Battery Powered

Charged.

I’m puzzled at all stuff that is now powered by battery.

I saw a guy cleaning up sawdust with a vacuum strapped to his back and no power cords at all. I thought that a vacuum required an electric motor producing a lot of suction.

The back pack unit uses a battery. Every tool now, except for hammers, are battery powered. But wait! The job of a hammer is to drive nails, and there are battery powered nail guns so there goes another one.

Lawn equipment cleans tough things, and there are battery powdered mowers and chippers.

My high school football coach mowed the field with a gas powered mower. Today a zero turn mower would mow that field in minutes rather than hours and do it with battery power.

Uncle Guy Phillips was a carpenter and built a few houses. All of his tools were hand tools. Even when power tools were available, he held on to his manual saws because they worked. He would have considered using electricity to power a drill as wasteful.

He built a shop held together with pegs, and the holes bored with a brace and bit.

It is good that more people are out riding bicycles, but bicycles may as well not have pedals because the new thing is to sit and let the battery power the pedals.

A new thing in Ham Radio is to go off to a mountain top or a state or national park and make contacts using a low powered transmitter and temporary antenna with a battery for a power source.

While some Hams want to use as much power as permitted, others want to function with the minimums like less than one watt of power.

Long ago someone with a hearing loss held something like a megaphone to his ear, but today hearing aids are micro units. They use tiny batteries to power the unit for days, but the difficult part is getting the battery out of the plastic packaging.

The first thing to go south on the newest vacuum cleaner here was the reel that winds up the power cord. If it didn’t need the power cord, the machine would still be working.

The number of medical devices that prolong a quality life grows. From pacemakers to portable oxygen concentrators, folks are walking around with medical gizmos powered by long-lasting batteries.

We had a family funeral last year, and funerals are the only time you can get relatives to visit the cemetery.

I was walking with Marie when she paused, cocked her head and said, “Hear that?”

“Nope, don’t hear anything but the wind. What are you hearing?”

Marie said, “I’m listening for the sound of all of those Pacemakers still firing away long after the patient died.”

What could we do with that?

joenphillips@yahoo.com