Grief

We all know what grief is. I dare say we’ve all experienced it at various times during our lives. Well, I’m dealing with grief of a slightly different kind.

We’ve decided to get rid of my car.

This is my car. I picked it. I bought it. I paid for it. It’s mine, through and through.

It’s a 2007 Pontiac G6, red in color. I bought it about the time I retired, so right about 2010. It has served us well for 13 years.

But…

I don’t feel I can trust it right now. It needs work. A lot of work. And I haven’t got the money. It needs an oil change and maybe some brake work… I don’t remember all the routine maintenance the garage said it needed, but it amounted to about $600. I haven’t found that money in the almost-a-year it’s been sitting in our driveway. I am nervous just driving it 2 miles to the grocery store, for fear it won’t start (or something else goes wrong) so that I can’t get it home.

That isn’t all. There was a bunch of not-so-routine maintenance that they said it also needed. That is a further $500.

And to cap it all off, the AC unit is completely fried. That would be $5,000. Yes, it is that fried.

A year ago, I was thinking it needed some bodywork and a paint job. I was dreaming, of course.

We’ll try to sell it, but if anybody shows any interest in it, we’d have to tell them what a fixer-upper it is right now. It wouldn’t be honest or ethical to keep that to ourselves.

If we can’t sell it, we’ll give it away.

I’ll still have the memories, right? The memories of driving that car back and forth between Omaha and Orlando for several years. Memories of driving it to Kansas City and back to Omaha once a week to take a class on Theatrical Makeup. Those were lonely trips, with just me and my car. And a road Atlas to keep me from getting lost. I think I still remember the route.

There was one trip to Orlando where my hubby flew down to meet me for a vacation (as usual). This time, while we were there, he bought two big tubs of cosplay costumes and a bunch of supplies from Smooth-on. That was a very loaded down car for the trip back to Omaha!

Well, I could keep talking about memories all day. It won’t change anything.

It’s kind of like when your pet dog is on his last legs, won’t eat, can’t even keep water down, and you know it’s time to put him to sleep.

Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

But I’ll miss it.

Thoughts on Electric Cars

A power company in Missouri will be installing close to 100 vehicle power-up plugs in Northwest Missouri and the Kansas City area. “That’s nice,” was my thought. “Now, if I had an electric car, my home charge would (probably) get me to Kansas City, and that charge would get me close to St Louis. But there’s still a long distance between St Louis and Florida. I wonder if any other power companies will do the same? St Louis? Paducah? Nashville? And so on? And how far out of my way would I need to go for one of these power-ups?”

As an author, I’m an ideas person. I have to be. I have to come up with ideas about characters, plot, scenes, everything. When I write science fiction, I don’t know exactly how thing works, I just have to be convincing.

Why has everybody been designing electric cars that are good for running around your home town, but not for traveling? I like to travel. If I could do both in an electric car, I would be scrounging up pennies to get one. Instead, I had to opt for a car that got decent gas mileage on the hiway.

I keep hearing about ‘tweaks’ some car company has made - like when you apply the brakes, a slight charge is trickled back into your battery.

Why stop there?

Here’s some ideas I wish SOMEbody would incorporate into an electric car. 

1. Solar panels. They’re being put everywhere else, why not on the car’s roof, trunk lid, hood... even the fenders, doors, sides and bumpers! They don’t have to be big and clunky; they can be small and flexible. (I’m not in favor of alternating colors into a checkerboard, but maybe that’s just me.) Trickle that power into a spare or already-discharged battery, and you’ll get further before you have to pause and charge up all the batteries.

2. Wind power. Windmills are good enough to put in the fields, why not put some tiny ones on the car? A few unobtrusive intake slots, and again, you’ve got some electricity to trickle into the batteries. Just moving down the street, a vehicle has air sliding past it, why not use it?

3. Human power. For those times when the sun isn’t out, or you find yourself way out in the middle of nowhere with dead batteries, this would be your backup. Open up a panel - perhaps in the dash in front of the passenger seat - and out pops cycle pedals. If you could change the position of the pedals, you could either use your legs or your arms. Just pedal away to charge your batteries so you can get further down the road.

I actually use these ideas in some stories set in the not-too-distant future.

Okay, talk to me. What improvement would you like made to today’s electric cars?

Anticipated Cars

Anticipated Cars

When I was a kid, the next anticipated ‘improvement’ to cars would be hovercars. ‘The Jetsons’ cartoons also seemed to promise flying cars, but we figured they had to float before they could fly.

Floating cars were on our doorstep... almost. But they never arrived. Loooong before I could drive, I asked my dad what was taking so long to get hovercars ‘off the ground’.

Now, dad was a mechanic, with no formal schooling beyond high school, but his answer made sense to my less-than-10-years-old brain. The layer of air under the car had to support the car’s weight, so they had designed a rubber skirt around the bottom to keep the air from dispersing. However, they couldn’t control the car’s height precisely enough to keep the skirt touching the ground. I’ve accepted that explanation for over half a century.

Eventually, we stopped hearing about hover cars.

These days, the big thing is cars that drive themselves. Sounds good!

You see, I rather routinely drive to Orlando 2-4 times a year. In my car trunk, I have my suitcase, my husband’s luggage, my laptop, my cpap... sometimes I even take my sewing machine. Hubby flies down after a few days, and all he needs to bring is a bag of books to read and his cpap. By driving down, we don’t have to rent a car.

This is a 22-hour drive, straight through, but I can’t do that. I can’t even manage 11 hours of driving - between boredom and highway hypnosis - so it takes 3 days to get there. I love Orlando, but the drive is dreaded.

If the car drove itself, I could read, write, crochet, or just enjoy the scenery. The trip could be as enjoyable as the destination.

I imagine other transportation methods would undergo changes, if cars drove themselves. Flying is expensive, especially with luggage, so people may decide to use their car. Trains are as expensive as flying, take at least as long as driving, and the route might not be as direct, so why not take the car? As for buses... well, some things might not change that much.

Bring on the self-driving car! While you’re at it, make them electric, solar-powered, and re-chargeable in a few minutes, with plenty of recharge stations around the country.

Then we could really get somewhere.