I am so sick of every branch of government, from the Fed down to the local level, sucking money out of the pockets of truckers. The Transportation Workers Identification Card program is a Federal program which presumably is supposed to help screen those who go into our nation's ports. Very soon now truckers will not be able to enter a port to pick up or deliver a load with this TWIC card. In order to get this card you must go into an office near where you live, present documents such as a bir...

Ah well, at least I made it out of PA. I came over to Akron, OH yesterday and picked up a partial load, some large steel rings, for a customer in Milwaukee. I still have 3/4 of my trailer open and they are looking to find some more frieght to go on it before I head that way. This little bit of frieght simply doesn't pay enough to make the drive to Milwaukee wortth it, but if they don't find something soon that'll be it as it needs to get to the customer tomorrow. So I am once again sitting ar...

I unloaded a military truck at the retrofit facility in Chambersburg, PA yesterday morning. Been sitting here at the truckstop in Carlisle ever since. Just no decent paying double-drop trailer frieght moving out of here right now. Dispatch said worse case there's a load moving out of the area on Thursday going to WI. Sitting around a truckstop is anything but exciting. Lots of idiots acting like, well, idiots on the CB radio, over priced truckstop food, and that's about it. At least I'm not o...

Tonight was kind of...weird. I stopped at one of my favorite watering holes, a little dive in Carlisle, PA called the BBQ Place. Despite the name it's a bar, across the street from a truckstop. As usual I carried my knitting pack in with me. The bartender, who has been working in this place for even longer than the 20 years or so I have been stopping there, immediately asked me what I was making now. I hadn't even opened my pack and taken out my knitting yet. I did so and showed her the cable...

I am currently sitting in wonderful El Paso, TX. I delivered a truck at Ft Bliss here this morning and have been sitting around ever since. The truckstops in El Paso are much like they are in any border town...shit holes. They're crawling with assorted and sundry low lifes, panhandlers, thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, and the occasional robber/murderer thrown in just for fun. A trucker was stabbed to death a few weeks ago just a few hundred yards from where I am now sitting, on his way ba...

Was sitting here in my truck watching the rain and saw this cool looking rainbow forming. Thought I shoot a bit of video and share it. I forgot my video camera at home so I had to shoot this with my webcam.    

On my way out to the extreme Northwestern corner of North Dakota I stopped at a truckstop near the WI/MN line to fill my coffee cup. I browsed around for a moment and noticed that they had the Cobra Nav One 5000 GPS on sale for about a hundred bucks off the normal $500 price. While I really like my Garmin Nuvi 350 the small 3.5" screen is a bit of a pain to read in a big rig where it sits farther away from me than it would in a passenger vehicle. The Cobra unit has a 5" screen which is huge b...

I delivered my load near Chicago yesterday. Despite the hard work involved with untarping and unsecuring it, everything went pretty well. When I called in to dispatch they asked me to stop by one of our regular customers outside of Milwaukee and pick up some stuff to bring back to the yard with me. naturally I agreed. Once there I wished I hadn't agreed. I had to load up 13 snow plow blades. In order for all of them to fit on the trailer they had to be stacked. Snow plow blades don't exactly ...

When I got to the shipper on Sunday to pick up the CNC machine it was obvious right off that this was going to be "one of those" trips. The oversize permits were supposed to have been faxed to the plant and waiting for me at the guard shack. They weren't. The guard had no idea what I was talking about. Ah well, I can't say I was too surprised. I would have been more surprised had they actually been there. Actually loading up the machine and all of the associated parts didn't take too long....

I am working on the second pair of baby booties, blue for a boy this time. I could just whip up another pair just like the pink ones, but if I am going to give these as a gift I want this baby to having something original and unique just as with the pink ones for the first baby. I have started and frogged the blue bootie at least ten times already. I work out a design idea in my mind, knit it up, don't like it, and tear it back apart again. At one point I was very near completion on the first...

I finally got an email from dispatch regarding a load. It's an oversized load coming out of Vidalia, GA which is about 7 hours from here. At this point they aren't certain when it will actually be ready to load and the shipper will be calling me directly to coordinate the loading. I pointed out to dispatch that at 12' 2" wide it may be pointless to load it on the weekend as GA may not allow weekend movement of the load. Also, at that width it may possibly require escorts which will also have ...

I finished the pink baby booties this morning. I am hoping the mother likes them.

Recently the UK formally gave binding legal status to Sharia courts there in regard to civil cases. They recognize these courts as legally binding arbitration. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4749183.ece   I just finished reading and replying to a thread on another forum entitled "The Worst Of All Possible Mistakes" in which the poster stated that "Great Britain has just committed suicide..." and " And thus collapses one of the oldest systems that claimed that...

I've been playing around with my webcam and decided to set it up as a streaming feed. Mostly just to try it out. First I set up my own server with IP forwarding from my dsl router, and placed a webpage with a viewing applet on it. That worked pretty well, but as I don't want to have my router opened up like that all the time I took that down again after playing with it for a bit. Then I set up an account at a free webcam hosting site and linked that feed into a webpage hosted by my isp.&nb...

I had planned on riding the bent to the grocery some time today. The food supplies I bought when I got home from the road are running low and I knew I needed to get enough to last three or four more days. Somehow the day just sort of drifted by and before I knew it the clock, and my stomach, indicated that it was getting close to dinner time. Hmmm, what to prepare for dinner? I had finished off the last of the turkey breast and Swiss cheese for lunch.  Check the fridge; 3/4 of a pound...