Today’s chores reminded me of the other good (great!) reasons to own an electric car — once they’re available for everyday drivers, that is.

I needed to top off my power steering fluid, and I noticed that my coolant was also a little low; might as well kill two birds with one stone beat two drums with one stick (sorry — The Wife’s a bird lover). Oh, and even though it was only about 2,500 miles since my last oil change, the oil was looking very dirty — might as well change that, too. It’s 65 degrees and clear, so why not?

Thus car maintenance was today’s Thing, along with an engine degreasing (“a clean engine is a happy engine”) and the associated cleanup, especially the used oil.

And that’s why I started thinking about electric cars. If I had one, I’d have most of my day back.

Electric motors mean no oil changes. No coolant. No transmissions and no transmission fluid.

And the other things I’ve dealt with lately: EGR valves that needed to be cleaned. PCV valves that needed to be replaced. Mass air flow sensors giving strange readings. And so on. None of these things was a big deal (we’re talking less than $20 in parts and cleaners), but with electric motors they simply wouldn’t exist. There’s no airflow to worry about, no crankcase to ventilate, no exhaust gas to recirculate.

My car’s approaching 80,000 miles. If it was electric, I wouldn’t have to think about timing belts and new water pumps.

Sure, there would be other issues, but batteries and capacitors are a lot simpler (and cleaner) than what goes into a gasoline-powered vehicle. And other things would remain — tie rods and CV joints and air conditioners and so on. But overall, an electric car is orders of magnitude simpler than a hydrocarbon-powered one. So I could have spent my morning doing something else.

OK, I like the guy too, but this might be going a bit too far.

The wife and I made a short trip today to take part in a Good Deed that was only possible because of the Internet. It’s one of those things that cheap and easy global communications doesn’t make easier, but makes possible.

We drove one leg of a dog “transport” — Richmond to Fredericksburg. The point of these transports is to move dogs that are being held in “kill” shelters (and likely to be euthanized) to either other shelters that have room, to foster homes, or to permanent homes.

But we’re not talking about moving them across town. We’re talking from — in our case — from Tennessee to New Hampshire. Every weekend, dozens of dogs are moved, usually from the South to the North, via a well-crafted plan involving dozens of people who each volunteer to run a leg of the trip. They meet in rest areas or just off highways to pass their dogs onto the next driver.

Sometimes it’s just one driver meeting another, other times it’ll be a dozen of them in a Wendy’s parking lot, where a clipboard-toting coordinator makes sure the right dogs go with the right people for the next leg.

Interstate 81 is the main corridor, so dogs will converge there — Nashville, Tenn., to Knoxville, to Bristol, Va., to Roanoke and up I-81 to Pennsylvania, New York, or further. Ours was coming from Nashville up I-95. We picked him up from the house he stayed in overnight (another volunteer), and dropped him off at a Wawa parking lot in Fredericksburg.

Think of the coordination this requires. Every week you’ve got drivers and overnights in five, six, maybe even 10 states. Each driver has to be screened, as do the dogs. (Can’t have biters with kids in the car, and some dogs just don’t get along with others.) Every week the coordinators work with shelters in different states to see which dogs are in the most danger and who can take them. Then they have to figure out the most efficient route — if three dogs are all going up I-81, it makes sense for them to ride together until they need to go their separate ways.

Once each dog’s trip is marked, all those trips are broken into segments, and then the coordinator has to to get drivers for every one. They tap into their network via e-mail or through message boards to see who’s available: “We need someone to take two small dogs from Roanoke to Charlottesville. Meeting at such-and-such a place in Roanoke at 9:00 a.m., then in Charlottesville at 10:45.”

Without the Internet, this wouldn’t be possible — certainly not on this scale. Phone trees couldn’t handle it, and changes to a schedule would take too long to propagate down the line.

But we have the Net, so today we did our part to bring Opie (a 52-pound, three-year-old Catahoula Mix) one small step closer to a better home. He had been living in a shelter — in a cage — since March. Today he was stuck in a bunch of cars. But in a day or to, he’ll be home.

For those who are interested, I have just finished and posted a new and updated version of my Legal Rights of Photographers. This is done from scratch, so all the legal jargon has been cleaned out. It’s easier to read, adds more information, and answers the most-frequent questions I get.

Legal Rights of Photographers, version 2.0 (500K PDF)

Got a nice new pair of Creative EP-610 earbuds. Nothing fancy, but nice. Nice, that is, until I moved.

I rolled my chair on the (carpeted) floor and ZAP! — static shocks from the earbuds into my ears. Sizzle sizzle ZAP!

File under double-plus-ungood. (Although the sound is very nice, especially for $25 ’buds.)