I am spending today, my birthday, in a motel room in Conroe, Texas. No special plans for the 50th anniversary of my arrival on this little speck of dust in a huge universe. Well, I'll go and get a haircut at some point, but no real plans otherwise. Just a nice, quiet day of relaxing. I had considered taking a cab to one of the local taverns this evening but Conroe has a city smoking ban and I don't feel like having to go outside to enjoy a pipe, and certainly can't afford to pay c...

For a good while now I have been considering starting an everyday stupidity thread. Just the obviously stupid shit one runs across every day. I'll start it with this one: Moist towelettes: I ate some very good chicken wings at Coaches Corner in Fond Du Lac, WI tonight. They provide a few packets of moist towelettes with the wings. I was reading the back of the towelette package and saw they actually have directions for how to use them. After reading the directions I just had to ...

Thursday morning I delivered a military truck to the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, GA. That all went without any hitches, as expected. Those loads are rarely any sort of problem. After unloading I was told that the driver, a new guy, who was supposed to pick up in Knoxville, TN had quit and left us hanging. I had to dead-head almost 400 miles to get the load picked up on Friday. It was at a closed down grocery store and was the coolers and freezers from the store. They had already be...

This is the sort of conversation one can have when spending a lot of time behind the wheel. I was on my way from New York state to Wisconsin. Me: I can probably make it to Roseland by five or six o'clock. I can get a room and then bobtail over to Tinder Box to look at pipes. Me too: No. Me: No? Why not? Me too: No more pipes. Me: Huh? Why not? Me too: What is that in your hand? Me: The steering wheel. Me too: No dummy, the other hand. Me: Ummm, a ...

This morning finds me sitting at Rhode Island's only 24 hour truckstop located in West Greenwich, R.I. I had delivered my load in Maine on Friday and, as I had expected, there wasn't any reload available up that way. The best she could do was a partial, a skid steer, coming out of Greenland, R.I. Monday morning. Ok, no problem. I went down as far as Portland, ME and got myself a room for Friday and Saturday nights. I needed a 34 hour restart anyway. The hotel was pretty decent and the...

Tonight finds me in Roseland, Indiana. Yesterday I picked up a snow removal truck headed for a small town in Maine. This morning I made my way down from Wisconsin to western Illinois to pick up a pavement roller going to a town a little north of Boston. The roller was supposed to be ready to load first thing this morning but when I got to the factory they weren't quite finished building it yet. It was after lunch before they finally had it done and ready to load. Such is truck...

As my physical health declines on an almost daily basis I am dreaming of retiring on a sailboat. I spend some of my off time reading sailing magazines and checking out sailboats on the web. Given my financial situation it's just dreaming, but it's a pleasant way to pass the time. I spent a good bit of my youth sailing the Gulf of Mexico, The Caribbean, and the Atlantic Seaboard, so I am not unfamiliar with boats. I know what sort of boat I would like to spend my remaining years sailin...

I had an exhausting day, today. I picked up an over-sized load, a very large crate containing some sort of laser, at the port in Baltimore. The thing is huge and needed to be tarped. The biggest problem was that the top of the crate was basically sheet metal and so I couldn't climb on or walk on it. That presented a real challenge as to exactly how I was to get the tarps over the thing. After thinking about it for a while I rigged a couple of load straps together, end to end, and tosse...

Today finds me in Jackson, GA. I delivered a military trailer to a base in Kentucky on Thursday, and then a military vehicle to Ft Benning, GA yesterday. The entire trip I was juggling my on duty hours to make sure I could get the Ft Benning vehicle delivered by the Friday deadline. It is going to be used for some urban warfare training next week. Regulations require that we not exceed 11 hours of driving in a day, 14 consecutive hours of work time, or 70 hours of work time in an 8 day...

I am in North Bend, Washington. There is a little log building tavern called the Mt Si Tavern about a half mile down the frontage road from the truck stop here, and I have been visiting it for a number of years now. Over time I have come to know some of the regulars there, as well as the employees. It is one of my favorite taverns in the U.S. I was really happy to see an old fellow called "Smoky", who has been fighting lung cancer for the past couple of years, shooting pool when I walked d...

I am currently hauling a farm tractor and military trailer to Washington state. It's a wide wide due to the tractor axles. The tractor is going to a port where it will then take a slow boat to China. I'll be delivering the trailer to Ft Lewis. I got started late Friday afternoon and made my way across Wisconsin to get close to the Minnesota line. Everything went well on Saturday until I was about 10 miles from Fargo, North Dakota when a trailer tire decided that it was tired of going ...

Wednesday afternoon I loaded five large crates in Milwaukee; oversized load. The crates contain some of the parts for a large mining shovel going to Lima, Peru. Altogether it will take over 500 crates to move the entire thing. That's a lot of loads, folks. As my oversize permits hadn't yet arrived when I reached Beloit, WI which is on the WI/IL line I spent the night there. I got a cheap room and had dinner in the bar. After dinner I was trying to relax with a pipe and a beer out o...

I am staying in a Motel 6 for the weekend. A few minutes ago I walked up to the lobby to fill my ice bucket so I could ice down my beer. Now, I must paint a mental picture of myself this day. I was wearing plaid shorts (picture very white, hairy legs...sorry about that), a black tank top, sunglasses, and a wide brim straw hat. I also had a bent Viking Classic pipe hanging from my kisser. Ok, get the picture? Not exactly well dressed. Beyond casual. A Hispanic lady also staying her...

I am hanging out in a motel in Kentucky. I had planned on delivering my load here on Thursday afternoon but just outside of Nashville the clutch went out in my truck and I had to put it in a garage. While it was there they discovered that the rear main seal was leaking, and there was also a bad u-joint. Almost $4,000 worth of repairs later I was able to get back on the road yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. Glad I didn't have to pay for those repairs. I got up here around 4:00 yesterday ...

A week or so ago I picked up some equipment from an auction yard in MI. It was a couple of dozers and a pair of forks for a loader. Picking up the forks, even with a forklift, was difficult. I had to pitch in and lend some manual effort to balancing them to get them on the trailer. During the process the guy running the forklift hit a pothole and I found myself trying to hold up this 1,000 lbs set of forks. My back has been hurting like hell ever since the day after. Typical sciatica. Lowe...