1/5/10

So we're five days into the new year. This morning, as I tore out the first four pages from my log book and prepared to send them off to Joplin, I saw that I had written '2009' on three of the four. Maybe that habit will be broken by the time February rolls around. We'll see.

On the driving end of things, all was smooth and simple. My loaded trailer was ready and waiting when I got to Kalamazoo and there wasn't much traffic at any point along my route. I cruised down onto the Ohio Turnpike and stopped off at the service plaza below Cleveland for the night. It was starting to snow, I was only around 450 miles from my consignee, and I was hungry. Perfect trifecta.

I also planned to sit and watch the Orange Bowl but I wound up inside the service plaza working on some things. In the process of tweaking a couple of my old investing spreadsheets, I noticed a couple of others in my 'documents' folder. I had a pretty exhaustive Excel spreadsheet that I kept for my first several months on the road in 2006, detailing anything and everything that seemed like it might be relevant. Since this blog was established to answer the old question - "What's it like out there?" - I intended to migrate it into Google Docs at some point and include it here. Alas, that original spreadsheet turned out to be too detailed and it really was just a general annoyance to me. I often forgot to enter the data and eventually concluded that it wasn't all that relevant anyway.

Starting with my first dispatch of 2010, I've decided to give it another go. The version that I put together tonight is much simpler and more direct, so even if I forget to keep current, I can back fill it with information from my log book and pay stubs. This new sheet still has the stuff that some people often wonder about - pay, miles, home time, and such. There's a permanent link in the column along the right side of this page, so we'll see if I can manage to stick with it. The running averages will obviously take some time to stabilize and the 52 week stuff will take, well, all year, but there you have it.

The other link in that section will take you to a spreadsheet that is more for my own personal use, but still might interest people who move around the country a lot. Whenever I (a) remember and (b) feel like doing it, I visit a test page and gauge the speed of my Sprint Mobile Broadband connection. Mainly I'm trying to get a good collection of data regarding where to stop when a fast connection would be useful to me. My card is about two years old so I don't have any idea about the newer 4G networks. Since my Swedish buddy Sjoe is a bit of a bandwidth hog and he has somehow slipped through the cracks in the TOS thus far, I have no intention to buy a new card or otherwise alter my account in any way. So 3G is as good as it's gonna get for me in the foreseeable future.

Now, as long as nobody bangs on the door at 4am, we're looking at another morning of sleeping as late as I like. I've been to this consignee before so I know that I can park there tomorrow night. My appointment is for 10am on Thursday so I can get there any time before midnight tomorrow and fit in a full ten hour break. Seven or eight hours of driving from here to there and, well, you can do the math. No alarm clock tomorrow.

We occasionally hear discussions of how the post-WWII power structure has left Japan without the need (or in fact ability) to maintain a strong military presence. With western assurances of security, the hypothesis goes, they were freed to pursue more productive economic development. I guess that all makes sense, but I have yet to hear an explanation for why they produce 78% of the world's really weird shit. Goofy cartoons, insane game shows, etc. Add one more to the list...



I have no idea what the words say, but dude. How long until the feds start requiring OTR drivers to have one of those things to reduce idling in the winter?