What would you do?

Last night the new guy followed me down to Gardens where we were delivering. Okay, so the new guy was to drop his trailer, run out to Mira Loma to grab a preloaded trailer and head back to Kingman.

Me, I had to wait till 9am to swap with the new guys trailer then come to the City of Industry to have a load of shoes hand loaded onto my trailer.

It would be okay if this was every once in a while. But it's every load. This company has several customers that have loaded trailers waiting for use to move them out. Not to mention the fact that we have a driver that spends the week down in the LA market loading trailers. But I'm the one that ends up sitting all day to load a trailer.

Guess it's time for another job... again. So effin tired of switching jobs. But what would you do? I got a family to support. So am I just bitching? I don't know.

Think I'm back

I've been having a real difficult time signing into this blog on my phone. It wanted me to sign in with the wrong email account and would not let me switch accounts. Well, I was just checking out YouTube and again, the phone wanted me to sign in on my gmail account but allowed me to sign in on my MSN account. So I then went bad to blogger and was able to sign in with my MSN account finally bringing my blog back to life.

Loosing you phone really blows. All the stuff you end up having to do to get up and running again. But I'm getting there.

It's nice the amount of stuff that android just backed up for me. Like the picture here was taken by the family that found my phone as I was driving out of the parking lot. Ironic

Interesting trip home

The last couple of times I've been in the local area I've been noticing KL1SF on my APRS. APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System. My radio sends out my location to a series of repeaters that broadcasts my location to other radios on the APRS system. You can also track the movement of APRS equipped units on the internet. This is a link to track my movements.

As I was saying, I had noticed KL1SF Sean recently. I first talked to Sean towards the end of winter. Sean lives up near the Grand Canyon but has family here in Lake Havasu. So we had talked while he was visiting, and all of a sudden his stations is beaconing my radio again. Which means he's close.

My radio will also show me how far away the other stations are, so once Sean was close enough I started calling out his station.

We made a quick contact but there where to many obstacles in the way to carry on a conversation, but another station replied to my call. KC7RJD Scott. Another truck driver. But the cool part was that I was in Topock. Right on the California Arizona border and Scott was in Searchlight. Driving, that's 70 miles. That's the longest direct contact I've made on 146.520 MHz. So pretty cool for me.

Then when I got into town my radio started beeping at me. My radio also allows me to text message through APRS and I got a message "hello from Scottsdale" Turns out W7SAZ George is friends with KL1SF Sean and wants me to say hi for him when I get the chance.

Guess George has been tracking Sean's movements and saw that my text enabled radio was close by so sent me the message, but that's pretty neat when you consider that we where a little over 200 miles apart.

Having fun with the Ham radio. But there's so much more equipment I want. But at least I can enjoy the equipment I have so far.

Just another rant

Haven't been on this blog in a while, been super busy. But seem to be having a bunch of time as of late.

Time would be nice if I were at home, but I'm a truck drive. So home time isn't that great.

  I took this current job because it's mostly local, making it possible to be home on the weekly basis.  but, I haven't been home in three weeks now. I'll be home tonight though. Just as soon as I get unloaded, I'll be headed 200 miles to pick up my next load. Then I'll take that load 70 miles to the house, spend Saturday at the house and roll out to Washington state Sunday morning. I'll have to be a little over 1300 miles at 0600 Tuesday morning to then assist on unloading.

This is really becoming a problem too. See, like the current load I'm on. I have twenty seven hours into this load so far. I drove 380 miles of which I'll only get paid 365 miles, being that I'm paid by the mile and not by the hour I'll make about $124 for the last 27 hours. Plus they haven't started to unload me yet. I probably won't get out of here till 1300 (1pm) which will bring me up to 30 hours into this run.

Okay. I admit. I still make more then a lot of people out there. But it could be better. I'm starting to look into a couple of other companies that have a lot more drop and hook work. That means that the customers that we service hold onto our trailers. So when you bring in a loaded trailer. You drop it and grab loaded one going somewhere else. Or more likely drop the loaded one and grab an empty one to go get another load somewhere else. A lot more efficient meaning I can actually be better paid for the hours that I work.

I enjoy being able to get home more often. But it's not very good if I can't afford to go home. So guess it's time for a change, again.

Happy Birthday America

Yesterday I got to talking to an old timer named Arvin. Really nice guy and owner of Starvin Arvins at the Loco truck stop in Fruita Colorado.

Being that I live in Lake Havasu City Arizona, Arvin got to telling me about the way things where. Not so funny thing, back around WW11 the military use to escort vehicles across the Hoover Dam. Armed Jeep in front and behind, and if you so much as put your arm out the window. You may have been shot.

See, Hoover dam is a power station and what better way to hurt America then harm our power stations. Ironic, but not getting into that right now.

Arvin also told me that the Navy had a sub in Lake Mead. Just in case in Japanese got one of those mini subs in the water. Now that's homeland security.

Also ironic. Nowadays our homeland security is gropping little kids and searching granny for the possibility of a diaper bomb. Someone show me evidence that any terrorist activity has ever been performed by the use of a diaper bomb.

Sure there have been diaper bombs, but that's a different kind of bomb. Get it. Diaper bomb?

Nowadays we search granny's and babies, but don't even stink eye the people that may actually be terrorist because of racial profiling? If we're not allowed to racial profile at a check point. Who about we get rid of the check point. Your wasting my time and money.

Happy Birthday America.

Kingman, AZ.

I actually live in Lake Havasu City, AZ. about seventy miles from Kingman. But I work out of Kingman.

I've only lived in Havasu for about three years now, so I really don't know a lot about the area. But there was some stuff I wanted to do in Kingman this weekend, so I'm held up in an old time route 66 motel.

Not because it's some historic landmark, but because it's the cheapest place I could find... come on now. I could have gone home and slept in my own bed. But at twenty-five bucks. It's probably cheaper then driving home. Think if it was my place I'd try to go the historical route to attract customers. But now. Flee bag.

Yesterday I was driving around a little, looking at Kingman. There's a lot of history here. Reminds me of Radiator Springs in the Cars movie. But you really have to look for it. Doesn't seem to be a lot of people interested in restoring history here. Think I'm going to go look for some.

Just spent a couple of hours in the historic part of Kingman. Went down to the old power house. Where they generated electricity for the area. It's now a museum. There are three nearby museums that you can access all for the price of one. Being I had other things I wanted to do, I decided to catch the museums later.

I did however discover another thing I want to do. Missed it by a month, but it's an annual fun run from Seligman to Topock... almost Williams AZ to the California line. On historic Route 66. First weekend of May? They start in Seligman on Friday night with a party and then spend the rest of the weekend on the trip that's about one hundred and fifty miles. Sounds like that could be fun.

Well, I gotta get a little nap in before my load's ready. Headed to Sacramento tonight. And picking up in Biggs. Close to grandma house. Sure hope I can be able to visit. But looks kind of tight.

What a week

Unfortunately I've come to expect the worse from my job. So today was my fault. But I got into Kingman about 0400—0430 at which time I thought about going home. Except for the fact that I had actually started about 1030 yesterday morning. Little tired.

I jumped into the sleeper and about four hours later the qualcomm started chirping at me. Preplan load assignments. One from Kingman, picking up about 2000 going to Gardena CA. the other picking up at 0800 over by Magic Mountain. I'm not going to get into the whole hours of service thing, considering I just worked an 18 hour day. But my problem was that I didn't really pay attention to the times on the runs.

Yes the first was to pick up today, but it doesn't have to deliver until before 9am Monday morning and I have to pick up that other one at 8am Monday so it's doable. But like I said earlier. I've come to expect the worse here. So I didn't give it a second thought. But I coulda been home all day today instead of trying to get the sleep to do these runs I thought had to be done in the morning.

So I got home about 9:30 this evening. That's when my wife tells me that my pay check was $60? Okay, so now I'm pissed. I refuse to live in a truck. Work weeks at a time without a day off and end up with a $60 paycheck. There had better be a good reason. But doesn't matter. Guess it's job hunting time again.