snow patrol

Well, after two days of working from home I'm finally back in the office. Yes, it snowed. Badly? Not really. Like I said before, Indiana is a back-birth. This morning I drove into work; Stacy did a good job of digging herself out of the snow drift we were in. Yeah I had to clear out some of the snow from the front tires but she did most of the work. She had to plow through about four feet of snow about a foot high. I had backed her into the parking space so she had an easier time because she's front-wheel drive (or as Bill calls it, wrong-wheel drive). My only real worry was the fact that I was that the speedometer read 50mph (in 2nd gear) and I had travelled about an inch or two. This is the only time I love manual transmission in the snow. Automatics have all those fancy gadgets like ABS or traction control, but Stacy has good ol' horsepower. She don't have alot of it but what she does have goes straight to the tires, good torque and thus, able to dig herself out.

Huh. You can get salmonella from peanut butter. Nothing is safe anymore. Is nothing sacred? Oh well, only 300 cases in 39 states. That's pretty good odds of not getting it. Plus, I don't usually eat peanut butter.

Stupid brain. Yeah, there's brain activity associated with love. I'd like to think there's something more than just that. Eh, who knows. I wouldn't cry though.

Switching to a political gear. I really don't think it matters that Obama smokes a cigarette. Yeah, it's not really healthy but so? Unless he's influenced by tobacco and tobacco product makers, I don't think it matters. I'm addicted to driving my car but no one talks about that. Why is that? There's viable supplements to oil-base fuel but the "oil industry" is halting our progress. Uh, not really. The economics of switching millions of vehicles to a completely different method of propulsion is daunting. I mean, there's cars from the 70's still being used as daily drivers.
Sorry, I don't know how I got on this topic. I've been pricing out how much it would cost for me to get a new engine and I'm at the upwards limits of $10,000 because age is a factor. New wires, new harnesses, new transmission, and exhaust. All of that makes for a pricey change. So let's say there's a million cars and to convert each of them costs $5,000. That's 5 billion dollars. Now there's more than a million cars out there and it'll cost more than $5,000 to covert. Yes, new cars could be built that way but a majority would need to be coverted. We're not even talking about infrastructure yet either. Gas stations would need to be converted, new holding tanks and delivery methods. What about upkeep and maintenance? There's training that has to go along with it too, that's not going to be cheap.

OK, enough ranting. Especially about serious issues. I really don't know how I got from smoking to the electric engine. *shrug* One of life's mysteries.