I Bought an Electric Car

Hi all! It's been a minute since the last time I wrote. I'm fine. I'm just trying to keep my head down through the winter and thinking about the day I will finally get a COVID vaccine (I want to believe it'll happen by mid-June). We're in the deepest part of COVID winter now, though. So I get through the days by focusing on work, making cafe au laits and daydreaming of the warmer days not so far away.

Fun update: I bought an electric car. It's a little "new to me" Nissan Leaf. I've been saying for a long time that whatever car I bought next I wanted it to be an EV but didn't think I'd do it any time soon. It was a whole "thing" deciding to buy it. You can choose the full story or TLDR version below.

The Full Story: I mentioned in my last post that I had ordered an electric bicycle and was planning on just using that as my primary mode of transit for a while. When it finally arrived, it was fucked up (disc brake problems) and when I took it to a bike shop the mechanic looked at me like I was a crazy person and said "where the hell did you get this bicycle?!" The bike I had ordered is difficult to have repaired since it uses mostly proprietary parts that have to be ordered and can be expensive / take weeks to arrive. I knew this was a thing with the bike, but I rolled the dice anyway because it's the best-looking e-bike on the market by a long shot. Hearing this bike mechanic say this was enough for me to throw my hands up and return it. If my local bike shop in the bike capital of the US doesn't know how to work on it, I'm not going to keep a $2,000 bicycle. I still have a regular bicycle and I have access to the public bike share e-bikes so I was thinking perhaps I'd just not have any mode of transit beyond that for a while. Everything I do these days is within a 1-mile radius so walking is easy and Charlie has a car for everything else. But after a lot of back and forth and driving Charlie bananas with my indecision I decided I wanted to buy a used EV since you can get lightly used ones for such killer prices and I believe in the potential of the EV as a means of lowering our carbon footprint (fuck climate change). The Nissan Leaf's the longest available and is a ubiquitous EV on the market plus they're weird looking and I like that. After a bit of research, I bought my white one at an EV dealership in Milkwaukie last Wednesday. It's a much nicer car than my Element which is basically an army tank and is going to a new home with my friends Connor and Ruthanne next week. The Leaf's so quiet and small and nimble. I'm still getting used to it.

TLDR: I had bought an electric bike but it was shitty so I sent it back and wound up buying a Nissan Leaf (an EV). It's weird and fun to drive and I quite like it.

Charging it still feels novel. Here are some photos of where I've charged it thus far:

I've been making some efforts to make our place a little nicer (even though we're 99% sure we're moving in early June). I bought a paper light fixture from IKEA to put above our new dining room table and I replaced the top on my standing desk with a piece of custom plywood that my friend Adam helped me make at his (insane) shop. It made me want to learn some basic woodworking someday so I can just build all my own plywood furniture. It was crazy how quickly he was able to make it (it wasn't hella complicated I guess). If I know someone in Portland with an at-home woodshop they'd let me use someday, hit me up.

My friends Kaya and Daphne moved into a new apartment downtown last weekend and several of us banned together to move them. 2 points to them for being the most prepared movers I've ever encountered. Seriously. We had two people who lived in two different places in different neighborhoods moved into one apartment across the river in about 4 hours. It was impressive. Also, their apartment has a KILLER view AND a rooftop deck. We all gathered there last night to eat ramen around one of the several fire pits. Having friends in a fancy building downtown pays off, people. It'll be glorious in the summertime.

It snowed just a little bit in Portland a few weeks ago. I was at my office when I saw it starting to fall so I decided to walk home just so I could be in it a bit because it wasn't supposed to stick at all (though it did just a little bit). They're saying we might get more snow at the end of the week. I personally hope it snows 10 inches. It won't.

That's the latest on life these days. Just, ya know, waiting for something to get better so life can feel full again (I feel like I say this every post). You may have noticed I've visually refreshed this blog. It handles dark mode now and is a bit more photo forward on the homepage. A fun thing is if I'm actively listening to music, you'll see what I'm listening to at the bottom of the page in real-time.

Press on, friends! I hope we're nearing the end of the COVID era. I want to go on a real vacation.