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two bad Electrify America experiences in one day
Saturday, August 17 2024
location: upper floor, Apartment [REDACTED], East Watergate Building, Washington, DC
Gretchen's friend Andrea came over for breakfast this morning. Gretchen's father had made a big loaf of polenta with bits of sausage and what not in it, something Gretchen knew that neither Andrea nor I would like. So she tried to give us small portions of it until I, the big dumb-dumb, said something about the relative sizes of the various portions she was giving us. It's for this reason that it's always best to just let people serve themselves. And if they take a small amount, say nothing. And when someone says that no, they don't want seconds, don't ask them if they are sure. Because that's not the kind of question anyone ever answers with anything less than sureness. Andrea still works in the restaurant industry, now as a manager at what Gretchen thought might be a Black-owned restaurant that is actively hostile to vegans. Gretchen said Andrea earns something like $80,000/year there, but she's on salary and works sixty hour weeks, so it sounds a bit like hell. There's also the stress of dealing with pizza, some of whom are VIPs and expect special treatment that sometimes doesn't get delivered. "That's why I like working with robots," I declared.
At some point the conversation turned back to our respective cabins (Andrea being the only one at the table without one). I know that Gretchen's father was traumatized a decade or more ago when some workers turned off the heat in his old cabin on Catoctin Mountain and the pipes froze and burst while he and Gretchen's mother were traveling in Africa. So I told the story of how I dug down to the footings all the way around our Adirondack cabin and glued styrofoam sheets to the outside of the foundation wall. I said that this was an effort to make the cabin basement freeze-proof. And the fact that basement temperature never dropped below 35 degrees Fahrenheit last winter (as measured remotely) demonstrated that this effort was not a wasted one.
Another topic we touched on briefly was what Powerful is up to these days. For those who've forgotten, Powerful was the man who was incarcerated for over 25 years after being party to a murder. While in prison, Powerful befriended Gretchen, then an instructor for the Bard Prison Initiative. When Powerful was eventually released (in the early months of the covid pandemic, no less), we gave him a room in our house, as he had no family who could help him get back into society. Eventually Powerful learned to drive a car and moved to Albany, but then his chronic heart problems became so severe that he required a heart transplant. When no one else would provide a place and necessary care for him to recover from that, we took him in again. Eventually, though, we told him he had to go. He then moved back to Albany, got in with some sketchy characters, ran up a huge amount of debt, fell prey to several internet scams, and someone wrecked the Prius we sold to him at a steep discount. We caught Andrea up at that point, how he tried to extricate himself from a woman he considered bad news, but how he inevitably ended up with her again, telling Gretchen that "she has my heart." "But it's not even his heart!" I interjected, an idea that seemed to both entertain and horrify Andrea.
I helped Gretchen's parents clean up while Andrea and Gretchen went off into the next room to have more intimate girl talk, perhaps about such subjects as vaginal rejuvenation (which Gretchen and I believe is almost certainly a scam).
Today Gretchen and I would be driving back to Hurley, but before we left, Gretchen's father wanted to take us to Costco so we could get a bunch of loot at his expense (part of his pattern of transfering as much wealth as possible to the next generation in a manner that avoids taxes). We completely filled one of those big Costco shopping cart with all sorts of things, including plenty of canned beans and tomatoes, nuts, and bulky carbohydrates like chips. Gretchen's father didn't tell us what it call came to, but he said it was the most he had ever spent at Costco.
After transferring everything to our car (where it nearly filled the backseat), we said goodbye to Gretchen's parents and started driving. There was traffic congestion from the very beginning, and it continued on and off all the way to Baltimore (Google did not route us across the Bay Bridge this time). After that, things improved.
As we approached Philadelphia, I tried to find the Electrify America charging station we'd stopped at on the way down so we could go there again. It may not be a great station, but it's near enough easy-to-walk-to vegan restaurants that we wanted to return. But for some reason it just wasn't coming up. We ended up going there anyway, and it was definitely operational, though of course we had to wait in line. Some guy in a Bolt grabbed the last working charger only seconds before we rolled up, and we knew his car would take an hour to charge. Another guy with a rental electric Volkswagen was telling Gretchen all about how awesome his Tesla is, which was all well and good, "...but Elon Musk." She then brought up her idea for selling a bumpstersticker that says something like "I bought this car before Elon showed himself to be an overly-online racist incel." (That's a great idea, although Tesla people aren't the sort who put bumperstickers on their cars.) About fifteen minutes later, a guy who had been charging an enormous all-electric Chevy Silverado drove away, and we could initiate the charging of our car and then walk to the place we'd be having dinner: Fitz on 4th, an all-vegan (and somewhat fancy) restaurant.
Looking over the Fitz menu, I was more inclined towards the smaller "classics" dishes than the more expensive (and presumably larger "basics" dishes. We ordered the cæsar salad, crispy broccoli, fries (with cheezy sauce), mushroom sliders, and empanadas. It came out slowly, so I ended up eating more crispy broccoli than expected. There was a fun energy to the flavors that reminded us of the now-defunct V-Street (another vegan restaurant in Philadelphia). But after eating the fries, I didn't think much of the mushroom sliders (which tended to drench me with boiling hot water from the mushroom with every bite) or the empanadas, though Gretchen thought they were excellent. I also ordered a coffee, which wasn't so great. When Gretchen ordered a decaf, she found it so undrinkable that she phoned in an order to the Dunkin Donuts near where our car was being charged. Perhaps we should've gotten the cauliflower tacos, which the people on either side of us got and which looked amazing.
When we got back to our car, I saw the green charging light was no longer blinking, meaning something had interrupted the charging. It turned out that only 100 miles of range had gone into our battery before some charging error had occurred, and then our car had just sat there doing nothing except running up an idling fee, which had come to nearly $20. Meanwhile the ElectrifyAmerica app hadn't sent me any updates whatsoever for the past 79 minutes. Gretchen immediately called ElectrifyAmerica, and, after being hung up on once (oh, that's how you're going to play it!) she managed to get a human, who told Gretchen the idling fee would be withdrawn. We only charged for a couple minutes after that, as the battery was now about 80% charged, after which charging proceeds very slowly, and we figured it would be better to charge later in Newburgh, when it would charge more rapidly.
I took over driving, and eventually we listened some to F-1-Trillion, the new Post Malone country album, which had just been released on Friday. Neither of us could be considered Post Malone fans, though his songs tend to be among the better ones played on the pop stations we listen to (which we only hear in our cars).
When we got to the Newburgh Electrify America charging station, we found half of the four chargers were out of commission and there was a guy in line. That guy managed to get to a charger while I was pissing in the bushes (Sweet Jesus!) and it seemed like the Asian couple charging at the other charger would soon be finished, since they were over 80% charged. But then one of them told us that they were driving down to South Carolina and were trying to charge to 100%, something that takes essentially forever at a fast charger. It's terrible charging etiquette to insist on charging to 100% when there are people waiting for a charger, but it does no good to argue with someone being that kind of rude. So we decided we probably had enough juice to make it to Kingston, where there was a new Evolve NY fast charging station behind the Bank of America at the corner of Washington and Hurley Avenues. That would give us the little extra we might need to climb the steep mile-long stretch of Dug Hill Road below our house. I tried to keep my speed around 61 miles per hour for the 30 miles between Newburgh and Kingston, and we still had over 30 miles when we got there. The new Evolve NY station had four chargers, all of which seemed to work, and only one of which was being used. We charged for only about five minutes, putting more than enough in our battery to make it up the Hurley Mountain escarpment. I then drove us to Ray & Nancy's house, where we picked up the dogs (Gretchen had made room for Charlotte amongst the Costco stuff in the backseat) and headed home. While Gretchen dealt with other things (like removing a chipmunk one of our cats had killed from the bedroom), I completely unloaded the car and saw to it that most (if not all) of the items requiring refrigeration made it into the refrigerator.
Our neighbor A and her daughter H had stopped by our house several times to feed and check in on the cats. Supposedly Lester's bad ear was giving him trouble and one of Diane's nostrils had seemed blocked. But everybody seemed perfectly normal to us.
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