Charging and proximity questions

Two questions around what I assume are the more popular potential uses for this plugin:

1. What state is the best one to check for whether the car is plugged in to charge or not? I'm sure I'm just missing the obvious one, but charge_port_open or charging_state don't seem to be quite right, even though I can make them work (they just occasionally return unanticipated statuses like "Complete" for charging_state). You'd think there would be a charger_connected state or something but I can't find it.

2. Since the states don't get updated unless you manually request an update, how would you implement a "when the car is 1 mile from home, do the following Actions". I don't really want to be polling the car every minute (seems like that would be really bad for the battery if nothing else to be waking the car up every minute), but I don't see any other way besides just scheduling it to poll within a timeframe of when I "typically get home from work" or something (e.g. start at 6pm and stop at 6:30pm), but that seems overly rigid. Obviously when I'm driving it it's awake, so polling it then doesn't seem to be too problematic, but I assume there's no way for the plugin to tell if it's awake without actually then triggering a command to wake it up?

Thanks in advance for any tips/suggestions.