"Ye Canna Change the Laws of Physics!"

Two things from yesterday about power, one from the day before it about speed. Oh, and one just now about pressure.

After we both got up and going yesterday morning, our power went out at home. The lights flickered back on a couple of times, but that was it. It wound up being a two hour outage and appeared to be fairly widespread. The three traffic lights on Sheridan I drove through on my way to work were on, off and on- suggesting some inconsistency.

A few people have asked, we certainly did, about whether our solar panels could be used as a grow-your-own generator when the power goes out. The answer is no, primarily for safety reasons. Then there are also the many associated brain farts as you try to stumble along without power on a dark and rainy Monday morning. I wound up shaving by the light of the motion-activated battery light we keep in the bathroom for our overnight trips (or hopefully the lack of trips). And of course, leaving the house yesterday, I forgot the garage door opener wouldn’t work until I pulled the red handle and hauled the door up by hand. That always reminds me of a long time Rochester client. When he worked downtown, he once got a call from his wife in a suburb about 20 miles out. Honey, the power is gone out and I can’t get the car out of the garage!  He told her to pull the red handle. Five minutes later, another call:. Well honey, I pulled the red handle and it still doesn’t work! He drove home, lifted the door by hand, went inside with a puzzled look. She didn’t realize that she still had to lift the door by hand after she pulled the red handle. (She must’ve thought it had some kind of battery back up or some thing.) They were not married long after that.

The other two stories come to you from Wegmans, two different ones on two different days. We live in  between two of them- Sheridan Drive, where Eleanor used to work, and Alberta Drive, the first Veg-monnns I ever shopped at arriving here in 1981 (one of my law school professors pronounced it zat vey) when it was located across the car park from the then General Cinema Boulevard I-II-III (actually IV!) I wrote about a few weeks ago.  Wegmans later put up a Chase-Pitkin hardware joint on the cinema site before leaving that business, converting the old building into their new Alberta store and leasing the old one to Ashley Furniture, another of Eleanor's former employers.  Alberta caters to more of a university and multicultural crowd, so it's not surprising they were picked as the first local store for this innovation:



They've actually been a little slow on the electricity draw with this addition; Tops has had one at their store nearest us for a few years, and National Grid popped a four-pack of chargers in the car park shared by Wegmans and Kohl's at  another plaza a few miles north of this store-developed station.  We're hoping it will lead to more ports at more of their stores. Existing stations tend to fill up quickly in local parking garages and outside government buildings. One of the first we ever saw- at UB outside the Center for the Arts- has gone away, probably because they got tired of gas guzzlers parking illegally in front of it.

We'd also like to see more of these in residential and lower-income areas, although the resistance from the oil companies and their lobbyees is starting to build. A few weeks back, I read this sick tale from a state Lej member down south who is fellating Big Oil's gas pump in his mouth and driving them to ecstasy:

A new product is introduced, and people are free to spend their money accordingly. But that, evidently, doesn’t sit right with a cadre of Republican lawmakers in North Carolina who have introduced a bill to demolish — literally — one of the primary reasons people are starting to buy EVs in the first place: public charging stations.

Introduced in the North Carolina state legislature this spring, the innocuously named “Equitable Free Vehicle Fueling Stations” bill, if passed, would allot tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars for the destruction of existing public EV charging stations if local authorities don’t build free gas and diesel pumps alongside them. As for free charging stations on private property, don’t worry, the bill has a plan for those too:

Any person who is engaged in a business where electric vehicle charging stations are provided for use by the public at no charge shall ensure that each customer of the business, without regard to whether the customer uses the charging stations, is informed of, on the receipt for purchases, the percentage of the amount of the customer’s total purchase price that is a result of the business providing electric vehicle charging stations at no charge.

... So basically, forcing business to snitch on EV users by stoking resentment among their general clientele who otherwise wouldn’t care one way or another. Unless, that is, they’re the sort of pedant who also wants to know what percentage of their bill goes to paying for public restrooms, or sponsoring a local little league team, or other wholly inconsequential stuff that no ordinary person would ever think to focus on.

At a certain point, if the bill’s sponsors are so worried about equitability in civic spending, are they going to also force towns to demolish street lights unless they also build natural gas lamps alongside them? Are local businesses going to have to start itemizing their annual budgets in each receipt they hand customers? As Car and Driver writer (and North Carolinian) Ezra Dyer noted earlier this week, the basic premise of the bill is marred by the fact that not only do EVs keep money within the US (where electricity is generated locally) rather than pouring outward to petroleum-producing countries, but the proliferation of EVs also can help keep gas costs down by lowering demand, forcing suppliers to cut prices in return.

Not that that actually seems to matter to the bill’s sponsors, who would seemingly rather spend $50 grand to destroy existing infrastructure for no other reason than the free market doesn’t seem to be going their way these days.

Suck my plug, Repugs.

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Meanwhile, the Sheridan experience showed a very good employee's need for speed:  I had an employee there written up. Fortunately, it was the good kind of write up.

As I was walking into that store, she came flying out running a 4.4 40-yard dash, trying to get a cell phone returned to the owner that had just left it behind. She just missed catching him when he pulled away at the stop sign, but I not only complimented her to her face, I did it at the service desk:



(Somebody saw that and said I had a doctor's handwriting. I explained that lawyers get JD degrees, and we have to take a third year course in bad penmanship in order to graduate.)

Anyway, Michaela will get a Care Card coupon out of the deal and a good mark on her permanent record card. If the guy in the Cadillac SUV is as smart about such stupids as I am, he will be logging into the Find My app on his computer anytime now and will realize that his phone is safe:)

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And the phinal physics of this post:  The temperature went down quite a bit overnight, so before leaving for Rochester today, of course my CHECK TIRE PRESSURE light came on.  In my car, it's sneakier than Eleanor's: hers tells you which tire is setting it off and shows all four pressures, while mine leaves you to guess.  It took two gas station stops to find a working air hose, and the light didn't go off until almost all the way down Route 104 to Greece, but it finally turned off.  Hopefully that's not a sign of a power failure.