The accident. And Vowels 'The Endangered Species'

So while I was making a turn the other day, this dude decides I was not making it fast enough for him. So his decision was to go ahead and take the turn in front of me. Now, luckily I saw him, or the damage to both of us could have been worse, so I stopped to let him by, however, it seemed that he may not have judged the turn correctly, and wound up hitting my trailer. In my last video post I commented on how impossible I thought this was. So here are some pictures to show just how taken I was with the spectacle that I not think could ever be recreated with exquisite precision.

I just did not ever think it was possible to take two trailers of the exact same height and put one on top of the other while in motion like this. But where there is a will there is a way, and this guy found the way. It was incredible. Then when the police officer arrived to account for the scene, he immediately said I was the cause. I just went wide eyed and stared at him. Nothing I could think to say could truly explain my bewilderment that he believed I managed to do this. I asked how it could be possible the the back end of my trailer wound up under his trailer while I was moving forward, making a turn. And then, before he could counter, I added, how could I have done it after being stopped, because I saw him trying to cut me off on the inside of a turn, I was making. He then continued to spout other excuses of how I was actually backing through the turn while HE was stopped. His story changed many times until the police officer finally just told him to stop talking. After a walk around of the vehicles, the note that only his vehicle had skid marks from stopping while mine had none, and just the complete awkward position of the whole thing, the police officer placed the other driver at fault and everything else carried on. It was only 3 hour aggravation session, that wasted everyone's time.

On a more tranquil note, I manage to drive through some more mountains, and accumulated some decent photos in the process. Quick question, should I get a flickr account? Someone comment and tell me if it is indeed worth it. Just something to quickly upload photos for sharing to. I know I could use imgur, but its not really the greatest for sharing. I suppose I could use tumblr, but it is also a 'bloggish' site, and I barely have enough dedication to this blog, let alone one that is circled around animated .gif's and random mocked up parodies of YouTube celebrities and flashes of amateur porn pics.









Which brings me quickly to my next topic, that I only just thought off while typing. What is with the new onslaught of incomplete words as site names? Flickr? Tumblr? Imgur (what the full word that is supposed to be I will never know)? It just seems like there is a disease of dyslexic american dream bound teenagers prancing through the internet calling every typo an idea. I can just imagine all of the wonderful minds behind Tumblr sitting around a table going "It seems that Tumbler.com is taken... what should we do now?", "Oh thats easy boss, take away the 'e' and its good to go,". It makes very little sense to me. Before the times of the super power house search engine of Google (should now be changed to ggle) you had to just surf the web a different way. Names of websites like Tumblr and Flickr would lose traffic, just simply because people would have the urge to spell the name correctly, and wander circles around the incorrectly spelled version trying to find their destination.

Im sure everything has its reason. There is no doubt in that. Why not just move everything to this incorrect representation of the English language? Why is 'Blogger' not Blgr, or Reddit, Rddt? My true conclusion has come down to the over hunting of vowels. That is the biggest problem. We are slowly witnessing the extinction of needed letters in the written word through the internet. Especially the 'E's. They are disappearing with a force. It is time we hunt down these vowel poachers and put them in their place. A 4th grade spelling class.

Since I rarely have any pictures lying around of what I am hauling, I decided to walk and snap a quick one the other day right before the accident I was involved in. So I am including that as well. And after writing this entry, I realized why I like doing this so much. Typing is just so much easier to do than talking :P. This weird sporadic rant over the loss of vowels would never have happened in front of a camera. So maybe I will keep the text entries in for a little longer.

Also, quick addition, I have managed to obtain an 'Ingress' invitation code (Thanks Aikar) so now I will be able to collect lots of 'XM' while traveling down the road, in hopes I come across a portal or two during my travels.

VLog Ep2 - Ingress and Things

Weekly Video Podcast. Week 1

I will try to get one of these out every Tuesday if able. Enjoy :).

A long day... Then.. mountains!

I did not get to write last night as I wound up in a pretty tough day. The day started off well enough. I arrived at my customer on time and unloaded pretty quickly. I sent in my empty message and waited for the new load to be sent. Lucky me the next load delivered from the customer I was sitting at. Very easy to keep appointments that day. With only two hours of drive time down from the drive to the customer that morning, it seemed like an ample oppurtunity to make good miles fast. That is where the good things for that day.

After I pulled into the loading bay, I staged my trailer for the load. Simple enoigh, just five peices of dunnage spread over a 40 - foot area of the trailer. I was told I would be getting 26 prices of steel. My appointment was for 8 AM, but since I was already there, they went ahead and accepted me at 7 30. I wwas loaded with three prices of steel in the first 10 minutes, I was excited to have the chance to be able move pretty quickly. Then, for no known reason, it all stopped. I watched truck after truck continue to get loaded and unloaded as I sat there until 8 45 rolled around.

At 8 45 every worker left. First break I guess. One other truck and myself waited there for approximately half an hour. At this time, I had already been here just get loaded for a little under 2 hours. I knew I still needed quite a bit more steel, and harping of the load still needed to be done.at 9 30, when I became the only truck in the building, loading continued. By 10, all of the prices I was told I would be getting, were on my truck. I threw my straps over the load, ensured they were in the proper position, and was beginning to tighten them when one of the loaders approached me.

I was informed that two of the bundles of steel were the wrong number and needed to be changed out. They were relatively small bundles and only required me to take off two of the six straps I had used. Once I did that, I tightened down Tue other four then threw the last two again once the new bundles were placed. I quickly tightened those down, and I hustled to my truck to go stage in the tarping area. I made it about as far as placeing my key into the ignition as I was appraoched, yet again, by the loader.

So, one of the bigger pieces, placed on my truck nearly 5 hours ago, had also been mistkenly placed, and needed to be switched put with another piece of steel  this one, however, required me to take off ALL my straps, and then wait as they took four other pieces of steel to work their way to the problem area. After all of this was done, I restrapped the load, ran my truck outside and tarped it. My part was completed very quickly, buy with little enjoyment as my day had been eaten away by operators who seemed to have problems doing their job.

My load delivers on the morning of the 20 th. I drove for a little while, then called it an early night somewhere in Missouri. I couldn't tell you where if you showed my a map. I know it was off of US Highway 412, and that's all I know.

Today has been much better. Beautiful driving weather and made it all the way through Tennessee. Drove through some amazing mountains while doing so. The scenery was very nice. The temperature at the time made some awesome, window down, driving weather.

Now I have managed to stop on just the other side of the border in North Carolina. A lonely mountainside Pilot. It was a good ride today, getting me in under 5 hours of my destination tomorrow morning, which I will easily make.

I have finished the second and third installments of the 'Wool' series of books. Very good reads, I will have to say again to anyone looking for a new read to start.

Hopefully, sometime soon, this will grab at least one persons attention and help me get rid of the feeling that I am talking to myself.

Tomorrow will hopefull be a nice smooth day, being able to be told in a single entry. 

I hope everyone is enjoying the read, all of the no one that is reading it.

Met up with Dad

Manage to meet up with my dad in Matthews Missouri today. Its provably going to be a rarity as pur companies do not frequent the same areas very often. However the timing turned out just right that we got to hang put, share some stories, watch a couple of movies and share a nice meal. It was a good time, and really all I have to post for today.

The only thing I can add really is I drove from Illinois to Matthews Missouri, which was just a quick little 3 hour drive. Had to split log to make it, messing with my time schedule, but the oppurtunity came up. It was hard to turn the chance at something that may not happen very often. I will have more updates hopefully tomorrow, as I have to deliver the load I have in the morning. So an early start to what will probably be a long day.

From Napoleon OH to Farina

Decided to take a mid day 10 hour break to flip my drove schedule. Thought I might give the night driving a bit of a try.

I thought it would be a cool shot to have the same photo I had before but with the parking lot a little bit more full.

Its Saturday, about to turn Sunday for this drive. My current load does not deliver until early Sunday morning. So I will probably take it a little bit slow. As I only have about 600 miles to go in two days. No need to push it if there is no promise of another load. Which there is not. The customer does not even open until Monday. So hoping for otherwise would be just plain silly.

It is time to throw on the ol' XM and carry on down the road. I will add to this post as the trip progresses before publishing. I do not know if that is going to be the way I keep doing these posts. Until I figure out and trust other methods , I feel like it is the best way to add things that happen throughout the day. To The Road!

Stopped at a rest area in Munice IN.

 Which reminded me (don't ask me why it did) but I read a book yesterday. Titled , Wool. If you are a fan of the post apocalyptic, then it is a must read. It was shorter than I would have liked, but luckily there are many additions to the series and I have personally already started book 2. Very dark stuff, and very enjoyable. Must continue driving, just throwing out a check up.

Decided to stop for the day. In Farina... I'm pretty sure its in Illinois, but I could be wrong. I lose track of where I am sometimes. Anyways, I have about 3 and a half more hours of travel in front of me. Bar the worst, reaching the customer by 6 AM tomorrow morning should be cake. Until then.

Introduction/ An app to track travels

So I am a professional truck driver. I do not plan on doing it forever, and have only recently started (at the time of this posting I have only been driving alone for  weeks :/). I have found that this will give me the unique opportunity to share my experiences in my travels with any community that decides to follow. I will probably talk about anything that comes to my mind honestly. I like to read, listen to music, and share the occasional political thought. So I will probably include some of those interests here. However, my main goal is just to document (sort of) how my daily life as a new driver goes, and then watch my self develop over time. I do this in hope of being able to look back on some things and either learn from them, or laugh at them.

I also hope to meet some new people to share thoughts with while doing this. I am married, and have a daughter, but the continuous separation leaves me feeling quite lonely, and the ability to meet some friends to stay in contact with would be nice. I hope I can manage to stay entertaining enough to pull in some readers/followers and have some people to talk to.

My first order of business is to actually find some app that keeps track of travels. I feel it would be a tool that would be undeniably crucial to maintaining a Blog such as this one. If anyone reads and knows of such an app that would be awesome, and please do share. Like I said though, I have not even as much as Google'd for such an app, so if it was as simple as doing that, feel free to ridicule me.

I do hope as time goes on that my interests come in fully and that some how, in some weird way, I actually manage to help someone with their experience of the same thing. Ultimately though, I would like to be able to reach a point where this occupation provides enough for my family and myself that I can consider going to college. More on what initially got in the way of that in a later post.

I will try to upload a picture of location I blog from, such as this one.

TA in Napoleon Oh. Empty Parking Lot

I might even get a tumblr... who knows. I feel that with out much of a following this is the equivalent of talking to ones self. I do enough of that as is. :P.

So here's to yet another new blog to fall amongst the masses. May someday it become fruitful in fun bringing.