weblog@wonderwinds

2 weeks in, so far so good. 15 maybe 16 days if you want to split hairs but whatever. That's JT's truck by the way. This is the end of the third night of doing nothing. Waiting for the next box of stuff to head out of Laredo TX bound for who cares where. 2 full days of zero hours and zero miles. My career total right now is about 77 hours behind the wheel covering 4461 miles. Started in Henderson CO where I met JT, destination somewhere up in Oregon. Dropped one hooked another (42,000 pound load) destined for Omaha NE. From there we picked up I forget what and took it to somewhere in southern CA. Dropped that and got a load destined for Charlotte NC which (of course) got dropped on time. That's when things took a turn in our fortunes. Spent a night in a crap-hole of a drop yard in Charlotte trying to find the right type of trailer for the next customer, not finding it, and running out of hours. The message in the morning was "use the trailer you got" so away we went. Picked up 22,000 pounds of stuff bound for Mexico, which to us meant Laredo TX ... with barely enough time to get 'er done. We did it but it basically costs me training opportunities due to gotta run it. Anyway we waited for a couple of hours to drop that load, then spent the night in a Flying J truck stop. Next day was spent in the terminal here, then a night, then most of the next day. JT decided to head out to a TA truck stop to get something to eat, and that's where we spent last night. And it isn't where the fun ended.

Follow up:

I bought a truckers GPS unit. They basically come in 2 screen sizes and cost pretty much the same for each size. I picked my brand (Rand McNally TND 700) a while ago, and yesterday the TA had one in stock. So I bought it. I'm really hoping there is some reason other than "you got a lemon" to explain why it seems like I got a lemon It can't find any satellites. I might not be the brightest bulb in the box but I'm pretty sure a navigation device sorta depends on satellites to know where you are. And if it can't tell where you are it can't help you get to where you're going. Not that we're going anywhere at the moment... I hooked it up to the laptop per their directions and it wouldn't connect. Being the geeky bastard that I am, I tried again with the same results - no connection between the devices therefore no docking software installed on the computer. Being the experienced geeky bastard that I am, I figured I'd hook it up in accordance with not their instructions. Yay - they saw each other, swapped over the docking software, and can talk to each other. Chewed up a bunch of my monthly bandwidth allowance doing the initial update to the device, set it to charging, and got some sleep. Not much sleep. Too much coffee after dropping to 2 cups a day for 2 weeks, but got some sleep. The green "charged" light was on so I turned it on. STILL no satellites. Not even 1 in the 'satellites seen' screen. WTF?

Oh well. So that is now on my list of things to take care of. First though is the mortgage. Tomorrow is the day my 45 day warning before they might put up a foreclosure notice expires and I can't get paperwork together on the road. Printer being the key ingredient I'm missing. Plus I can't get a letter certifying employment by my employer. All they'll do is give me a fax number that the bank can send a request to the employer so the bank can get the letter, which might not be an option the bank is willing to buy into. Anyway after that I really need to figure out my insurance paperwork, then figure out if I can do this training straight through or not, and somewhere in there I need to get a lot more practice backing up a fifty three foot trailer, and see if I got a lemon of a gps unit or learn what mystery is hiding it from the satellites. And I gotta go have a poo. And maybe a shower.