10/15/07

Well, in a perfect world I'd be sitting at the pub with a pint in my fist, watching the ballgame right now. In the real world though, the customer was all locked up by the time I got here this evening. I'll have to make the scheduled drop tomorrow morning and then head home.

The guys at the place in Nashville woke me up this morning and got to work right away. From there it was a pretty easy ride up to Ohio, although I got tired and had to take a nap for a few hours halfway here. Without the nap, who knows? Maybe I get here early enough to get right of the freight today, although I doubt it. From the look of the way the trailer is loaded, they probably don't want anything to do with it until the scheduled time comes around. No big deal really. The biggest positive about getting home tonight would have been that I could get a restart before I drop in Brighton on Wednesday. As it stands, I'll just accumulate some hours from the three or four easy days in a row.

Coming through Cincinnati, right at rush hour, there was hardly any traffic at all. Pretty cool. Then, once I got out to the suburbs, the brake lights started. I broke north from exit 28 and ran US-42 all the way across. I've seen enough of the interstate lately and my patience for traffic was wearing thin. That was a stretch of road I don't remember running before, so I figured what the hell. It was a pretty mellow ride up here.

I got out and took a look through the locked gate at the dock I'll have to use tomorrow morning. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work, but it looks like I'll have to pull into the lot across the street and then back into the lot, around the corner and back to the door. That and wrestling with the load straps will be about the hardest parts of my day tomorrow. These newer trailers don't seem to fit the locking mechanism of the straps as well as the older trailers do. It's like the holes are about a sixteenth of an inch too small or something. I had to bang on the thing with a rubber mallet to get the strap loose this morning, then do the same to re-secure the load once the first batch of stuff was pulled from the trailer. As for the actual driving, it's only about 175 miles from here to Taylor so it will be an easy day.

I wrapped up the first pay period of the month with 6,293 miles plus some extra pay to kick the gross over $2,300. I'll probably see the extra $52.50 for this run on that check too, so somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,400 should be the number. The extra stop pay doesn't show on my account until I've made the last drop, but the last few times I've earned pay, after a pay period ended, for a run that started during the pay period, it has been on that check. Since I have to plan a wedding with that French-Canadian chick, I need every little bit I can get.