Good evening. Happy Saturday. Currently 56 degrees and cloudy this evening. I decided to walk down to the town park where they have free wi-fi to post some updates and download some files I needed off the internet. No, I still don’t have Internet at home, and I don’t really care one way or another. The low for tonight will only be 45 degrees, though we have a chance of showers.

Sorry I haven’t posted any updates in a while, I’ve been dealing with the latest bunch of issues with my truck. I swear my truck is not a lemon, it just has problems that I don’t understand with the electrical side of things. No seriously, for some reason the battery decided to go dead between the time I last drove it on Tuesday and Thursday evening. I don’t know the issue, but I couldn’t jump start it. So I bought a car battery charger as it wasn’t too expensive, and it’s sitting in my kitchen alternating between charging the starting and deep cycle battery.

I can’t imagine the battery is bad, as it’s only a year old, and this is the only the second time it’s ever gotten low enough to need jump starting, but maybe it is. I noticed I was only getting what appeared to be a surface charge earlier, but on the other hand, the voltage looks healthy from the voltage meter, sitting unplugged from the charger, and settling for about a half hour. I will see when I get things plugged back in tomorrow. The battery is still under warranty, but I think the receipt got wet and is illegible, when I went in the truck earlier today to low for it.

So I’m stuck in town while the battery charges. It should be fine by tomorrow morning, but I certainly can’t put it back in my truck after dark. So we will see. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to ask for a ride back down to the auto parts store, and see if they will warranty it without the receipt. Hopefully they will. If not, I guess I will have to get a better battery — probably an Optium battery. The alternator was putting out a healthy 14.3 volts per the meter on Tuesday, so I doubt that’s bad. It could have been I just made too many short trips at city speed and it went dead. I don’t know, but it’s just another headache.

Other then that, I got the map making software fully back up and running on my laptop, although I’m still working on tweaking the topographic maps, for the first time since thing broke when I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.10. I would have done it sooner, but I’ve been out and on the road so much lately, camping and so forth. So I guess it’s good to be back home for a bit. I do need to take some new pictures to freshen up the blog a bit.

Tomorrow hopefully I will put the starting battery back in and I’ll be back in business. If not, it’s not a big deal to get things back up and running again with a replacement battery. Even if the battery charger doesn’t work for this fix, I will have it handy to charge the deep cycle after camping, or if for some reason it doesn’t automatically recharge when I start the truck. I might not have the truck forever, and the charger is handy for charging the deep cycle, even if it’s just used with my solar panel. So be it.

I would like to get out hiking tomorrow, but I don’t want to get stranded too far from home. That said, I think it’s either going to start or not tomorrow. And my feeling is it will. There are places to get out and hike, and I don’t really want to be far back in the woods hiking, disturbing hunters who are just trying on their final day to get their buck. I think the weather will be cloudy, and hardly that nice, even though the mercury will be warm for this time of year.