I'm parked for the night at a truck stop just West of Salt Lake City. It's been a long day of driving, as puliing over sized loads tends to be, and I'm pretty beat.

When I pulled in and parked I walked inside to wash up, grab a cold drink, and prepare to settle down for the night with a DVD. As I was standing in line to pay for my purchase I got to talking with a lady trucker standing in the next line over from mine. She mentioned that she had loaded today for WI.

I told her that I just came out of WI with an over sized load bound for CA. She looked me up and down for a second and asked "You're a driver"? I replied in the affirmative.

"Well you sure don't look like a driver" she said with a smile. I told her that was the best compliment she could have paid me.

I was dressed in gray slacks, brown shoes, a dark green long sleeve shirt, a tie with diagonal stripes of two alternating shades of green, and a narrow brim fedora hat. She said that she really liked the look.

We had both paid for our purchases at the same time and walked out to the parking lot together. We chatted as we walked toward our respective trucks. She reached hers first and as she turned off toward it she commented again "You're looking really sharp there, you dapper man!" and gave me a big smile as she climbed into her rig.

I could tell she was being ernest and not just trying to rib me, and I smiled and waved a thanks as I continued on to my own rig several parking spaces on down the row.

"Dapper" is hardly a word I've ever heard used with respect to myself, but then I've been called a lot worse LOL. I appreciated the compliment and had a bit of a spring in my somewhat limping gait as I walked the remainder of the distance to my truck.

The bum hip hasn't been bothering me too much for the past few days, for which I am grateful, but a very nasty toothache has had me on edge since I picked up this load. While chaining down my load my breaker bar slipped and caught me in the face breaking off my right eye tooth (canine) flush with the gum line.

I don't mind saying that hurt quite a lot, and still does. I can feel it all the way to the base of my nose and then some. I've been taking Aleve to dull the pain and just trying to live with it for now. When time and money allow I'll seek out a dentist to see if they can do anything about it. Hopefully they can just extract what's left of it and be done with it. I'm not long for dentures anyway (next year I hope) so it really wouldn't matter all that much.

Not too much else going on at present. Just another load and just another trip. Nothing very exciting has happened on this one so far. The weather has been nice, somewhat cool even, and other than a near miss with some dimwit in a day cab who was too busy yapping on his cell phone to pay attention to his driving, not much of an eventful nature has taken place. Kind of a dull trip actually.

Tomorrow morning I'll head out of here as soon as the sun starts to rise and make my way across NV. I still have a little over 900 miles to go and want to knock out as much of that as possible tomorrow so I can make delivery and hopefully reload on Friday. CA is not a place I care to spend the weekend if I can help it.

Stupid CA has routed me over 200 miles out of my way with this over sized load becase they aren't allowing any over sized loads on I-80 at the current time. Lots of back mountain roads to negotiate just to get where I'm going. Damn botherson bit of nonsense, but there's nothing to be done but just drive the extra 200 miles.

I really do dislike CA.