Car, house, life.
So, I made a spreadsheet. I can’t be bothered to deal with the fun and games of raw HTML editing at 10pm on a Saturday night so you just get a picture of it.
Really it’s a “pro-con” list. We’re thinking about whether we can afford a used EV replacement for our hybrid. And this is how it’s looking. Realistically, because we want to be able to visit Nikki / Kate / Fam down in Oregon, we need something with DC rapid charge, or the range to get there without charging.
Of course, this is entirely theoretical. Basically, because I’m changing job and have my ‘summer pay’ saved, I’m contemplating whether that, plus the sale of the car, might mean we can pull together enough to make the switch possible.
Sadly, having looked at charger locations, we think a 24kW Leaf isn’t going to do it. It would mean that we would essentially have to stop in Castle Rock on the way to see friends, and given the number of Trump signs, and the shitty shitty greeting our friends got in a café there, we think that’s not somewhere we want to spend ages if we don’t have to.
Also, a 24kW Leaf would mean we have no extra leeway should a charger be down. With the Soul EV or a newer 30kW Leaf then we’d actually be able to make it to one of the other chargers, if we were gentle.
Whether it’ll happen or not depends on a few things - one of which is whether we’re going to manage to sort out the house, and how much it might cost. The house we were looking at and super positive about fell through. The owner had no interest in replacing the End-Of-Life and believed-to-be structurally unsound roof, unless we paid half. And then we discovered the termite issue. 9 years without treatment, then they found termites…
…so, does it have a wall? Or does it have a sheet of plasterboard on some ornamental lace-trim woodwork?
Who can say?
Certainly not us, it turns out, without ripping apart the walls. Which would have been a whole other debate, but since the roof debate didn’t seem to be moving in our favour, we abandoned ship.
So we’re on the hunt again, and looked at three entirely terrible houses today.
- Terrible house the first seems to be attempting to make good its escape by slipping quietly down the hill. Bonus points to this one for having a building (shed) so shonkily supported that I declined to even attempt to look in it for fear that it might fall several feet down into the ravine.
- Terrible house the second actually could be quite cool. It’s an ex-creamery, but in the 1980s it had what I would call an extremely shoddy residential conversion. The carpet appears to have been laid directly onto concrete floor making the building so damp you could actually see the rising damp watermark on some of the doors. It still has the fridge door and a great delivery space that could be amazing. Indeed, I was trying to convince myself that we could do something cool with it when we noticed the dirty great cracks in the wall and around the roof. Structural failure makes it beyond us, sadly. Also, loud, loud road.
- Terrible house the third was a 1940s rambler that’s been rented to someone who appears to have been morally opposed to cleaning. Ignoring that, and the fact it broadly needs gutting, and a garage reinstating where there’s a room with a giant fireplace….and the washer/drier… oh, and the chimney reopening and providing with at least some ventilation (because it’s got mould appearing on the wall where it’s just panelled in)…and the fact that the roof looked shonky as all hell… ignoring all that…oh, and the crappy electrical panel… ignoring all that - it had black mould on two of the walls in the bedroom. The realtor tried to persuade us it just needed some abatement. Personally, I think a match and some petrol should sort all the building’s problems
So, that wasn’t exactly a raging success.
On the life front, I can now formally state I’m going back to the Emergency Department. Teaching this year led me to a place I don’t particularly wish to return to, of stress, feeling bleak, and feeling like I wasn’t able to serve the students. Rather than subject myself to another year of that I applied to my old place of work and they kindly gave me a job.
I’m hoping that I’ll get to return to doing some stuff with Transport Evolved, too, which would be cool.
In other, other news, my Macbook seems to be intent on dying. It’s taken to randomly switching itself off for no obvious reason (obviously, it’s decided to start doing this immediately after I bought it a new charger). I’ve put myself on the list for a Pinebook, which is certainly not meant to be a proper laptop replacement, but… the plan is to have an actual functional desktop (for video editing, if required…) and so hopefully this will just be my dinking box. Also, with luck, if I need something more beefy, for the time being I can run it on the media server.
Anyhow, hopefully my 9 year old Macbook will hang on a bit longer.
And that, my loves, is the news.
Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.