not so much time…
On batteries and time…
i did some reading about batteries a while back, the way i do, getting obsessive and desperate to understand something and concentrating on nothing else for a short while. i do it with verve until i think i have a decent grasp on it, or until something else successfully wrests my attention. usually the second i suppose.
anyway, i wanted to know about car batteries, because i’ve left the lights on in Mobius (my van) and had the battery go dead several times and wondered if there was substantial difference in qualities of batteries. 
at the same time, i’ve been studying the potential for setting up a photovoltaic solar electricity system for the ex-Loopy Limbo, er aka my house. [exLoopy is the local phone number and Limbo is what being sedentary feels like to me quite often]
so my trawling of internet wisdom resulted in finding a couple of sites done by people like me with a curmudgeonly interest in quality and a desire to share what they learned. one line has stuck with me from one of them, although i can’t remember the domain of the website. this person wrote [something like] “i’m not rich enough to buy cheap batteries.”
since a cheap battery stops working before a good one, they reasoned, it requires more money in the long run to save money in the short term. leaving aside the question of recycling and/or waste created by planned obsolescence and crap quality, to make basic fiscal sense to buy an expensive battery, the expensive one has to last as long as it costs. in other words, if it costs twice as much as the cheap one, it has to last as long as two cheap ones. our battery guru on the web held that the odds were actually better than that with batteries.
so my next battery for Mobius was a deep-cycle one, also known as a marine battery. These are designed to run down [somewhat] and recharge, so i can leave the lights on a little longer without worry.
but this idea of “i’m too poor to buy cheap stuff” has stuck with me. it appeals probably to some genetic norwegian farmer part of my physiology that is just irrationally annoyed by poor-quality workmanship.
lately i’ve started applying it to time. so here is where i am today, and this is why i’m typing random thoughts brought on my battery mavens rather than addressing the gaping hole where Mobius’s windshield once was [’nother story]. competing with my tendency to procrastinate is this epiphany: “i don’t have enough time left to hurry.”
