If you enjoy maps at all, I warn you that learning about the content of this post may result in great loss of time for you.
Now that you’ve been warned, check out Historic Aerials. For any address, you can scroll back in time and see satellite images of what it looked like in previous years! You can even click the Compare button, choose a map on each side, and then adjust the transparency slider back and forth to really spot the differences.
When Elijah was younger, I heard about the Wingfeather Saga book series. It’s a fantasy book series for kids written by one of my favorite Christian musicians, Andrew Peterson. I read the first book and loved it, but it was too much drama for Elijah at the time, and it was so good that I didn’t want to turn him off by giving it to him too early.
Fast forward to last year when we were driving down to Oregon for vacation, and we gobbled up the first audio book. Elijah loved it! There are four books in the series and we both read them whole series. I don’t know if I would have given it a chance if I didn’t have a kid, but it’s a solid story even for adults. There’s plenty of humor and a really good story. We talked about it so much that Tyla ended up reading the books too, and now we’re watching the TV show as a family.
As if one of my favorite musicians authoring a great book series in one of my favorite genres wasn’t enough, there were more great connections:
I keep mentioning Christian artists, but this book isn’t religious. It’s not an allegory or anything like that, but there’s also no garbage that you wouldn’t want your kids reading. There is a deity in the book but it’s not a main point and they just refer to him as “the Maker”.
Unless you really hate the entire fantasy genre for some reason, I obviously recommend checking out the books. I’m usually one for books over audio books, but I liked doing the first one as an audiobook because we got to hear the hidden jokes with the way things are pronounced and get more of a feel for Peterson’s intention behind the characters (because he narrates the book himself.)
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
Earlier this year, we replaced our OEM tires with Hankook iON evo SUV tires. Efficiency and longevity were two big analysis points in my research. I can’t speak to longevity yet (though I’m tracking tread depth with every tire rotation), but I can give an update on efficiency.
First of all, I’ll say that it’s quite difficult to get objective research about efficiency. So many of the random posts online do a very poor job of analyzing the data. For example, they’ll make a post of their efficiency after 100 miles or they’ll show a month of snowy winter driving compared to the previous 2 years of all-season driving. To avoid some of these issues, I’ve waited until we had 10,000 miles on the new tires before making this post.
The tires area already performing slightly better than the OEM tires and that’s even when they’re relatively new. Over time, traction decreases but efficiency increases due to less rolling resistance.
A lot of the recommended tires for this car are high performance which makes sense because the cars can be driven hard. However, we are more interested in overall efficiency and those high performance tires can easily use 10% more energy. This makes a big difference over time, or even on specific trips where you’re pushing the limits of your range.
Shortly after we purchased these tires, Tire Rack came out with an in-depth review of EV tires and they agreed that the Hankooks were much more efficient than other tires while still having good performance: Tire Test Results : Are EV-Specific Tires Better than Popular Non-Ev Tires? – 2024 Test 1 (tirerack.com)
We’ll see how long these tires last, but assuming they hold up ok, I’d happily buy them again.
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.
While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.
To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.
When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.
This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!
Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.
While we did just get back from a great trip, we decided to squeeze one more in before the weather gets rainy. I don’t remember how it started but we have a random family goal of visiting all the counties in Washington together. With that in mind, we headed east. For those of you not familiar with our state, you may picture Washington state as wet and cloudy. That’s true on the west side of the state between October and May but the east side of the estate is a desert. There are literally tumbleweeds blowing around. It’s a dramatic change with just an hour drive east over the mountains.
Our base of operations was Moses Lake, but the drive out there was slower than expected because the I-90 bridge over the Columbia River is being worked on for the next couple months. We sat through a 5-mile, 75 minute backup squeezing down to one lane. Oops.
Saturday morning we headed north for Grand Coulee Dam. Tyla and I have been there before but Elijah had never seen it. Grand Coulee Dam is mind-boggling big. It was originally created to supply a huge part of central Washington with irrigation but now it also supplies power for about 2 million homes per year. There are lots of stats, but suffice it to say the ~1 mile long dam is one of the biggest concrete structures in the world and the 10th most powerful hydroelectric dam (3.2 times more powerful than the famous Hoover Dam.) We got there for the first tour at 10am, but unfortunately the tour has really been neutered even after the initial changes after 9/11. You no longer get to visit the generator area. The tour briefly takes you down to the pumping facility which is interesting but too short. The rest of the tour is a drive across the top of the dam with a stop walk around at the top. I guess it’s still worth doing if you’re there, but don’t make that the key point of your day. Luckily for us, it was just one piece of the puzzle!
After the tour we had lunch at the apparently brand new Billups Sub Co. It was delicious but way more expensive than I was expecting. We got our food to go and ate it at a nearby park that had free EV charging (more on that in a later post.)
After lunch we headed northeast to Koontzville and then east to Highway 21. I don’t think we saw any other cars on that part of the drive and a forest fire had ravaged the area only a couple months before. It was quite a sight. Once on Hwy 21, we headed south to the Keller Ferry. This ferry is tiny compared to the ones we’re used to in the Puget Sound. It only holds 20 cars! The north dock is movable and gets moved upriver to a different spot when the river is too low. There’s no schedule and no fee for the 10 minute crossing. This sounds like a simple part of the trip, but we all said it was our favorite!
From the south ferry dock, we headed straight back to our hotel in Moses Lake for some swimming, food, and rest. Our drive back home went smoothly and we got through the construction in Vantage, WA before it had backed up at all. After getting through that, we did stop at the Thorp Fruit & Antique Mall. It was fun to go inside afer driving by so many times. We came back with a box of apples, but if you’re looking for really good deals, I think you should look elsewhere. It wasn’t bad but it felt like a mildly good sale at the grocery store, not the kind of deal you get buying straight out of a field.
So none of those activities were monumental but it added up to a nice weekend and some more family memories to add to the pile.
We’ve done three cruises now so clearly we are experts and you should get your info from this post instead of the endless barrage of other internet content on this topic. Kidding of course, but here are three things that I think are helpful when planning a cruise, especially your first cruise:
There is a cruise to fit just about everyone and you can customize each cruise in a lot of ways, but those choices can have a big impact on your experience and your bank account!
It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post. We subscribe to the ad-free YouTube because it’s the streaming service we watch the most. Yes, there are lots of garbage videos there, but if you want to learn something, there is an endless flood of educational content too.
First up we have a video from Donut. Honestly, this might be one of the last videos I watch from that channel because my favorite hosts left to do their own thing at the new Big Time, channel, but this is still a great video. In 15 minutes (and what appears to be a single take), they explain every part of an engine:
If you have even a passing interest in engineering, check out Stuff Made Here. Every video is a home run, and his most recent video is no exception. He set out to make the world’s smallest bicycle. It’s incredible how much energy he puts into these ideas!
And finally, here’s a shoutout for the Practical Engineering channel. There are so many interesting videos with solid explanations of things that you might take for granted. He recently had a good one that goes into detail about how French drains work which is worth watching even if you already think you know, but for this post, I want to highlight “Why Railroads Don’t Need Expansion Joints.” Think about it… you have a thousand miles of a solid metal bar baking in the sun. That must expand and contract a lot! How do they deal with it?
I was approached a few weeks back by a girl at church asking if I could make a sign for a kids craft fair/bake sale that she was entering. She quickly drew a picture of the logo she and her friend had designed. I’m frustrated that I can’t find the original drawing, but I took what she had and made a vector version of it on the computer. I actually started with Copilot to generate some similar ideas and then I combined all the ideas in Inkscape.
I ended up making two identical signs using round, pine blanks from Home Depot. I sprayed them with shellac and then covered them with Oramask the girls wanted to paint them after I was done.
The girls did a nice job painting the signs and it sounds like their bake sale was a hit! After learning a bit more, it sounds like lots of market setups have one day a year where the booths are run by kids. If you have a crafty kid, check for options in your area!
This is the third sign I’ve done on these round Home Depot blanks. They are a great size and relatively inexpensive so they’re a good option, but if you have a good source for other 3/4-1″ thick blanks in different shapes, please let me know. It would be fun to give people options of other shapes too.
For our big family vacation this year, we chose a cruise to Alaska! Tyla and I did two cruises (cruise 1 post and cruise 2 post) before Elijah was born, but we had saved an Alaskan cruise because it was so easy to do. Sometimes those easy/local things get put off for a long time!
This cruise was on Royal Caribbean’s “Quantum of the Seas” ship. We chose it because our first two cruises were with Royal Caribbean and the related Celebrity cruise line. We knew they had good family programs and Elijah was still within the age limit for their kids club.
We had four stops on this cruise:
With the skipped Skagway stops and the two ports where we mostly just walked around, a lot of our time was spent on the ship. Thankfully the ship had a ton of things to keep us busy!
This cruise was quite different from our previous cruises.
With the missed port and the different dynamics of having three people’s wishes to coordinate, I would say that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked it, but it turned out differently great. We have a lot of wonderful memories together and we’re all dreaming about doing it again!
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
I’ve been running the TeslaMate service since the first day we got our car. I have data points from our cars complete life at a resolution of multiple data points per minute. There are dozens of sensors recorded in every data point. It’s a mountain of data and the TeslaMate dashboards do a great job of making use of that data. For a data nerd like me, it has been amazing.
One of the key takeaways I get from it is the ability to get an extremely accurate measurement of what a gas car would have cost me because I take my daily miles and the cost of gas at the local gas station every day. I can compare that with my energy cost and voila, I know my savings over the life of the car.
There are also some fun aspects like seeing a map of every road we’ve ever driven, calculating exactly which counties we have visited, knowing our longest stint without stopping for the bathroom, and the list goes on and on.
But for the last week I’ve had the data logger turned off. It’s gotten to the point where background work of keeping it running, making sure the data is backed up, etc just doesn’t feel worth it anymore. Plus, our car has never done a great job of falling into its low power sleep state and I wonder how much of that is related to TeslaMate (even though the devs say it’s highly unlikely to matter.) The Tesla app has slowly improved over the two years of ownership to the point where, other than the data logging, all my scenarios are covered by the app.
Furthermore, I’ve noticed that while I initially learned a lot from the data, it’s not really teaching me anything new now. I’ll still keep track of daily gas prices and even with fewer recorded mileage checkpoints, I’ll still be able to get a very accurate estimate of our total cost savings. Barring a major repair bill (so far our total is still $0), I’m highly confident that this car will end up being cheaper than what we would have got instead. I liked having the data to really prove it to people who don’t believe me, but meh, it’s not my job to change their minds, and if they hate EVs, my data isn’t going to convince them anyway.
As a data hoarder, it’s hard to let this go, but I’ve gotten to the point in life where I feel the need to simplify. Some of that is physically getting rid of stuff and some of that is letting go of commitments and projects. Maybe this is a healthy step in the right direction, or maybe I’ll reget it in the future! I’m going to leave everything hooked up and I’ll turn it on every once in a while so I still have some data points, but for the most part, this will free up some head space.