I’ve seen the car museum off to the north side of I-5 in Tacoma many times, but I’ve never been inside… until recently. When my parents came for a visit, we decided to check it out. A review on the internet said that a non-car geek could make it through in about two hours. I couldn’t understand how that would be possible. The place doesn’t look that big.
As we walked around, we saw signs that said Harold LeMay owned a refuse company in Tacoma and built up one of the largest private car collections in the world. And while there were a lot of cool cars in sight, it sure didn’t seem that large. But then we turned the corner, went down the ramp, and I caught sight of a building map. There are four floors and each one is packed full of cars! If you follow the arrows, you’ll wind your way all the way to the bottom and then work your way back up to the top.
We spent too much time on the way down and had to walk up a bit quicker than we would have liked since we were on a schedule, but wow, this place was huge! There were so many cars to look at. It kept our family easily entertained for a couple hours, and I think we could have spent a bit more time there.
There isn’t much maintenance on an electric vehicle. The manual basically says to put some windshield washer fluid in every once in a while and check the brakes, but even the brakes are hardly ever used since regen braking takes care of most of it. You do still need to rotate tires though, and while I could take it in to a shop or have Tesla come to my house (for $50) to do it, I don’t mind doing this at home.
Jacking up an EV isn’t always the same as a traditional car because things look a lot different under the car. If you look under a Tesla, you’ll see the giant flat area of the battery. There are four jack total points which is fine, but how do you put a jack stand under there? Enter the RennStand jack stands. These jack stands are an arch shape with removable legs. You jack up the car with the cross piece between the jack and the car. Once the car is lifted high enough, you insert the legs into the cross piece and remove the jack. Voila!
RennStand sells various adapters for all different cars so hopefully this is something that will be useful on a lot of my cars in the future… because they aren’t cheap. I bought mine from Teslarati. I bought two but for rotating the tires it turns out that I only need one. Both wheels on one side of our Model Y are lifted off the ground even when resting on a single jack stand.
The jack in the picture is the Arcan XL3000 Heavy Duty All Steel 3.0 Ton Jack. It works well but it took a very long time to get it to hold pressure when I initially unboxed it. There are steps in the manual that amount to raising and lowering it a bunch of times to work any air bubbles out of the system. I had to do it so many times that I almost gave up and returned it.
Is this overkill? Absolutely. I’m not crawling under the car so I could let it rest on the jack while I make the swap, or I could let a tire shop swap my tires. But I do like the convenience of doing it myself at home whenever it fits into my schedule. Plus, I’m also sticking with the recommended 6000-mile rotation schedule so that would be a lot of appointments to schedule. I’ve heard that EV tires don’t last as long, but I don’t know how much of that is due to additional car weight versus people driving them harder because they’re fast. I want to do it by the book for our first set and see if the tire life seems reasonable. If it goes fine, then I’ll be a little lazier on the tire rotations like I have been with our other vehicles.
A huge percentage of our mail is junk… or it was. This is the point where I’d normally hit you with some stats about how much junk mail we get per day, and honestly, I did start collecting it at one point. Normally collecting data about random things is fun, but even data can’t make junk mail fun. So even though I didn’t count the junk mail rate, I did throw it all into a box for a month or two, and then I signed up for PaperKarma.
This isn’t sponsored, but the idea of PaperKarma is that it helps you unsubscribe from junk mail. You take a picture of the junk mail with your phone to help it search for the company that sent it, you tell it the exact addressee for the junk mail, and then they go off to tell the company to stop sending you mail.
I was skeptical at first but we signed up for a six month subscription for $16. Since I had a big backlog of junk mail, I was able to enter in a lot of mail right away. Again, I don’t have data, but we get WAY less junk mail than we used to. Some still sneaks through, but I know I’ll never be rid of it all and just reducing it has made me happier.
The only real nitpick I have with the service is that the photo of the junk mail seems pretty pointless because it rarely works. I end up typing in the name of the company so why include the photo step?
I plan to let our subscription lapse for a while and see how long it takes to build back up, but I won’t hesitate too long to resubscribe for a bit to beat back the flood.
Yesterday I wrote about our trip to Lincoln Rock State Park. Usually when we go camping, we take the truck, but since we were staying in a cabin and it was such a short trip, I decided to give the Tesla a shot instead.
With the Cascade mountains in between us and the park, it would have been pretty tight to make it all the way there and back without charging. I didn’t know what charging options would be available at the campsite, so on the way out, we paused at the Leavenworth supercharger for a quick hit. That charger is so convenient because it’s in the same parking lot as Dan’s Market which is quickly becoming our favorite grocery store in Leavenworth. We had planned to buy some of our food there anyway instead of lugging a cooler across the state. I actually had to let Tyla finish the shopping because our charging was done before our shopping was.
I had intentionally not topped off the car there in case we could find a way to get free charging at the park. The only easy option was a 110v outlet on the back of our cabin. It was a little too far for our Tesla mobile charger to reach, but I had bought along a beefy 12/3 extension cord. Charging on a standard home outlet is exceedingly slow, but we had time and it was free so why not.
On Saturday, I drove over to an unused RV spot and plugged into their 240v 50amp circuit which charged about 7 times faster than the outlet at our cabin. After a couple hours a ranger stopped by and asked me to move the car though just in case someone happened to have that site reserved. I get that it was the rule and I didn’t put up a fight, but it seemed unlikely that in a park with 100+ empty sites, that specific one would be reserved. In retrospect, I wish I had put a note in the window with a short explanation and my phone number so that I’d at least save them the work of looking up my license plate if they didn’t like it.
I didn’t leave the mobile charger plugged in overnight because I wasn’t sure how waterproof the whole setup was, but by the time we left, we had added about 25% to the battery which meant we could easily make it home without a stop, and it also saved us about $7 versus charging at the supercharger.
Yes, you read that right: $8. I love the challenge of being as frugal as I can with my charging to really milk the most savings we can, but when you look at the work required to save even a few bucks, it really doesn’t pay off unless you’re having fun doing it.
While it was a little tricky to fit Elijah’s bike into the car, all our stuff fit pretty easily. The frunk and the under trunk storage swallow up so much gear. And I was glad we had all wheel drive for the trip through the pass. There was quite a bit of snow over the weekend but thankfully we missed the worst of it. I did have chains along just in case.
All in all I’m glad we took the Tesla instead of the truck. These adventures with the Tesla are helpful in expanding my comfort zone. We’re still hoping to do a long road trip with it this summer!
After our fun cabin rental in Bay View in 2021, we decided to do it again this year. There are quite a few Washington State Parks that have cabin rentals. This time we picked a cabin at Lincoln Rock State Park that included a bathroom and a small kitchenette. The Scherschels booked the cabin right next to us.
The cabin was built recently and was nice inside. It had a bunk bed and a futon. You could theoretically sleep six, but six adults would need to be very friendly. The three of us spread out and each had our own sleeping area.
The heat was a key feature for us because it was chilly! We knew we were rolling the dice by booking a cabin the last weekend in March. It was in the 30s in the mornings and only got up to 50 for a little while. Throw in a ~10mph wind and it was cold, but we still spent a lot of time outside exploring the campground, playing games, and sitting by the fire. While the cabins were only about a hundred feet from the Columbia River, access to the river wasn’t the easiest and there wasn’t a ton of room along the shore. There was easier access at the other end of the park which I imagine would be nice in the summer.
The hot water wasn’t super hot, but it was nice to have a sink to do dishes in and a place to take a shower. If we go back there again, I think I’d buy a small electric hot plate to make it easier to cook meals inside. We used a camp stove outside which worked fine but the hot plate would be a nice option.
Let’s say you’re the kind of person who is running a website within your home network and you want to access it while you’re away. Let’s also imagine you’re the kind of person who has at least a loose knowledge of your router configuration and what a VPN does. Yes, this one gets a little geeky, but maybe it will be helpful for someone else out there.
I run Teslamate to record a bunch of stats about our car, but one the reasons I check it most often is to see whether the car is asleep or not. Sleep mode for a Tesla is like standby on your computer. There’s normally a constant drain from the car when it’s sitting there, but if it goes into sleep mode, it uses almost no power. This is important especially in situations like when we’re away from home and I’m leaving it parked outside a hotel overnight. I like to be able to check in on whether it’s in sleep mode as well as the current battery state. Teslamate lets me check that without waking the car up. But Teslamate only works on my home network. How can I view it while I’m away? Obviously I could just open that port to Internet traffic but it’s an unsecured connection and I don’t really want to share all that personal info with anyone who happens to sniff my password. So how can I view that website securely while I’m away?
The first option I tried was using a feature of my Synology router. That router has an installable app called VPN Plus Server. There are a few different modes, but the simplest one gives me a VPN tunnel into my home network and the ability to browse to any internal website. During setup, the app walked me through creating an SSL certificate so that the traffic would be encrypted, and the app provides a nice portal experience where I can have links to any internal websites that I might want. There’s a more complicated version of the app that actually lets me set up a Windows VPN connection to my home network but I haven’t played around with that yet. It would be overkill for the scenario described here.
The second option is via NordVPN. I like to have a VPN subscription like NordVPN to encrypt my traffic when I’m on public WiFi like in a hotel or at a store. A side benefit of NordVPN is their MeshNet feature (but they recently announced that MeshNet is now free for everyone!) MeshNet allows for VPN-protected communication between two devices from anywhere in the world just as if they were on the same network along with other features like file sharing. So this also lets me access that Teslamate webpage from anywhere.
There are plenty of other ways to tackle this scenario, the most obvious of which is “this is dumb, stop worrying about it”, but these are two have that worked for me. The NordVPN is definitely the simpler one, but the Synology option gives me more control and more options.
I spend a lot of time in virtual meetings from home. During the day, I usually have reasonably good light coming through the window next to me, but when it’s darker outside (or when it is so bright that I have to close the window shade), my video doesn’t look great. Does it really matter? No, but I like to have good quality audio and video.
It took me a while to find a light that I wanted to buy. These were my criteria:
Ability to adjust the color temperature – during the day I have daylight coming in and at night I have warm white bulbs. I didn’t know it would look to have different light colors at the same time.
Ability to adjust light brightness
Ability to work well whether my desk is in sitting or standing mode.
I ended up with the Lume Cube Edge LED Desk Light (Amazon referral link: https://amzn.to/3ZZF1js) It clips onto my desk so it’s always in the same place whether I’m sitting or standing, and it has adjustable brightness and color temperature. The arm is easy to move around to work either as a desk light or to light up my face for video. The light is also diffused pretty well so I don’t get a lot of shiny spots on my face. Below is a before and after comparison. Not only am I more evenly lit with the new light, but the background blurring algorithm has a lot easier time identifying the edges of my head.
After buying flagship phones, Tyla and I tried out a midrange phone last time: the Pixel 4a. It has been stellar! Other than a lack of wireless charging, I can’t think of anything I miss from the flagship phones. Our batteries still last a full day, and they don’t feel too sluggish.
We were happy enough with it that we went for another Pixel: the 6a. This phone has been out since last summer, but when I saw the 6a’s were selling for only $299, it was hard to pass up!
It’s hard to give much of a review for a phone that I just unboxed, but I can say that the transfer process was nice. When the new phone booted up, there was a point where I could connect to the old phone via USB and suck over all the content. Not only did it bring my list of apps, but for many of the apps I didn’t even have to log in again on the new phone! We also use Microsoft Launcher so everything works very much like it did before the upgrade. Connecting the phones to the Tesla and the truck was a breeze and went much quicker than with our old phones. I had been having trouble getting Android Auto to work in the truck so it was nice to see it fire up much faster than it did before.
Unfortunately switching our SIM cards to the new devices was not easy. Xfinity Mobile is typically easy to work with. Most things are done through an app or the website, but for some reason, the “replace your device” workflow was not accepting our new phones. It took a total of two hours on the phone to get both phones upgraded.
I was tempted to wait for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 7a to launch this summer, but those would be sold at full price again and getting two fantastic phones for a total of $598+tax was too hard to pass up. After experiencing our 4a’s, I’m fully onboard with this mid-range phone idea. Not only do they work great for years, but I feel less bad about upgrading since they were more affordable.
Here’s an updated list of my cell phone device history. If we’ve come this far in 22 years, imagine what the next couple of decades will look like!
As part of my effort to closely track the cost savings of our Tesla, I wrote a program that uses Gas Buddy to track the prices of the six gas stations closest to our house with the logic being that these are the places we’d be most likely to buy gas from. In reality, we buy almost all our gas at Safeway but for some reason that one doesn’t usually have prices listed on Gas Buddy.
That program started running a year ago and below is the chart of how things have changed. The orange line (the cheapest gas) is usually the Costco near us.
When I was doing the calculations about whether I could save money with a Model Y versus buying another Ford Escape, I had planned on $3.50/gallon. So with the average gas price barely ever dipping below $4/gallon, I’m ahead of my estimated savings mark. But I’ll more on those specific savings numbers when we reach 20,000 miles in a few months.
Three years ago, our family went into lockdown, not knowing what COVID would mean for the future. After three years, life does seem to be returning more to normal. Through a combination of vaccines, immunity from previous infections, and better treatment options, the death rate is falling. The media is tired of talking about it, and I’ve had multiple people tell me that COVID is over.
While things are certainly better than they were, it’s still killing ~2500 people per week in the US. That’s an improvement from where we were, and it has been holding steady in that range for a few months. But even at that rate, it is still the 7th biggest killer in the US ahead of diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Higher vaccination rates, more home testing, and isolating when sick could save around 100,000 lives per year. How many lives could we save if people know that COVID is still killing this many people? Would they care?
We had a chance at getting people to care when there was a personal threat, but how do we get people to make sacrifices to help someone else? This challenge isn’t unique to COVID. With other global threats like our changing climate, we have an idea of which activities are making things worse, but how do we get people to make a financial or lifestyle change for results that won’t show up for a few decades? The real solutions seem to work around the need for individuals to make sacrifices, but will we find something like that for COVID?
Long term, I think we solve these types of problems by educating the next generation to do a better job of consuming information. I’ve been very happy to see Elijah’s school teaching how to differentiate facts from opinions, look for supporting evidence, and identify experts. A population with those kinds of habits would hopefully have a better response to situations like this in the future.
For now, we have to work with the tools at our disposal. The good news is that compared to the original lockdown, these tools are pretty easy to use:
If you haven’t gotten the updated vaccine shot that came out last fall, get it.
If you are sick, take a COVID test every couple days until you’re better. You get 8 free per month with most insurance plans.
If you get COVID, follow the guidelines and isolate.
For a mix of social and scientific reasons, it looks like COVID is here to stay, and while we don’t need to stay locked up in our houses, we also can’t ignore the continued impacts.
COVID-19: Day 1095 (Three Years)
Three years ago, our family went into lockdown, not knowing what COVID would mean for the future. After three years, life does seem to be returning more to normal. Through a combination of vaccines, immunity from previous infections, and better treatment options, the death rate is falling. The media is tired of talking about it, and I’ve had multiple people tell me that COVID is over.
While things are certainly better than they were, it’s still killing ~2500 people per week in the US. That’s an improvement from where we were, and it has been holding steady in that range for a few months. But even at that rate, it is still the 7th biggest killer in the US ahead of diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Higher vaccination rates, more home testing, and isolating when sick could save around 100,000 lives per year. How many lives could we save if people know that COVID is still killing this many people? Would they care?
We had a chance at getting people to care when there was a personal threat, but how do we get people to make sacrifices to help someone else? This challenge isn’t unique to COVID. With other global threats like our changing climate, we have an idea of which activities are making things worse, but how do we get people to make a financial or lifestyle change for results that won’t show up for a few decades? The real solutions seem to work around the need for individuals to make sacrifices, but will we find something like that for COVID?
Long term, I think we solve these types of problems by educating the next generation to do a better job of consuming information. I’ve been very happy to see Elijah’s school teaching how to differentiate facts from opinions, look for supporting evidence, and identify experts. A population with those kinds of habits would hopefully have a better response to situations like this in the future.
For now, we have to work with the tools at our disposal. The good news is that compared to the original lockdown, these tools are pretty easy to use:
For a mix of social and scientific reasons, it looks like COVID is here to stay, and while we don’t need to stay locked up in our houses, we also can’t ignore the continued impacts.