As I get older, crankier and more set in my ways, it’s good to be reminded that change can be a positive thing. Sometimes. In controlled doses.  My recent encounter with a deer left me without car. A perfect time to become a devoted user of public transit, right? Wrong. Let’s not go cr azy. Not where I live.  So I needed to buy a new car. I’d been thinking about buying a new car next spring anyway, so I had looked around a bit on line. Bambi made the decision more urgent.  I sometimes feel a little guilty living in a remote frontier location that requires a lot of driving, and burning a lot of gas. It’s a 30-mile round trip to a quart of milk. It’s not quite as isolated as The Colony or the nether reaches of Promontory, but I don’t have household staff to make that errand.  I decided to get an electric car this time around. I looked at the hybrids, but with distance of each trip from home, the hybrid didn’t really provide much. The battery-only driving would be done before I reached civilization and the rest of the trip would be burning gas while freighting a heavy, but dead, battery around. I couldn’t find the model I wanted, equipped the way I wanted, at local dealers. The cars were coming in slowly, all larded up with options I didn’t want, and for some reason, all in either black or the same color as the car I just wrecked.  They said I could order it and wait six weeks.  I used an on-line search service, and was getting matches in St. Louis, western New York, and finally Billings, Montana. I thought flying to Billings and driving it home would be a great road trip adventure.  A friend who has had an electric car for a few years said “adventure” would not fully describe it. “You don’t want to be standing at a fast charging plaza on I-90 holding a cord that doesn’t match the plug, reading the manual in the dark.” In other words, there was enough of a learning curve that shipping the car to my house and figuring it all out on a Zoom call with the dealer was a better plan.  The delivery was the first of the dominoes to fall. I needed a charger installed in the garage. That meant I had to clear it out enough that the electrician could access the electrical panel on the back wall. I had not been able to see or touch the back wall of my garage since I moved into the house in 1985. It was full of stuff ranging from left over shingles from the original construction (the house has been re-roofed since, so they don’t match) to a mountain of old ski gear, bent bike wheels, pieces of plywood too small to use but too big to throw away.  And mice. Lots of mice. I hauled three loads in the tractor front-end loader to a dumpster my nephew has at his house. The garage was stripped bare.  Getting rid of all the crap was nothing short of liberating. People who move often don’t really have that problem, but when you live in the same house for better than 40 years, there’s no sorting. Nothing gets culled, and the crap in the garage breeds more.  My strategy has been that when one building gets filled beyond use, you expand into another farm building, or build another shed.  The emptiness of the garage was so powerful that I’m now looking at every room in the house differently. Nothing is safe.  A pile of clothes went to the thrift store. The drawer in the kitchen filled with everything from miscellaneous batteries to bottles of dried glue and a box of unlabeled keys suddenly looks unnecessary. Do I methodically sort through it, probably saving half of it in the process, or do I dump it wholesale into the trash bin? If I don’t even know what’s in there, odds are I won’t miss it.  On a much larger scale, there is the box of miscellaneous hardware in the shop.  If I need a fine-thread, grade 8, 9/16th nut, I’m certain there is one in there. I’m also certain that it will take less time to drive to Ace in Kamas and buy a new one than it would to sift through the random box in hopes it’s there. No need for a tetanus booster, either.  I haven’t found the courage to dump that just yet, partly because the box is torn and will spill all over the floor, almost guaranteeing a flat tire on the tractor.  But I’m looking at it differently now. Instead of it being a potential source of an emergency repair part, it’s now on the chopping block.  The plan had been to leave the house packed with junk for my heirs to clean up.  A small price to pay for their inheritance. But now, after seeing the back of the garage, I’m rethinking that.  Another change with the EV is my doughnut consumption has fallen off a cliff. Gassing up the car always included doughnuts. I never need to go to the gas station, so the impulse purchase of the doughnuts doesn’t happen. At least not as often. I think I’m going to like the change. Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: Unexpected changes appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less