and there is a lack of investment in the local infrastructure, with power outages increasing.”
I don’t know how it is these days, but daylong winter power outages were pretty routine when I was growing up in rural Western WA. We’ve experienced far fewer power outages living in Texas. Before the Feb. 2021 storm, the biggest Texas utility disruption I recall was some rolling blackouts in (I believe) summer 2011.
“I don’t want to buy firewood (very polluting) or diesel generators (likewise) as backup power sources.”
In an emergency, you do all kinds of stuff that you wouldn’t normally do.
“In Texas, consumers are buying power that can be turned off when the grid is overloaded (part of the market solutions). I’m not — I want regular reliable power.”
Fingers crossed, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue right now. ERCOT is operating with a lot of reserve energy:
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/gridconditions
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/how-you-can-monitor-texas-power-grid-online/
“ERCOT interim CEO Brad Jones said the state has 15,000 megawatts of power on reserve to use as needed. That’s enough to power around 11 million homes. The load is expected to peak at 71,000 megawatts Friday morning.”
“The state isn’t expecting widespread grid issues, but local outages due to snapping tree limbs and ice can’t be ruled out, Gov. Greg Abbott said during a storm briefing.”
I don’t think people realize how freakishly unusual last February’s storm was for Texas–the current 2 or 3 day cold snap is much more normal, and even that is not something that happens every year. Also, if you’ll recall, a lot of electric plants were offline last year for scheduled maintenance. Summer is normally the peak energy use time in TX. There’s a chart here if you page down that shows normal energy use in Texas:
https://electricitymatch.com/blog/residential-electricity/texas-electricity-usage-patterns/
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Also in a quiet house today because spouse traveled, which was a frequent occurrence but has been recently rare, one kiddo in college (and she isn’t returning for the weekend), and the other in school (all the district schools are open now, after intermittent individual school closures in January).
Cool book find!
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Have also been blissing out on the quiet house this week.
Mr 14 back in school (after the long summer vacation). Not sure how long it will last – Omicron is spreading, but still at relatively low levels, so far.
Working from home is so much easier, on your own…..
Good spotting on the Hemingway!
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Ann wrote, “Have also been blissing out on the quiet house this week.
Mr 14 back in school (after the long summer vacation). Not sure how long it will last – Omicron is spreading, but still at relatively low levels, so far.
Working from home is so much easier, on your own…..”
I’m enjoying a snow day with everybody at home…but I’m not trying to get anything done beyond basic housekeeping.
A quiet house is nice for any tasks requiring concentration!
The cold weather clothes we bought for skiing are getting good use. All of my kids went through last February’s week-long blizzard in just tennis shoes, so it’s really nice that two of the kids have snow boots now and our youngest has a parka and snow pants and proper ski mittens. So many soggy knit mittens and tennis shoes last year!
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A twitter guy offers a 2022 Texas storm BINGO:
He also has a 2021 one somewhere. I’m trying not to get BINGO.
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They left out “send your child to school with all the drinking water they’ll need for the day, since the city is under a boil water notice AGAIN”.
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BWB wrote, “They left out “send your child to school with all the drinking water they’ll need for the day, since the city is under a boil water notice AGAIN”.”
Oh, man.
I feel like there have been a lot of Texas cities with water issues the last couple years.
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We had a pretty unremarkable 2-3 day storm with lows only in the high teens, which was good, because it turned out that we could just barely get our new oak firewood to burn. We walked to the Hometown U. cafeteria for hot breakfasts twice to help stretch our provisions.
I got “Hunkering down” and “2021 Hell Storm Flashback” from the BINGO but nothing else. The kids had Thursday and Friday as snow days and I managed to get to the grocery store on Saturday, where I discovered that there was basically no canned cat food. Everything else was fine, though.
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https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-water-employee-error-led-to-boil-water-notice/
It was “worker error” at one plant that put the whole city of Austin under a boil order?
I’d love to know what one little itty bitty mistake caused so much inconvenience.
I was reading another article that said that a peculiarity of the city of Austin is that the water from separate plants winds up being mixed together, as opposed to different plants serving different sections of the city, so that impurity at one plant winds up affecting the entire city.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/why-did-everyone-in-austin-get-a-boil-water-notice-for-mistakes-at-one-plant/
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