Over the weekend I had a lot of extra time on my hands. I had to make sure I cleared IL before noon on Saturday as they don't allow oversized loads to move between noon on Saturday and sunrise Monday. Beats me why. Once I cleared IL I had a lot of time to get to my delivery just North of Geen Bay Monday morning. I stopped and killed Saturday afternoon and night at a Petro truck stop South of Milwaukee. I accidentally wandered over to the bar and grill across the street. They have cold beer an...
As this seems to be some major issue these days I just wanna say that I'm not leaving JU. I delivered the wheel loader this morning, picked up some other crap, ate some food, and checked into the hotel as my load home is still developing. Mom called me yesterday to see if I'll make it home before her surgery. That's the plan and I hope it'll work out but I couldn't tell her for sure I would be there. She sounded worse. I met an interesting woman at Applebee's tonight. I was impressed ...
OK, so I've been seeing aall of these "On such and such" bullshit articles posted one after another. Whatever. I hauled a firetruck down to Dover AFB. The route I had to take due to the oversized load was pure bullshit and it took me an extra day to get there thanks to being stuck behind farm tractors and school buses. Ah well, I did finally make it there. From there I went up to Northern PA and picked up a wheel loader, which is basically a bulldozer except with wheels instead...
The only load dispatch had for me yesterday was a crash truck (airfield fire truck) going to Tacoma. As I need to get home for Mom's surgery on the 9th I didn't want to go to the left coast and risk not being able to make it to Florida on time. We decided that I would just take the weekend off and pick up another crash truck heading to Dover AFB on Monday. Staying East will ensure I can get home on time even though I don't really like running in that area in Maryland. While inspecting my t...
Last night while I was having dinner at Applebee's a black guy came in and sat at the bar. Since this WI town is one of the whitest places I've ever been, with very little in the way of diversity, I assumed he was from somewhere else just as myself. I had him rightly pegged as a truck driver, but he surprised me when he said he was a local driver and lives here. I said "You live here? Are you like the only black dude in town?" He laughed at that and said that no, there are a few here. He k...
I finally made it back to the yard today. As I got in late and didn't have a pending load that I know about I checked into the hotel ( sort of, more on that later) and went over to Applebee's for a few adult beverages and dinner. The area was hit hard by a nasty lightening storm. It was striking all around me, very close as I dropped my trailer. Now, you have to understand that I once spent three months blind as a bat becaue of a lightening strike (yes, I've been hit by lightening) I was less...
Yesterday I made it to where I needed to go to pick up my trailer. The place is a government installation out in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. The security there is very high and I had to check in, sign in, ID check, and be escorted to the place where my trailer was sitting. It was 8 miles from the gate to the actual location, where I went through the entire security process again as well as having my truck inspected, before I was allowed into that compound to get the trailer. For obvious r...
Well, the weather people were right this time. While bobtailing across Montana I ran smack into a snow storm. Loaded big trucks get very good traction on messy roads. All that weight is a huge advantage under these conditions. Unfortunately that same truck without a load or a trailer gets almost no traction at all on the same roads. Between the snow and ice on the road and high cross winds I broke traction several times before I finally reached an exit with a hotel. I took the exit and mor...
I finally got my truck out of the shop and checked in at dispatch to see what they for me in the way of a load. After sitting around for two days I was ready to roll. What he said he wanted me to do struck as crazy on a couple of levels, and I even asked him if he'd been hitting the sauce a little early. He said we have a van trailer sitting in Idaho and he wants me to bobtail from Wisconsin to there to pick it up. Ok, a couple of things here. Firstly, I didn't know we even had a van trailer ...
I'm still hanging out at the hotel waiting to hear about my truck. I am really hoping that they'll have it ready to go soon. I find hanging around hotels to be very boring, not to mention losing all that income from sitting still instead of trucking. I'm not a big television person so I lose interest in it pretty quickly. Not much else to do in a hotel room though. Hopefully I'll get the call soon and be on my way once again. I had been planning on heading home but now I'm not so sure abou...
When I got to the yard yesterday I put my truck in the shop for routine maintenance. I also mentioned a couple of minor issues they needed to address, one of which was a bit of an oil leak which I thought was just a minor problem. Turns out the rear main seal is leaking so I had to take the truck down to the engine shop. Again. Replacing the rear main seal is no small task. It involves, among other things, taking out the transmission. I am laid up in the hotel waiting to hear about the tru...
Over the past couple of weeks I have been contacted by writers for a couple of different magazines, the Financial Times in London and Yarn Forward in who knows where, for interviews about male knitting. I found it quite flattering that they would want to hear from me about the subject and did my best to answer their questions as best I could. The Financial Times one is a proposed articnle that may or may not actually run in the magazine, but the Yarn Forward one is an article in the works alt...
I'm sitting around the truckstop in Cali waiting for dispatch to find me a load. It'll be tomorrow now. It's a really nice day here. The sun is shining and there is a breeze blowing. Although the breeze is slightly chilly the air is still reasonably warm and the sun feels especially good. I was sitting at one of the picnic tables near the building and knitting when a tour bus pulled into the truckstop. A passel of tourists piled out of the bus. Most of them were elderly but there were a few y...
There an old carpenter's saying "Measure twice, cut once". The same concept applies to knitting. When knitting a fitted item such as a sweater or a vest one must knit a gauge swatch to see how many stitches and rows per inch they get with the needle/yarn combination. I did this with the alpaca vest I have been knitting and came up with 6 stitches/inch for each row/round. I did the math and cast on the stitches that would be needed to knit it in the desired size with that gauge. At just sho...
After getting my truck out of the shop on Wednesday I had to haul ass down to IL to deliver a generator, then go and pick up a Bomag roller to fill out my load. I then had to run like hell to deliver the Bomag in Denver on Friday. After Denver I had to go to Elko, NV to deliver some steel to a mining supply company. That was Saturday. Those guys did me a favor because they aren't normally open on the weekend, but agreed to come in Saturday and unload their steel so I could be on my way to Cal...