Author: Steve

Instead of wondering how they could take an existing car and turn it into an electric car, Aptera wondered how they could create the best, most sustainable, way of getting people from one place to another, regardless of what’s been done before.  They came up with this:

It’s got the stability of a two-front-wheel trike.  It’s lightweight and has a drag coefficient of almost zero.  Powered by electric motors.  Every horizontal surface covered in solar collector tiles.  Fully enclosed and roomy for two people with plenty of cargo space.  Zippy performance and a 1,000 mile range.  Charge up 40 miles for free every day just by parking (or driving) it outside in the sun.

Aptera Motors

Yeah.  That’s outside the box.  This may not be a car that all of us want to drive, but a smooth silent runabout for the city, that never has to be gassed up or even plugged in?  That’s worth a look!

Perched on a silhouette of a chickadee!

An outbreak of house flies in the yard.  Don’t know what causes it, but it happens around this time of year.  It’s annoying.

Got an idea, researched online, and put out a fly trap consisting of a hanging two-quart jar with some attractant and water in it that draws the flies in and they can’t get out.  It worked.  It smells terrible, so we had to put it a ways away from the deck, but it works.  After a few weeks we had a pretty good collection of flies floating in there, but then things got weird.  It started collecting faster and faster until it was almost full.  I’ll spare you the photo.  That couldn’t be right because there just weren’t that many flies to collect in the first place.  I realized that not only were flies trapped in the jar and couldn’t get out, they were breeding in the jar before they died and the population was increasing exponentially!

Gross!  We now know there is a practical time limit on how long we can leave that fly trap out.  We disposed of the old one and put a fresh one out.

Did I ever confess my confusion about backpacking prep lists?  All those years ago, on our first backpacking trip together in Colorado, we were comparing backpacking lists to make sure we weren’t missing anything.  I saw a tide table on yours.  Tide.  That’s the detergent we’ve always used to wash our clothes.  I immediately went there.  A tide table.  I couldn’t figure out why or how we could bring a table for washing clothes, but I knew you wouldn’t pack anything unnecessarily heavy, so I just waited to see what it turned out to be.

It never turned out to be anything on that trip in Colorado.  It wasn’t until a later trip, on the Olympic Peninsula, that I was able to escape that first fatal logic flaw and realize that a tide table didn’t have anything to do with washing clothes; you needed to bring along a tide chart anytime you might be walking along the coast.  Don’t want to get caught out on a spit at the bottom of a cliff during a rising tide.  Not an issue I ever had to consider on my backcountry trips in Colorado.