5/8/10

So we all know that I don't sleep very well until the wee hours of the morning, right?  Just the way I'm wired or whatever.  Some time after midnight last night I still wasn't feeling tired, so I fired up a movie that had been lingering on my hard drive for a while.  The next two hours of my life were wasted as I watched a steaming pile of cinematic shit called Syriana.  Just awful.  I would have been better off lying in bed and pretending to sleep.  Once the movie was over, I saw that I had been parked for ten hours.  I sent in my updated hours, reflecting my fresh 11 and 14, and hopped in the sack.  Ten minutes later - new assignment.  No rest for the wicked...

My pickup was a drop/hook at the gigantinormous Wal Mart DC in Baytown.  The drive down there was a little obnoxious since I kept getting shifted from actual highways to access roads for highways under construction and so forth.  It was the middle of the night though, and the trip was short, so it wasn't so bad.  Once I got my loaded trailer and its 40,000 payload all ready to roll, my only intention was to get back through Houston and go to sleep.  I'm heading to Kansas City for a Tuesday morning delivery, meaning that I have tons of extra time and no need to drive tired.

As I approached Houston on I-10, I was starting to feel like someone who hadn't slept in a while.  I wasn't terribly sleepy or anything, but my patience was running even lower than usual and I just wanted to get off the road.  Just then, an SUV started to pass on my left and then slowed down next to me.  Man I hate that.  I came down a hill and gained some speed, at which point the SUV sped up.  Bastard.  I looked over and prepared to unleash a profane tirade (that nobody except me would have been able to hear, of course).  Then I saw that there was a woman in the passenger's seat, motioning to get my attention.  She pointed toward my trailer and said something (that I couldn't hear, of course).  Great.  What now?

I took the next exit and found a place to pull off the road.  I have nothing but super singles on my truck and trailer this time around, so I was reasonably sure that I hadn't blown a tire.  Sometimes a driver might not notice if one of his dual tires blows, but these wide ones are a different story.  Even if one of them goes flat slowly, the vibration will tend to get pretty intense.  I could see in my mirrors that I still had working trailer lights.  Whatever.  There must have been some reason for the lady to be pointing at my trailer.

I hopped out and took a walk around.  Everything seemed kosher on first inspection, so I grabbed my flashlight and took another look.  Ahh, there it is.  One of the springs supporting my air lines had broken off at the point where it was connected to the belly of the trailer.  The air lines weren't dragging, but the spring itself was hanging down on the ground.  At 60mph, it probably had been creating some sparks that caught the attention of the people in the SUV.  It only took a minute for me to get the spring reattached and secured, after which I was wide awake and rolling again.

The construction on I-610 was certainly enough to keep me on my toes for a little while longer, weaving around curves with my trailer about 8" from a concrete wall.  No room to relax there.  I wound up going all the way up to my fuel stop in Huntsville, topping off the tanks, and covering another 50 miles before it was time to hit the sack for realsies.

After an awesome three-hour nap at a roadside picnic area, helped by cool and cloudy weather, I awoke and took stock of my situation.  Essentially, any miles that I drove from that point would be gravy.  I had the rest of today plus two more full days to reach Kansas City.  What then would be the strategy?  None, actually.  I decided just to hit the road and figure something out as I went along. 

Speaking of 'as I went along,' I noticed that our man DW appears to be doing some moonlighting as a business owner.  (No word yet on the content of the video, but I think we can make an educated guess.)

Just to the south of Dallas, I saw a sign for a Love's truck stop.  That should do the trick, I thought.  Love's usually has clean showers and it was close enough to Dallas that my internet connection should support a stream of the hockey game.  I pulled in and found that everything is A-OK.  There's no SubWay here though.  I had to settle for Carls Jr. for lunch, but I do have a fast internet connection and plenty of room for the Fenian Godfather Strength Training Institute to open up after the sun goes down.  Not bad at all.

The pay week wraps up with 2,157 miles plus the layover pay from my time in Tucson.  One more mile and we could have cracked a thousand bucks.  Just one more mile.

5/7/10

When I checked in with you folks last night, a few things seemed apparent to me.  First was that the folks at the Fenian Godfather Routing Service had done a good job.  Second was that there was something amiss about my dispatched ETA, if my delivery was in fact a live unload.  Third was that there was something other than erroneous trading behind our skittish stock market.  One out of three ain't bad.

Notwithstanding the New Braunfels detour, which really wasn't their fault, my routing consultants did a fine job yesterday by keeping me out of San Antonio without slowing me down too much.  Today, I took their advice and went around Houston on TX-6 and FM-1960.  The 'shortcut' was something like twenty miles long.  Even with some traffic, how bad could it be?  To quote my man Pete Clemenza - "Pretty Goddamn bad."  How does an hour and fifteen minutes sound?  Yeah, really.  Red lights every quarter mile and bumper-to-bumper traffic.

My intent had been to arrive at the consignee a little early and see what would happen.  This afternoon's little slice of driving Heaven changed the story completely.  My dispatched ETA was 15:18 rather than 15:38 (as I thought last night), but the same general concept regarding apointments held true.  Or so I thought.  I got to the distribution center at 14:30 and checked in with the security guard.  She promptly assigned me to a door, told me that I would have to unhook from the trailer, and handed me the paperwork that I was to take to the receiving office.  My appointment time was stamped on the paperwork - 15:18.  I'll be damned.  You learn something new every day.

The Wal Mart DC in New Caney charges $50 to unload a trailer, so I had to do that least desirable of all things and call Joplin.  Just needed a Comchek though, right?  How bad could it be?  You simply never know.  I got the recorded message saying that my fleet manager was away and that I would be connected with the next available team member.  Okay then.  My fleet manager is generally a fairly competent fella, but now my fate was in the hands of the telephonic roulette wheel.  Who would I get?  I'm leading you down a phony rhetorical path here, of course, since I wound up being connected to the wisest and most enlightened operations person in the long and storied history of Con-way Truckload.  A Comchek is mere child's play for our man Bob.  Good deal.

As I sat in my truck and filled in the express code on the Comchek, I heard a noise behind me and saw that the red light had turned on, indicating that my trailer had been locked into the door.  I looked at my clock and saw 4:18pm.  Subtract an hour to bring us down to the level of these savages who operate on Central time and there you go.  15:18.  Efficiency.  No wonder those guys can sell underwear for a dollar.  I'm impressed.

I spent most of this afternoon listening to tales of more wild swings in the stock market.  This is where it appears that I was probably right about something, at least for one day.  I placed some trade orders last night before I went to bed.  I have always been far more conservatively invested than the "conventional wisdom" would dictate, but it works for me, so I've had a lot of money in safe havens lately to hedge against my equity positions.  Anyhow, the question that I had to answer last night was whether or not I wanted to move some more money into equities and lower my overall baseline equity cost.  (You know, buy fear, sell arrogance, that sort of deal.)  To distill the question a little further - would the market finish today higher or lower?  Since I invest mostly in mutual funds rather than stocks or ETFs, my orders are executed at the end of the trading day.  A day that finished with the market heading lower would be better for me in this context, since I would be a net buyer of stocks once everything was rebalanced.  For today at least, I win.  I'm a long way from retirement so the big picture questions are far more imporant than a few timely trades, but each little bit helps.  Now the market will probably crater another thousand points on Monday or something.

I know that nobody really gives a shit about my retirement funding situation, but I included that paragraph in order to set up this next video.  You look at what I wrote there and it's what?  Boring, right?  Completely boring.  That's how investing is supposed to be, as far as I'm concerned.  Get a load of this next guy though.  I don't give people financial advice anymore but I will tell you this - Never take any sort of guidance from anyone who sounds like this dude...



I have no idea what sort of scam they try to sell at that website, but I'll bet my last dollar that this goofball did not "tell you" that the Dow would drop eight hundred points in twenty minutes and then rebound six hundred points in the next hour.  He did, however, make me chuckle.  And that counts for an awful lot in my little world.

I cruised over to the Flying J in New Caney once my trailer was empty and found that I was #1 on the board.  Really no need to request home time in order to get to the front of the line then.  I was already there.  Time to kick back and wait it out.  And wait it out.  And... you know the deal.  Weekends in the Houston area - no bueno.

They got rain in Cleveland tonight, so the ballgame was only in the fifth inning by the time I got around to finding a video stream.  That was pretty cool.  Apparently the Red Wings and Tigers have done quite a bit of losing in the few days since I last paid attention.  I'm gonna have to start rallying the troops or something.  Then it turned out that my video stream wasn't functioning very well, so we're stuck with the magic XM Radio tonight whenever the game gets going again.

Until then, we browse the web and read some news...

Old folks ain't gettin' it on like they used to.  Bummer.
Waitresses with bigger boobs get bigger tips.  Shocking.
Companies are thinking about dropping insurance coverage now that we have Obamacare.  Obvious.
Parents are in a state of denial about their teens and sex.  Yep.
A massive mosque is going up near the World Trade Center.  Diversity.
Germany signs on to the Greek bailout.  Neighborly.
Lord Jesus Christ hit by car.  Umm, hang on a second.  What?

Maybe I'll catch some kind of assignment tomorrow and get out of this ludicrous heat and humidity.  I always thought the whole 'dry heat' thing was horseshit.  I gotta say though, I'm starting to come around.  After hanging with J.T. in Phoenix on a 90° day, I wasn't sweating.  After lifting weights in El Paso on an 80° night, I was only sweating a little.  Here, if I so much as open the window on an 81° night, sweat starts dripping down my forehead.  Do your own calculation on what it was like when the sun was shining.  A nice long dispatch to the Midwest before the pay period ends tomorrow night would be pretty sweet.

5/6/10

Dude.  No, seriously.  Dude.  I-10 in Texas is long.  I mean, like really, really long.  Oy.

Using the standard greenhouse effect alarm clock to rouse myself this morning, I got rolling at around 11am (civilized time).  I knew that I had a long day in store, given the nature of my schedule for this trip, but dude.  Seriously.  The first hundred miles went quickly enough.  That got me to Van Horn, where I stopped to top off my fuel tanks.  I probably didn't need to get any fuel, given that my tanks were almost full.  I did make a stop in Anthony last night after all, but certain routes elicit certain memories.  Since I would be crossing mostly wilderness and trying a couple of creative ways to bypass San Antonio and Houston, my last chance to fill 'er up would be Van Horn.  So fill 'er up I did.  Not taking any chances.

In thinking about today's drive, all I can say is that I-10 in Texas is really long.  My first effort at 'winging it' came when I reached Exit 540 and turned onto TX-46.  This shaved a few miles off my route but, more importantly, it steered me clear of San Antonio.  Not a bad route either, with one notable exception.  Somewhere around New Braunfels, I should have made a turn (not sure which way) to stay on TX-46.  The intersection was under construction though, so there was no sign.  I saw a sign on the far side of the intersection with the number 46 on it, so I kept going straight.  As I passed the sign, I saw that it was for Business 46, not the main state highway.  No big deal though, right?  Just follow the business route and I'm bound to catch back up with the main road eventually.  It seemed like a logical idea at the time anyway.

After a couple of curves, I saw a sign warning that there was a low bridge ahead and that {insert some road name that I don't recall} had no turnaround.  All good though, I thought.  The business route was turning to the left at the next intersection.  I got into the turn lane and stopped at the light.  On the corner, pointing in the direction that I would be turning, I saw another of the warning signs for the low bridge.  Damn.  It turns out that the business route was the road with the low bridge.  Well that sucks.  Uncertainty is no friend of a truck driver in unfamiliar territory.  I moved back over after the light turned green and continued straight instead of seeing if I could knock down the bridge.  Time to use The Force...  I encountered a few curves here and a skinny bridge there, but no major drama.  I wound up catching up with the I-35 business loop and then TX-46.  No harm, no foul, and I technically managed to avoid Satan's Driveway completely.

Once I caught back up with I-10, it was getting to be that time of the evening when it's best to grab a parking space and call it a day.  I tried the Love's at Exit 632 but had no luck.  Completely filled.  This left me in the unfortunate position of watching my 11 hour clock rapidly approaching its end, but feeling terribly hungry.  Park in one of the I-10 picnic areas (with no food) or press on and hope for a spot at a truck stop?  The 'go for broke' option was the Shell station at Exit 661.  If I couldn't find a place there, then I would end up running afoul of the law.  Screw it.  After almost nine straight hours of driving, I was really freaking hungry.  I got off at the appointed exit and saw a truck parked illegally along the side of the road.  That's usually a surefire sign that the truck stop is full.  Not this time though.  Plenty of room.  Beauty.  And thus concludes another glorious day on the road.

It turns out that I won't have to drive nearly as far to reach the Wal Mart DC in New Caney tomorrow as I originally thought.  Probably a little over two hours, depending on how much time I waste by going up TX-6 and cutting Houston out of my route.  Even having driven the extra thirty miles to find parking tonight, I thought that I would be more than 200 miles away.

In any case, I have a dispatched ETA of 15:38 (or something stupid like that) and my assignment says that it's a live unload.  Those of you who are familiar with the Con-way dispatch system will see the apparent contradiction here.  Live unloads at Wal Mart have fixed appointment times and they always fall at the top of the hour.  For those, we're not allowed to arrive early.  An odd ETA like this one usually indicates a drop/hook, in which case it doesn't matter when I show up.  So which is it?  Who cares, really?  Given that the paperwork says the load delivers today, nothing will surprise me.  Hell, maybe I'll show up and they'll say I missed today's appointment.  Wouldn't be the first time.  Maybe I'll be in the mood to make a call in the morning and find out what's the story.  Otherwise I'll just cruise up there in the afternoon.  Whatever.

Now it's time to try and figure out if I need to do any portfolio rebalancing.  That was one big-assed "oops," to be sure, but I have to wonder what else goes into the equation at this point.  Big German bailout vote and domestic jobs report tomorrow.  Feeling lucky?

5/5/10

I've come to expect that the other shoe will drop at any moment when it comes to this job of mine, so we'll see what tomorrow brings.  For today though, I think we're back on track.  I got a new assignment at some unholy hour this morning, saw that it picked up in Phoenix this afternoon, and went back to bed.  By the time the sun started to cook my truck I had gotten plenty of sleep.  Beauty.

A nice and easy trip up I-10 had me on the south side of Phoenix two hours ahead of schedule.  I figured I would take a shot at getting loaded early so I might make it out into the wilderness before the afternoon traffic set in.  Of course, I would need to get to the shipper first.  Details are pesky things sometimes.  It turns out that "last driveway on the left" actually means "nowhere remotely close to the last driveway on the left."  Gotta love trucking directions.  After circling the block, passing the place a second time, and backing up a hundred yards, I found the shipper's driveway and got settled into a loading dock.  45 minutes later I was on my way.  In the process of losing last weekend's run to Texas and picking up this run to Texas, I've managed to trade a 13,000 pound payload for a 44,000 pound one.  Story of life.

My layover pay came through in a timely manner and the traffic leaving Arizona was reasonably light.  Definitely can't complain about that.  I received my dispatch to deliver in the Houston area on Friday afternoon.  That's a nice and workable schedule but my paperwork says that the delivery date is tomorrow.  I sent an 'FYI' message letting my fleet manager know about the discrepancy and received a reply confirming that Friday is the day.  Good enough for me. 

I haven't decided whether or not I'll have to employ my 'Texas = Go Home' policy or not.  Most loads that I've gotten out of the Houston area have gone to the Midwest and not toward Waco.  This would make me inclined to avoid the home time request and try to stay in the flow of freight.  My recollection seems to be that recent weekends in the Houston area have involved some sitting and waiting though.  This would make me inclined to request a day at home and get myself to the front of the line for a new assignment.  Oh well, I suppose I've got a couple of days to sort it out.  We'll just play it by ear.

As I rolled through New Mexico this evening I started trying to think of where I would park for the night.  I had enough hours to get somewhere around Van Horn, but I wasn't sure exactly how far I felt like driving.  The final decision was made once I reconciled myself to an unfortunate reality.  I just spent four days in a motel, separated from my damned weight bench.  Then I spent last night in a grubby dirt parking area where it wasn't really practical to have a workout.  So tonight was basically a mandatory workout night.  Our drop yard on the east side of El Paso always has a lot of room, so here we are.  I've been hoping that the temperature would drop a little further, but it looks like things have settled in at 80°.  Yeah, that sucks.  Here goes nothing...

5/4/10

Honest question, since the topic seems to dominate the news these days.  If you're going to inject your NBA franchise into a political debate, couldn't you at least be bothered to get the words right?  Should it not be 'Los Soles?'  They're not celebrating Cinco de May tomorrow, for Christ's sake.

Those Kenworth mechanics seemed to have an uncanny ability to drag ass until it was almost closing time and then hurry up and get the job done.  I checked out of my motel room nice and early this morning, in order to make sure I was ready and waiting whenever my truck was fixed.  They pulled it into a service bay early in the afternoon.  They pulled it out of the service bay at around 7pm.  Bummer.

So today was essentially another lost day.  At least I got my truck back in time to scoot across town to the local truck stop before all of the parking dried up.  We'll consider that a good thing.  And my brakes feel normal again.  Obviously this is a good thing.  I'm #2 on the board right now, meaning that I should get back into the flow of things tomorrow morning.  I got my purchase order number from the road service guys for my motel room tonight, so that's one less bit of housekeeping for tomorrow.  There remains the obligatory request for layover pay.  Since I was introduced to the bizarre concept of "layover math" last month, I have no idea what to expect from these chuckleheads.  I did get paid correctly for my breakdown time in El Paso though, so maybe it will work out right.

One of the most memorable days that I've had in recent years came last September. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the ballgame where Ernie Harwell gave his farewell address to the people of Detroit. He was always the embodiment of the phrase 'class act' and we were supremely blessed to share the decades of memories that we did. Ernie lost his battle with cancer today. The world lost a good man.

5/3/10

Ooooh.  Pennsylvania knows where you live.  Ooooh.


Freaky deaky. Those damned Quakers may be watching your every move, but at least they're not raaaacists.

Heh. That one made me laugh more than the crayons did.  I guess we'll see how it all plays out down here in the Copper State, but my understanding of the new law isn't nearly so dramatic.  Sounds to me like reality will prove to be a lot more boring.  Most people carry a driver's license whenever they leave the house and, as far as I can tell, a license is enough to verify your status here.  Hyperbole is still more fun that reality though.  Raaaacists!  Heh.

I suppose that there's a chance I'll be back in my truck by this point tomorrow.  This can hardly be considered exciting news, but after four days of sitting in a motel with nothing to do but drink, I actually wouldn't mind getting back to work.  Obviously I don't mind the drinking, but this negative cash flow situation has to be reversed sooner or later.  I just spent a ton of money while I was home and then had a potentially good paycheck neutered by the Kenworth parts department.  Freaking capitalism.  Just another case of The Man tryin' to keep a brother down.

Update (6:07pm): Another one that will probably go viral by tomorrow.  You know me, here to share and whatnot.  Republican state senator Mike Bennett of Florida seems to have a taste for the lovely ladies.  Me too, my man.  Me too.

5/2/10

Posting a little early today, since I've reached a conclusion.  (1) I'm bored out of my gourd.  (2) Television is essentially worthless.  (3) It's not really in my financial interest to rent a car or call a cab and go exploring.  (4) The service at the Las Cazuelitas restaurant was even worse than the service at the bar on Friday night.  (5) The Red Wings are playing in a few hours.   (6) Most importantly, tomorrow is the last day on which there will be no consequences for waking with a hangover.  I do believe it's about time to tie one on and cheer the Wings on to victory.

Heh.  Arizona is a raaaaacist police state.  Heh.

Looks like I'm still okay, since I'm about as white as they get.  Heh.  Hyperbole is awesome.