We all know about the age-old debate regarding just how sleepy you can get from eating turkey. I would have no way of knowing, of course, but I've been told by some people in Pennsylvania that turkey can most certainly help you get a good night's sleep. In completely unrelated news, I got a very good night's sleep last night. Whew. Yeah, I slept like a baby.
Nice and late in the morning today, I awoke feeling well rested and ready to go for the first time in several days. With the four and a half hours that I had available under the 70 hour rule, I was able to cover 240 miles on the road plus a fuel stop and a post-trip inspection. This brought me to the last service plaza on the turnpike, just outside New Stanton, Pennsylvania. Good enough, I suppose.
NFL football is widely considered to be the most popular sport in America. Personally, I often find it almost unwatchable. I like to watch my 'Skins sometimes, but they're so terrible that even their games are usually tough to watch. I'll concede that the teams playing today weren't exactly the cream of the crop, but damn. When you're sitting at a highway service plaza and that's all you get... Boo! NFL football. Boo! (Looks like I'm about to go 3-for-3 against the spread though, eh? Too bad I had no 'entertainment purposes' riding on the action.) At least this college game has been pretty entertaining so far. Not sure if the Aggies will be able to hang around much longer.
I haven't received any messages this week reminding me to send in my receipt for reimbursement of my Thanksgiving meal. Maybe they stopped offering it or maybe they're just not reminding us in hopes that we will forget and they can save a few bucks. I'm proceeding on the assumption that the reimbursement is still offered though, so I tried to find a way to spend $15 at Burger King. That's not as easy as one might think. Whopper meal? Nah, make it a Double Whopper. Cheese? Sure, toss some cheese on there. Small, medium, or large? Go big or go home, as they say. Anything else? Ah, what the hell, give me one of those slices of pie while we're at it. And the grand total comes to... $10.80. Damn. I let 'em off easy. I suppose that I could have tacked on more stuff to reach the $15 mark but, to be honest, I was pretty full after eating that meal. Fair enough.
I think I'll hop over to the Toledo area tomorrow and then sit for a 34-hour restart before continuing on to Wisconsin. I have six hours coming to me tomorrow. That should be enough to get me somewhere good. I wouldn't mind sitting around and watching football all day on Saturday. Then I can finish the trip on Sunday and make my delivery with plenty of available hours on Monday morning. Pretty clever thinking, says I.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
11/25/09
When I was in Pittsburgh with my brothers earlier in the month, we had a little catch phrase that was generally good for a laugh. Whenever something less than ideal would happen (someone cuts us off in traffic, there's a bump in the road, etc.), one of us would make up some goofy reason that the Quakers were behind it. It probably sounds dumb if you weren't there, but the phrase "damn Quakers" was good for a pretty hearty laugh by the time the weekend was over. Oh, I was muttering "damn Quakers" quite a bit this afternoon.
Last night's ten hour break was over at 6:30am today. In related news, I started driving at 6:30am today. The construction on the turnpike seems to have eased up since the last time I crossed Pennsylvania, so the traffic was moving accordingly. The light rain slowed some people down a little, as did the patches of dense fog, but overall it was a good morning drive. I received a pre-plan just before reaching my consignee and then my drop/hook went nicely and smoothly. The day was looking good indeed.
As regards the pre-plan, it appears that the load planners were trying to make use of my remaining hours of availability. That's about all I can ask of them, right? I suspect that they didn't know just how effectively they would be using my remaining hours. I had two hours left after this afternoon's delivery. I was given a 42 mile deadhead to the big warehouse in Topton. The ride wasn't a whole lot more than 42 miles in reality, so I should have had what, another hour to burn after I showed up? Yeah, the drive to the shipper took an hour and forty-five minutes. I shit you not. That was a pretty brutal 48 miles. Stop and go, stop and go. Damn Quakers.
So I had time to pull my truck out of the dock after it was loaded and do a post-trip inspection, and that was that. Out of hours. Thanks for playing. I was fortunate in that this shipper allows overnight parking and they have a 24-hour break room area with a vending machine and restrooms. I actually made sure to stock up on snacks and water last night (since I had no idea where I might end up today), so we're good there, but the presence of restrooms is always a plus. If the rain stops though, I suspect that my Swedish buddy Sjoe may want to walk into town and see what kind of trouble he can find. Day before Thanksgiving and all, he seems to think that the locals may be having a good time.
My trip will be taking me to De Forest, Wisconsin for a Monday morning delivery. I'll be crossing Ohio on the turnpike, so in a perfect world I could park in Toledo and Sjoe could catch a ride home to visit with family and friends tomorrow. In a world run by an out-of-control federal government, however, I can only work four and a half hours tomorrow. You know, after finishing work today at 3:30pm and taking the whole evening off, then sleeping the night away without setting an alarm for tomorrow, I'll be all worn out whenever I decide to get out of bed. These last few days while I was hardly getting any sleep and running my ass off, well on those days I was just fine, of course. It's only now that the magical 70/8 threshold has been reached that I'm not fine. Damn Quakers, probably running the FMCSA.
The four and a half hours won't even get me out of Pennsylvania. Probably just as well though. There seemed to be a bit of strife amongst the family when I was last home. I have no use for any of that. Much better to see if I can catch a good internet signal and watch some football in peace. Bad news if you're a Packer fan (I like Green Bay -11.5), a Cowboy fan (I Like Dallas -13.5), or a Bronco fan (I like Denver +6.5). Whenever I actually sit and watch football, the games go exactly the opposite of however I expected them to go.
Last night's ten hour break was over at 6:30am today. In related news, I started driving at 6:30am today. The construction on the turnpike seems to have eased up since the last time I crossed Pennsylvania, so the traffic was moving accordingly. The light rain slowed some people down a little, as did the patches of dense fog, but overall it was a good morning drive. I received a pre-plan just before reaching my consignee and then my drop/hook went nicely and smoothly. The day was looking good indeed.
As regards the pre-plan, it appears that the load planners were trying to make use of my remaining hours of availability. That's about all I can ask of them, right? I suspect that they didn't know just how effectively they would be using my remaining hours. I had two hours left after this afternoon's delivery. I was given a 42 mile deadhead to the big warehouse in Topton. The ride wasn't a whole lot more than 42 miles in reality, so I should have had what, another hour to burn after I showed up? Yeah, the drive to the shipper took an hour and forty-five minutes. I shit you not. That was a pretty brutal 48 miles. Stop and go, stop and go. Damn Quakers.
So I had time to pull my truck out of the dock after it was loaded and do a post-trip inspection, and that was that. Out of hours. Thanks for playing. I was fortunate in that this shipper allows overnight parking and they have a 24-hour break room area with a vending machine and restrooms. I actually made sure to stock up on snacks and water last night (since I had no idea where I might end up today), so we're good there, but the presence of restrooms is always a plus. If the rain stops though, I suspect that my Swedish buddy Sjoe may want to walk into town and see what kind of trouble he can find. Day before Thanksgiving and all, he seems to think that the locals may be having a good time.
My trip will be taking me to De Forest, Wisconsin for a Monday morning delivery. I'll be crossing Ohio on the turnpike, so in a perfect world I could park in Toledo and Sjoe could catch a ride home to visit with family and friends tomorrow. In a world run by an out-of-control federal government, however, I can only work four and a half hours tomorrow. You know, after finishing work today at 3:30pm and taking the whole evening off, then sleeping the night away without setting an alarm for tomorrow, I'll be all worn out whenever I decide to get out of bed. These last few days while I was hardly getting any sleep and running my ass off, well on those days I was just fine, of course. It's only now that the magical 70/8 threshold has been reached that I'm not fine. Damn Quakers, probably running the FMCSA.
The four and a half hours won't even get me out of Pennsylvania. Probably just as well though. There seemed to be a bit of strife amongst the family when I was last home. I have no use for any of that. Much better to see if I can catch a good internet signal and watch some football in peace. Bad news if you're a Packer fan (I like Green Bay -11.5), a Cowboy fan (I Like Dallas -13.5), or a Bronco fan (I like Denver +6.5). Whenever I actually sit and watch football, the games go exactly the opposite of however I expected them to go.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
11/24/09
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you see the following statement? (I don't really care to know but, for your own sake, try a quick word association.)...
"You are being videotaped. All pull-outs will be prosecuted."
I saw this on a (poorly worded) sign outside the window of a truck stop as I was eating dinner tonight. Telling people not to steal gasoline, of course, but that ain't what popped into my head when I first saw it.
I was tired when I wrote to you fine folks last night and I may be even more tired now. Fortunately (or maybe not so fortunately, as time will tell) my logbook is on a collision course with the 70 hour rule at this point. I can only work a total of seven hours tomorrow. Then I only pick up four and a half hours on Thursday and six more on Friday. So I won't be working terribly hard and this tired driver business will be put to rest (pun intended), at least until the weekend. That's the fortunate part. With a logbook short on hours and a holiday approaching though, I may end up stuck in the middle of nowhere with my thumb up my ass for a few days. That would be rather unfortunate.
This morning got started bright and early. The drive was quite a bit easier than I expected. I knew that US-30 is a pretty easy ride, but I expected a little more traffic around the cities and towns. Bypassing Fort Wayne at 8am, one would have thought that it was 3am on a Sunday or something. Almost no traffic to be seen. I had time for a lunch break along the way and still arrived at my consignee before noon.
It was a 'good news/bad news' deal at the consignee. Good news in that I was assigned to a door and unloaded right away (actually leaving at 1:30pm, when I was scheduled to arrive). Bad news in that I had to pay $50 to a lumper. I don't know how the intervening holiday will affect the payroll people or the TripPak transit schedule, but hopefully my reimbursement can still be handled before my next paycheck is processed.
I sent in my empty call and then headed over to the Flying J on I-71 once I got checked out at the security booth. The drive was something like seven or eight miles. Of course, as I sat in the left turn lane waiting to get into the truck stop, I received a new assignment. They couldn't have sent it through before I started driving away from the consignee, could they? Eh, whatever. I had to drop off that TripPak anyway.
The next load was picking up in Waverly, Ohio. I scooted down through Columbus before the afternoon rush got too heavy and then caught US-23 to the south. My directions to the shipper were wrong. To put it more accurately, the directions were correct in the sense that they got me to the shipper, but I needed to be at a different warehouse belonging to that shipper. The security guard at the first (wrong) location gave me a printed sheet with directions to the second (correct) location and sent me on my way. After arriving at the second location, my drop/hook was quick and easy. With a groovy 8,000 pounds in the wagon, away we go.
I'm heading to Eastern Pennsylvania so the route took me up US-23 to US-22 and then across to I-70. That stretch of US-22 was far more tedious than I remember from previous trips. Cancels out the morning's drive being easier than expected, I suppose. Eventually I caught up with the freeway and put my foot down. I got into Pennsylvania before I was completely worn out and decided to call it a day. I ducked off at Exit 6 and found a parking spot at the Petro. Just to throw a curveball to the cosmos, I decided on a slice of Sbarro pizza for dinner instead of a SubWay Italian BMT with double meat. Hopefully SubWay can forgive me.
As soon as I've been here for ten hours, it will be time to hit the road again. I am set to make a drop/hook in Minersville, Pennsylvania by tomorrow at 12:30pm. Then I'll be down to something like two hours remaining on my log book and staring a holiday in the face. The load planners are good for a surprise every now and then though, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. I'm sure hoping for a positive surprise tomorrow. Getting stuck sitting out a holiday isn't any great tragedy in and of itself. Getting stuck sitting out that holiday in Minersville, Pennsylvania would be pretty crummy.
"You are being videotaped. All pull-outs will be prosecuted."
I saw this on a (poorly worded) sign outside the window of a truck stop as I was eating dinner tonight. Telling people not to steal gasoline, of course, but that ain't what popped into my head when I first saw it.
I was tired when I wrote to you fine folks last night and I may be even more tired now. Fortunately (or maybe not so fortunately, as time will tell) my logbook is on a collision course with the 70 hour rule at this point. I can only work a total of seven hours tomorrow. Then I only pick up four and a half hours on Thursday and six more on Friday. So I won't be working terribly hard and this tired driver business will be put to rest (pun intended), at least until the weekend. That's the fortunate part. With a logbook short on hours and a holiday approaching though, I may end up stuck in the middle of nowhere with my thumb up my ass for a few days. That would be rather unfortunate.
This morning got started bright and early. The drive was quite a bit easier than I expected. I knew that US-30 is a pretty easy ride, but I expected a little more traffic around the cities and towns. Bypassing Fort Wayne at 8am, one would have thought that it was 3am on a Sunday or something. Almost no traffic to be seen. I had time for a lunch break along the way and still arrived at my consignee before noon.
It was a 'good news/bad news' deal at the consignee. Good news in that I was assigned to a door and unloaded right away (actually leaving at 1:30pm, when I was scheduled to arrive). Bad news in that I had to pay $50 to a lumper. I don't know how the intervening holiday will affect the payroll people or the TripPak transit schedule, but hopefully my reimbursement can still be handled before my next paycheck is processed.
I sent in my empty call and then headed over to the Flying J on I-71 once I got checked out at the security booth. The drive was something like seven or eight miles. Of course, as I sat in the left turn lane waiting to get into the truck stop, I received a new assignment. They couldn't have sent it through before I started driving away from the consignee, could they? Eh, whatever. I had to drop off that TripPak anyway.
The next load was picking up in Waverly, Ohio. I scooted down through Columbus before the afternoon rush got too heavy and then caught US-23 to the south. My directions to the shipper were wrong. To put it more accurately, the directions were correct in the sense that they got me to the shipper, but I needed to be at a different warehouse belonging to that shipper. The security guard at the first (wrong) location gave me a printed sheet with directions to the second (correct) location and sent me on my way. After arriving at the second location, my drop/hook was quick and easy. With a groovy 8,000 pounds in the wagon, away we go.
I'm heading to Eastern Pennsylvania so the route took me up US-23 to US-22 and then across to I-70. That stretch of US-22 was far more tedious than I remember from previous trips. Cancels out the morning's drive being easier than expected, I suppose. Eventually I caught up with the freeway and put my foot down. I got into Pennsylvania before I was completely worn out and decided to call it a day. I ducked off at Exit 6 and found a parking spot at the Petro. Just to throw a curveball to the cosmos, I decided on a slice of Sbarro pizza for dinner instead of a SubWay Italian BMT with double meat. Hopefully SubWay can forgive me.
As soon as I've been here for ten hours, it will be time to hit the road again. I am set to make a drop/hook in Minersville, Pennsylvania by tomorrow at 12:30pm. Then I'll be down to something like two hours remaining on my log book and staring a holiday in the face. The load planners are good for a surprise every now and then though, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. I'm sure hoping for a positive surprise tomorrow. Getting stuck sitting out a holiday isn't any great tragedy in and of itself. Getting stuck sitting out that holiday in Minersville, Pennsylvania would be pretty crummy.
Monday, November 23, 2009
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.
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.
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