I did get Chapter 7, “A Mug of Friendship” done and outlined Chapter 8 “To Tilt When One Should Yield.” That took me till noon and while I might have wanted to take a break and go again, the batteries in the laptop and Ace said no. I will get Chapter 8 done today, either this morning or this evening.
I do plan to get one chapter done a day and stay at that pace. I will do perhaps two each day on the weekends since I have access to the library and steady power. I don’t have a clue how many chapters this book will take or how many pages it will end up to be. It will be as long and have as many chapters as it needs. I do, however, plan to stay in the double digits of chapter numbers.
I had setup Bigboy to charge up Wanda’s Batteries to see what would happen if I left him setup all day. Well nothing much happened. I mean power got to the batteries but no charging happened. I will try a slightly different method next time. I will try to add a load of some kind onto the charge controller and see if that helps.
I was able to charge up the laptop’s batteries by the old fashioned method of plugging the laptop into my baby inverter and plugging that into the truck. It worked fine, even when off the laptop drew only enough power and only long enough to charge it. The truck has a system which will cut off power to the accessories if the truck’s batteries get too low. That means that I shouldn’t have to worry about draining too much power from the truck’s batteries so it won’t start.
I know that I am nudging towards buying a small generator and running that for a few hours in some open and forgotten area every weekend. I had hoped that the solar solution would work, but alas, so far it has not worked as I had hoped. Ah well, this is all research and as they say “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.”
It is frustrating that half of yesterday seemed to be a waste as Wanda’s batteries did not get charged up even though I stayed in and around the trailer all day in the middle of a Walmart parking lot. I had wanted to go for a bike ride in the park, but didn’t feel it wise to leave the solar panel and charge controller so exposed.
I looked at the 12 VDC charge systems in Wanda and saw an open spot for me to draw 12 VDC. It is there for expansion, so I got to thinking. If I were to put a 12V power plug (cigarette lighter) in there, I could draw 12 VDC from Wanda’s batteries. Then I could plug my baby inverter in there and use it to run my laptop. Yes this would drain Wanda’s batteries faster but I will need to find a solution for that regardless, this way I can have a steady source of power, with or without Ace.
Once again, company would be nice but I can barely afford me, let alone someone else. This journey is suited for one, perhaps two if they were together and committed beforehand. It would not be fair for me to even bring a dog or cat along with me on this journey, I know this. I know that this journey will be worth it, that in the end, if only for me to break the cycle of endless debt that is those damn credit cards.
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