What a magnificent day this has started out to be! Hit the road from Houston by five heading to OK. Not long after a Hy-Po pulls along side me and turns his lights on. I'm doing the limit or less and know I've done nothing wrong and don't have time to fool with him. So I run him off the road and carry on with my day.

Wait! Oh, no I didn't. I pulled over. He asks for my license and my "11-14-70." That gave me pause. I started to ask "what?" When it occurred to me ...

I completed my first week of on the road training and I didn't fare nearly as well as I had hoped. I struggled quiet a bit with shifting; down-shifting in particular. With time and practice I know I'd get it; but, I'm thinking about it too much. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around revving my RPMs to float gears while breaking at the same time.

I did slightly better on up-shift. All this was while floating gears. I had about made up my mind to quit trying to float and just ...

Today will begin my second day out with my trainer. Mark's a pretty good guy; calm and easy to get along with (thank God.) But I guess I did ok.

We made a pretty good day. Bedtime will take me some getting used to. Jailhouse bunk. As I went to bed, I slept with my clothes on except socks, so my feet got chilly. I discovered there's a gap between the wall and my bunk because my blanket fell onto the lower bunk. I made the mistake of drinking a big glass of tea before bed. Since I can't ...

While it's not "official" until I leave work tomorrow, I'm done with orientation training. We're finished with all paperwork and quizzes, we're passed on road tests (at least well enough for now) and backing skills. We did a lil more on our backing skills today.

I was disappointed we only got two rounds. I coulda gone a couple more. Each time was a lil better than the last for me.
"Bob" on the other hand.... who knows what's happening in his head. ...

I didn't get to update yesterday because my darling wife surprised me with a visit. So I got to spend the night with my honey. Sure was nice.

Yesterday Jay took us out for some road practice and a road test. I dunno why, but I was so dang tense it was unreal. I still hurt. Jay kept telling me to relax and breath. Overall, I think I did ok. Jay never got around to critiquing us; but did say we're still passing.

On my road test, I stalled out once at a stop sign. I didn't ...

I've been feeling a lil deflated and hadn't posted this last week. We took a road test and I blew it pretty bad. Jay said I scared him. He didn't hafta tell me cause I knew I did. I scared myself. I wasn't downshifting to corner and was cornering too fast.

He asked how long I've been out of Continental Training School and what we did there.
I told him honest, two weeks and almost all of our road training was in an automatic. To boot, almost every turn we made was from a stop, ...

Jay, our Safety trainer, gave us some words of caution on being careful how we speak to people. Today we took a field trip to the Lowe's Distribution Center. He said a guy drove by one of our drivers one day. The driver was on top of the load pulling his tarp and tossing some scrap off. The guy said, "Driver, I would sure appreciate it if you make sure this stuff gets into a trash can."
The driver replies, "Who the ###### are YOU to come over here and tell me what to do?" ...