1/6/10

Do you remember Santa's Secret Shop from elementary school? I got to buy something from them once. I must have been about six or seven years old at the time. My mother gave me five dollars, apparently with the understanding that I would get a Christmas present for my little sister. Something got lost in translation though and I bought myself a little Spirograph kit instead. Mom wasn't too happy with me, but what are you gonna do? I was a kid.

Before last month's trip up to Boyne Falls, my sister gave my little niece some money to buy Christmas gifts from Santa's Secret Shop. She follows directions better than I did as a kid, it turns out. Everyone enjoyed a good chuckle when my brothers and I unwrapped our gifts and saw that she bought the exact same thing for each of us - a little ice scraper with a Santa sleeve over the handle. Most of you are aware that we live in Michigan, so we all have ice scrapers in our cars, but it was a nice gift anyway. Most six-year-olds wouldn't have been quite as practical. I tossed my scraper in my duffel bag and forgot about it.

When I got ready to leave the service plaza today, I looked over and saw that my mirror was covered with snow. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped away the snow, only to find that there was a solid sheet of ice underneath. Well hell, what are we gonna do about this? I glanced around the cab of my truck in search of something useful and then remembered the gift-opening scene in front of the fireplace at our rental house. I checked my duffel bag and, sure enough, thanks Maddy...


I sent that picture to my sister, so I'm sure my niece is feeling pretty clever right about now.

The snow never turned out to be the hassle that I thought it would today. Through the rest of Ohio and the first half of Pennsylvania it was snowing, but the roads had been thoroughly salted and everything was going fine. Those turnpikes are, generally speaking, some of the best maintained roads anywhere during the winter. As I got further to the east the snow even stopped and the temperature crept up into the 30's for a while. Not bad at all.

After a fuel stop and a couple of breaks, I decided that it was late enough to head into the Philly suburbs and set up shop for the night. There seems to be more activity around here than I recall from last time, but I'm parked in the same out-of-the-way spot and I don't appear to be bothering anyone. Beauty.

Since I had this exact run in September and it was followed the next day by some regional northeast nonsense, here's hoping for a change of pace to welcome in 2010. I can only assume that there is more crappy weather coming tomorrow, so something toward Miami for the weekend might not be so bad. A guy can always dream.

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?

1/4/10

A day with no alarm clock... ahh yes, this will be great, right? Wrong. I don't know what time I finally went to bed last night, but it was definitely late. As I was lying there trying to fall asleep, someone started banging on my door. I looked at my clock and saw 5am. This means that it was 4am in Illinois. There is no reason for anyone to be banging on my door at 4am. I ignored the noise and tried again to fall asleep. After a couple of minutes, the banging resumed. This time it was even louder. What the fuck, man? Without stepping into the front part of the truck, since we've already established that there's no reason for anyone to be banging on my door at 4am, I tried to peek around the corner and see if I could tell what was going on. Nothing visible in either mirror. Nothing visible in front of the truck. Screw 'em. I tried going to sleep for a third time.

If you've done any regular reading of this here blog, then you probably know how this part of the story ends. I was wide awake. Son of a... I took a peek at my log book and saw that I had already been parked for ten hours. I could head down the road for a while and then take an eight hour sleeper berth break later in the morning. After the break I could finish the trip to Kentwood and take a two hour break to complete my split, all within the time that was available to me. So I headed out.

It was looking like a fortuitous situation for a little while. Being able to cruise out of the Chicago area before people start heading to work is always a good thing. Then I-94 turned to the north. Well hell, it looks like ole Lake Michigan hasn't frozen yet, eh? When those winter storms move over the water, the western part of the state gets pummeled pretty thoroughly. The effect seems to lessen after the lake is frozen, but we're not there yet. The air temperature started to rise steadily and the roads started to get snowy. There were some stretches that had been well salted and were only wet. There were other stretches where the snow was coming down like a mutha and it was all I could do to follow the tire ruts in front of me. The first part of I-196 was particularly bad, so I resolved to take my break at the next rest area. That way, after I woke and started driving again, hopefully the plow trucks would have been out and made some improvements. The joke was on me though, as that rest area was closed. So I got to slug along to the big truck stop in Holland and take my break there.

It was 8am by the time I pulled into the truck stop. To quote Carlito Brigante - "Tired baby, tired." I was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow. I woke around noon and saw that I had a satellite message waiting. Somehow I had managed to sleep through the beep. I took a look, assuming that it would be one of those "stay safe" notices or something. It was a message from my fleet manager, saying that he knew my miles were down over the last week and he would work on getting me another load. I'm not sure exactly what that was about, but fine with me. I had 2,531 miles last week, with an intervening holiday, so I had no complaints.

I was tempted to head back up the road for a while at that point and see if I could deliver early. I had a 6pm appointment though. If the consignee made me wait and then took too long to unload my trailer, I would likely run into issues with my 14 hour clock. I had started driving at 5:30am, meaning that 7:30pm would be the end of the line. So I decided to stay put until my full 8 hour break was complete. This way the 14 hour rule would be taken out of play, regardless of the consignee's actions. Time to play around on the interwebs for a while.

At 4pm I headed back out to the highway and found that the road situation had been handled. Everything was clean and dry. Beauty. The customers had me unloaded quickly and I was once again on my way. The nearest truck stop was on the south side of Grand Rapids so I headed over there. I was surprised to find the place so crowded in the early evening but I managed to find a spot. Good enough.

I was #9 on the board, meaning I didn't expect much to happen tonight. After about a half hour my next assignment came through. I'll be picking up in Kalamazoo tomorrow afternoon and heading for Eastern Pennsylvania for a delivery on Thursday morning. Not a huge start to the week by any means, but the schedule is pretty favorable for me. No early morning nonsense and so forth. Maybe I'll catch a nice run for the weekend to bail out the week or something.

Kalamazoo isn't far from here and I'm already headed in the right general direction, so I think I'm going to stay put for the night. I have my parking space and that's enough for me. I used to know a pretty cool chick from this area but apparently I don't have her phone number anymore. Bummer. And no football tonight? [EDIT: Yeah, I see now that the Fiesta Bowl is tonight.] Not even a Red Wings game? Damn. Guess I might as well walk over and see what this Piccione's Pizzeria place is all about.

1/3/10

When it comes to adopting another team in situations where I have no natural rooting interest, my record is uncanny. I lose every time. Sorry Sparties.

Another day with no alarm clock could only be a good day as far as I'm concerned. When I did wake though, I took a look outside and saw a bunch of snow. So I went back to bed. Screw that. I got up again an hour or so later and found that the snow really didn't amount to more than a light dusting. It had blanketed the truck stop's parking lot but the roads were fine. Off we go...

I thought I had heard that the truck speed in Illinois was increasing at the start of the year. The signs still say 55mph though, so the old double nickel it was for me. I had plenty of time on this trip so there was no need to speed along and find out the hard way that the limit hadn't been raised yet.

I intended to drive at least 350 miles today, leaving myself less than 250 miles tomorrow. As it turned out, the traffic was flowing smoothly and the weather was good so I just kept driving. I decided to take a shot at the service plaza in South Holland, Illinois. Usually these things are pretty crowded but there was plenty of open parking tonight. Beauty. It looks like I have around three hours of driving from here to my consignee in Kentwood, Michigan. In related news, it looks like I have at least one more day without an alarm clock before I'll have to get back to reality.

I don't have a strong affinity for either team tonight, but I do have an affinity for the city of New York. So... sorry Jets fans, I'm gonna have to be on your side this time around.