11/23/09

Nothing is quite as rewarding as dealing with a sluggish computer for several hours while your DVD encoding software hogs the processor and memory, only to have the actual DVD writing process fail on account of an 'unknown error' at the 90% mark. Quite rewarding indeed.

I actually got something resembling a little bit of down time today (hence the DVD encoding). They're still keeping me moving, to be sure, but tomorrow's delivery is for a very reasonable 1:30pm. Good deal too, 'cause today I'm freaking tired. I set my alarm for 4:30am this morning so that I could be ready whenever the employees at my consignee showed up and started parking. I never made it to 4:30am. I think, all in all, I probably slept for an hour or two. The rest of the night was spent tossing and turning and checking to see how long it would be until I had to get up. By 3am I concluded that it was pointless so I sat in the front of the truck and browsed the interwebs for a while.

It turned out to be a good thing that I was up before 4:30am though, as the first employee arrived at 4am and told me that I would have to move. He pointed me to another area where I could hang out and told me to check in at Door #1 shortly before 6am. They would have to load their local delivery trucks first and then they would get me unloaded. Okay then. I don't know exactly what time the main forklift driver dude showed up but it was definitely well before 6am. He said that they needed some of the materials from my truck to put on one of the local trucks, so I needed to back into the dock. One of last night's mysteries was solved when I found out that there actually was an indoor loading dock behind a big overhead door facing the street.

Once I got settled into the dock I had plenty of time to try taking a nap, given that the bales of insulation were being unloaded by hand, but I didn't manage to fall asleep. I was freaking tired too. Such a shame. Once I was empty, I headed back southward to the McDonald's that I passed last night. By the time I parked and bought a sausage biscuit, I had a new assignment waiting for me. Onward we roll. This time I did manage to nod off for an hour before I had to get going though.

My next shipper was up to the north of Milwaukee along I-43. So I had gone a little out of the way in search of morning parking, but not too terribly out of the way. I was right along I-43 so I just had to run it all the way up to Belgium, Wisconsin. I was dispatched to arrive at 11am. I showed up at 9:45am. The broad in the office said that I had a 10:30am appointment. The forklift dude directed me to a door at 11:15am. So take that however you will. I don't know. I was just glad to see that it was an appointment deal because there were a bunch of trucks hanging around before I arrived. I skipped right past most of them, so one might reasonably conclude that they had later appointments.

My string of empty or lightly loaded trailers came to an abrupt end once I had my 42,000 pound payload all ready to go. You win some, you lose some. Back down I-43 through Milwaukee and then onto I-94 toward Chicago we go. I took the bypass this time and the traffic was tedious but reasonable in the early afternoon. I'm heading for Delaware, Ohio so I decided to cross Indiana on US-30 instead of taking the turnpikes. I think I'll shave around twenty miles off the trip this way and I find it to be a pretty relaxing route once I get to the east of Valparaiso.

Coming off a pretty intense weekend of driving and feeling pretty weary, I stopped off in Plymouth, Indiana for an Italian BMT with double meat. Then, about two seconds after I set my brakes, I decided that this will do just fine for tonight. I'll have a little over 200 miles to cover from here to my consignee, but that afternoon appointment shouldn't be too bad. It's getting tough to tell day from night at this point so with any luck I'll get some decent sleep here pretty soon. I'm (hopefully) going to get one more DVD finished and then give it a shot.

Sometimes, while creating DVDs and posting a blog entry, one might be inclined to peruse the news of the day. Yeah, I just did that. Media reports are now saying that our golden boy quarterback was involved in a bar fight late Saturday night in South Bend, leaving him with two black eyes. People who were there are saying that he got sucker punched, which (to me) sounds quite a bit different than being involved in a fight. (For the record, I've been sucker punched before and I've been involved in fights. There's most certainly a difference.) Either way, just one more awesome story in a season that can't end soon enough.