Taking the plunge. My journey as an O/O.

Banks and small business owners have always had... issues with one another.

 

Shut down in Kirkersville, OH, and the Dennys has a limited menu, and limited seating in the restaurant.

As I sat down in a comfy seat, I thought about making it a diet cheat night, but then ordered low carb. It's way too early to start cheating.

 

Well, ran into a minor issue with the diet today.

Dunkin has a new peppered bacon side offering. I bought a sausage scramble bowl, black coffee, and an order of the bacon.

The bacon was sugar cured. Never heard of black pepper sugar cured bacon before.

I thought about it and decided to eat it anyway, probably a bit more carbs in a day than I should be eating at this point, but if one minor cheat causes me significant issues at this point, the diet is probably doomed to failure.

NOTE: The sugar cured black pepper bacon side order at Dunkin is tasty! Just full of carbs.

Also, I can tell I am losing weight due to the fit of my pants, however, the last scales I tried were badly off. Said I weighed 240 lbs fully clothed with keys and boots. No way in hell have I lost over 60 lbs in about two weeks.

Eventually, I will find scales that give a sane reading. I suspect I am around 270 right now, based on clothes fit.

 

So. The last few days have been annoying.

Three days ago, after driving half a day, I fueled and took lunch in Cumberland, MD. When I finished fueling, my Peoplegarbage machine told me I had no hours left. ########. I rebooted it. Then is said I had 8 hours drive time left. After driving 5 hours, that was clearly not accurate, so I wasted an hour with the Peoplenet and Crete logs people getting a bug ticket put in, and having Crete logs department fix the drive time.

Then I rolled to Hazleton, PA, taking US-220 and I-99 between I-68 and I-80. It is not a bad route, and I might use it again.

After dropping in Hazleton, I had time to run to Palmyra and grab my next load, but it would be late, and I would have to overnight in the Mechanicsburg yard. No biggie.

I-81 had some extremely bad off-and-on rain, with low visibility at times, but i had time to get where I needed to go.

Until there was a nasty wreck right before the exit I needed for Palmyra, while I was 1.5 miles from it. Was stuck on the interstate 90 minutes and blew my 14. Went to PC and drove to the nearby TA and Pilot. No parking. Went to the terminal (can't advance a load on PC.)

The next day, I wasted an extra 70 miles round trip driving back to Palmyra to get the load.

That meant that I had to shut down about an hour early yesterday, because I-70 and I-76 are stupidly atrociously crapped up with enormous 55 MPH and 45 MPH construction zones, and I could not make it to the Indianapolis yard for a guaranteed parking spot.

So, today, I rolled, and as I was going around Indianapolis on the Southern part of the 465 loop (I-70 is shut down for through traffic in Indianapolis), there was some sort of fire event spewing enormous black gouts of smoke into the air, and they shut down 465 about 2 miles ahead of me. Lost an hour. Finally worked my way to an alternate exit and went around the mess.

Made my drop, picked an empty trailer, and pushed to my next pick.

Arrived at my next pick with 1 hour left on my drive and 14 hour clocks. Grabbed it, and during the inspection, found the LRO trailer tire was off bead.

This particular shipper is stupidly annoying and will not allow a empty, clean trailer to be dropped if the driver does not take a loaded trailer out. Therefore, I would have to drop the loaded trailer, rehook, drag the empty out, and return in the AM after the tire was replaced overnight by a road call, wasting more of my time.

The load was only 18k lbs, so I rolled it out of the lot three miles to a Wal Mart that I know allows truck parking, and called for a tire service call.

And that's where I am now.

All in all, a rather frustrating last few days.

 

I qualified for 20k, but the program ended before I could find a bank to process it.

My only debt is the truck, and my only expense is my storage unit. I am in absolutely no financial stress. I work as hard as I do because I choose to.