Of course temps today never made it above freezing and we’ll be back below zero tomorrow morning. However we may see the mid-40’s towards the end of the week.
==++==
Another thing I did yesterday that I would have normally done this morning - due entirely to the above normal temperature – was run pre and post church errands. An early morning trip to Walmart and early afternoon trip to BJ’s (an equivalent to Sam’s Club and Costco for those unfamiliar with the chain). All kinds of chores were completed yesterday that would have been spread over two days. There are still a few chores that need to be done today, but they are short and minor in nature.
I certainly don’t mind.
==++==
I don’t know about you, but I know I have been devoutly ignoring the Winter Olympics. The WP Mom has been watching, but most of her attention has been towards the figure skating events.
I haven’t feel the need to support either NBC or the genocidal CCP by watching the Olympics.
There was a time when our family spent hours watching the Olympics. (That was back in the days when ABC was the go-to network, covering the Olympics start to finish.) It was an exciting time and we watched American and Finnish athletes compete in the various summer and winter games.
But over the past few decades the games became more politicized, the coverage less complete and spottier, and the commentators less restrained. With the games having lost the luster they once had, we became less interested as they aren’t what they once were.
Have I seen any of the Olympics? Sort of, and then only because I was in the same room as the WP Mom as she watched skating. I was usually reading, watching movies on my tablet, or writing on the Official Weekend Pundit Laptop. The Olympics were more in the way of background noise rather than something to which I needed to pay attention.
==++==
Oh, it’s SuperBowl Sunday? Really? Hmm. I hadn’t noticed.
Like the Olympics, I shall be devoutly ignoring the SuperBowl. I haven’t been paying attention to the NFL since it caved to a small vocal minority and went woke.
The NFL has been losing fans and TV viewers as they shifted their focus from football to placating people who aren’t fans and never will be. They made the stupid decision to change the name of the Washington Redskins because the woke a**hats decided it was denigrating and racist despite the fact that Native American groups and the tribe who created the logo (based upon one of their historical figures) didn’t want the change and resented the a**hats pushing this down everyone’s throats. But the woke and the NFL knew better.
You don’t remain successful by pissing off your fan base. The NFL is learning that lesson the hard way.
==++==
Is it just me, or does it seem our electrical grid has been becoming less stable and less reliable?
While I haven’t seen any major outages here for a number of years, I have seen warnings by the local Independent System Operator (ISO), ISO New England, warning about increasing demand and decreasing generation capacity. Baseline capacity has been decreasing as various generating facilities have been decommissioned. New ones aren’t coming online at a rate that replaces the lost capacity. Some renewables – wind and solar – have come online but neither can make up for the capacity lost.
It doesn’t help that New England has an inadequate natural gas infrastructure, with only a single pipeline providing natural gas coming in from Pennsylvania. All of the rest comes in via LNG tankers bringing natural gas from hostile nations like Libya, Yemen, and Russia, and doing so at prices well above those of US natural gas. The ‘green’ morons have blocked every attempt to construct a new pipeline, in some cases using the claim that the only reason for the pipeline was “to make money”. Really? It wouldn’t be likely anyone would build a pipeline to lose money, right?
In any case, the increasing instability/unreliability of the electrical grid has been driving sales of generators in the US, both portable and standby types. While the generator manufacturers have no issues with increased sales, the reason for those increased sales does not bode well for us.
One of the people aiming to get a new generator for their home is my friend, K., who lives near Houston. (K. asked me not to use her full name.) She and her husband are spending $11,600 on a new 24-kilowatt Generac generator. (She sent me the receipt.) They put half of the money down last December, but don’t expect to get the machine delivered and hooked up to their home until the end of this year. They recently got an email update telling them that more than 2,500 people are in line ahead of them.I learned the lesson of having a generator decades ago when I lived in an old farmhouse in a town near Manchester, NH. I and two of my roommates were renovating that farmhouse for the owner and in return we had extremely cheap rent. The farmhouse was on a back road in the hinterlands of the town and whenever there was really bad weather we lost power. That meant no water since the farmhouse used a well for water. After a lengthy power outage that lasted 4 days, we decided it would be a good idea to get a generator. Since then I have always had a generator of some kind. At The Manse we had a standby generator that ran off the 500 gallon propane tank which would give us weeks of run time if needed. Here at The Gulch it’s a portable 7kW dual fuel (gasoline and propane) genset which will handle a good portion of the electrical load. It won’t cover the oven or the clothesdrier, but it takes care of the lights, furnace, refrigerator, chest freezer, microwave, TV, and computers with some capacity left over.
The reason why K. and so many other people in Texas and across the country are buying generators is obvious: the reliability of the electric grid is declining. According to data from the Department of Energy, between 2000 and 2020, the number of what the agency calls “major electric disturbances and unusual occurrences” (read: blackouts) on the U.S. electric grid jumped about 13-fold.
The new house (tentatively named ‘The Redoubt’) will also have a generator, a standby generator setup similar to the one at The Manse.
Unless the trend for dismantling power plants and replacing them with unreliable non-dispatchable sources ends, everyone is going to need a generator. Ironically, these generators will create more CO2 than the ‘green’ energy sources are supposed to eliminate. (The same thing has been seen in South Australia in great numbers because the grid has become so unreliable.)
==++==
After some shenanigans at Dartmouth College where the antifa a**hats decided they weren’t going to allow the Dartmouth Republicans to hold an event which author James Lindsay to speak, the college Republicans moved the event off-campus and over the border in Vermont. The same group of a**hats also blocked journalist Andy Ngo from speaking on campus recently.
To those closeminded intolerant wannabe totalitarians I can on offer the following:
(H/T Knuckledraggin)
==++==
And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been shifting from moment to moment, the annual Ice Fishing Derby is winding to a close, and where it’s going to get even colder on Monday.