7/22/08

Q: What city do I not hope to see any time in the immediate future?

Give yourself five points if you said Houston. I'm sure it's a fine town, but I had my fill today. I had to contend with rush hour traffic on the way into town this morning. Yuck. Thank God I don't have one of those 'swear jars.' I would have had to take out a personal loan.

My plan summary indicated that I had a drop/hook. The security chick at the consignee said that I had a drop/hook. Then she saw that I had two bolt seals, a cable seal, and two thin metal seals on my trailer. I guess the amigos across the border didn't want that load getting fucked with. Simple deal, right? I drop the trailer and the yard dog cuts the seals whenever they get around to unloading it. Wrong. They changed it to a live unload and made me take the trailer to a door, since the bolt cutters are kept at the dock doors. Dumb. Punks.

After a couple of hours there, I was on my way to my next pickup. I had to go west along I-10 and catch Beltway 8 to the north. Beltway 8 is the surface road that runs along the Sam Houston toll road. The interchange was under construction and the signs were ambiguous, so of course I wound up on the toll road by accident. Even better, I managed to go south instead of north. I took the first exit and pulled up to the toll booth. I don't carry cash on the road unless I expect to need it. My mistake was not a terribly costly one ($4), but I'll still have to mail a check to the state of Texas within seven days. Oh well. The guy at the booth was helpful in getting me sorted out and headed toward my customer, so that was nice.

I rolled into the shipper's location and had a drop/hook. They made me go to a neighboring lot to drop my empty and then come back to the main lot for my loaded trailer. Nothing really exciting there, but it took quite a while. People were backing into the (extremely tight) loading docks each time I tried to pass, so I had to be a little bit patient. I saw that I only had five forklifts in my trailer, so I thought the weight might not be too bad. Then I saw that each one weighs 9,000 pounds. Damn.

Then it was back onto the freeway and all the way back through Houston. Like I said, I'm sure it's a fine town... At least I got out before the wind and rain from the hurricane got there. I headed up US-59 toward Texarkana. The routing programs say that the 'practical' route is eastward across Louisiana and then northward. My paid route is quite a bit shorter than that, coming pretty close to the route that I'm taking. For some reason, these runs originating in eastern Texas always work out that way. US-59 is a decent drive for the most part, so I can't complain too much. My 70 hours ran out before I got to Arkansas, so I'll have some hard driving ahead of me. I'll get up bright and early and go as far as possible tomorrow, then finish off the run early in the morning on Thursday.

I heard on the radio that Estelle Getty died tonight. I always got a kick out of The Golden Girls for some reason. It just seemed to be one of the wittier sitcoms and the casting was perfect. I (sort of) made an appearance on that show a long time ago. I was at Disney World with my family when I was thirteen years old. They had this thing where they selected people from the audience to appear in an episode of The Golden Girls. I was one of a few people chosen from a pretty huge crowd. They gave us about five minutes to memorize our lines and then filmed us against a green screen. The people in the crowd were watching an actual episode of the show on a movie screen. Then when a certain scene came up, there we were, right on the screen with the real actors. My parents couldn't afford to buy the videotape so I never got to see it, but everyone said it was pretty cool. I just realized that there's really no point to this story, but screw it. I'm not getting paid for this. I just liked Estelle Getty. That's all.