Swift - Starting the New Year training with Swift 1/7/13 - A long read...

Thanks for the link. Definitely going to check this out tomorrow. Sounds like a good deal.

 

That's a great documentary. I got the chance to see it and it was amazing.

Congrats on the weight loss so far. You are doing great. Take it piece by piece. Best of luck!

 

I think I remember seeing Food Matters but I don't think I've checked out Forks Over Knives yet. I"ll see if I can dig it up and check it out.

 

Sitting at the Pilot in Hammond, Louisiana. It is humid, as is expected.


Before parking here at the Pilot I just washed my "new to me" truck for the first time. No sooner did I park that it started to rain. At least it is clean.
I got it pretty muddy today at a Tractor Supply chain store in Bogalusa, LA when I had to turn around behind the building. There were huge potholes filled with mud and muddy water and my truck was a mess afterwards.

My last load had a stop plus a final. I don't know if the guy at the Tractor Supply at the first stop didn't hear me but when I went to check on the unloading progress I saw that my trailer was nearly empty. I asked if the last stop and final only got the one or two pallets that remained in the trailer. He looked at once surprised and crushed. He thought his stop got all the freight and he unloaded a lot of the pallets that belonged to the second stop. I waited some more for him to reverse the process and load pallets back onto the trailer.

I'm waiting on a load that works at the moment. I keep getting preplans that just won't work for some reason. I Mac 9 and send a revised time and it comes back dropped. I send messages before the Mac 9 to see about a window. Currently they have a preplan on my that will only give me 20 minutes to get out and find parking once I pickup. My 14 is already running down to less than 3 hours so not sure how that load would work.


Running around in the states of the deep south...

I've been bouncing around the southeast here for days it seems. In and out of Louisiana, Mississippi and yesterday I touched over the state line for a pickup/live load in Arkansas. Seems like a lot of my loads lately have been either live loads or live unloads. I thought maybe it was just me until I went back over my last 10 loads. 7 out of the 10 had either a live load, a live unload or both. Guess it's not me. But I'm running pretty strong so I'm not complaining. Most of my loads lately have been 1 day loads or slightly more than a day. I don't mind them.


I like it down here. It definitely feels different and the accents are something else. I'm sure my accent is equally different to them too. I've learned a new phrase down here. The phrase is "raht chair".

When getting ready to set up for a load, I asked the security guard where I was to go. Conversation went something like this...

Me: "So I go up to the left past the yellow dumpster and I'll find the dock over there?"
Her: "Yessir, to da left raht chair".
Me: "Where?"
Her: "Raht chair".


Missing the perfect picture all day long...

It's especially interesting passing through the small country towns in this part of the country. I can't count how many times I wanted to stop my truck on the side of the road to snap what I thought would be a perfect picture of life in the deep south. As they are, they are images I will not soon forget. Colorful and overflowing with character I wish I could have gotten those pictures.

Out in the country I passed a small, white Baptist church located alone in an agricultural area. It was a beautiful church, humble and respectable. The congregation was just letting out and their cars were parked everywhere all around the church, on the side gravel lot and overflowing onto the front lawn. As the members were exiting everyone was dressed to the hilt - large, colorful hats and beautiful dresses on the women and the men were dressed sharp in their best suits. People were conversing in small groups, smiles everywhere. I wanted that picture.

Later that day I passed some kind of business with three, old black men sitting out front. They appeared, at least from the distance where I was passing, to be in their 70's. It was hot and the humidity was just hanging thick in the air. They were engaged in conversation sitting out front near the door and they were fanning themselves with what looked like newspaper. As I passed I saw a very young kitten that was playing in front of them. They were laughing and the conversation appeared to be about this kitten. The building was worn and old, paint was nearly gone and it had seen better years. But it was still functioning. Again, no where to park to get that shot but I thought about how I would approach them to ask permission to get a photo yet still keep that same atmosphere as I saw it passing it by.

A little way up this same road there was a roadside bar. There were four white people, three guys and a woman, that were sitting out front of the bar on white, plastic chairs a good distance from the entrance and closer to the street. They were laughing and engaged in conversation as well but they had a cooler pulled out next to them. Again, I thought about this scenario as I drove along regretting that I couldn't just pull over and get another perfect picture that I wanted. I was maybe thinking that, like most state laws, they were not allowed to smoke inside the bar so they brought part of the bar outside with them and pulled their chairs out near the street.

I would have loved to know the story behind these groups - what their relationship was to each other, how long they were acquainted, why they were sitting where they were and what they were discussing. All three of the scenarios would have made a perfect picture, in my mind, and each was colorful enough and full of character to tell some kind of story. Scenes like that make for some of my favorite pictures to take but they are also the most difficult to get, even when not driving a truck and figuring out where to park (or if I even have time to stop with a load). The conundrum with taking real world, real life pictures of people doing their thing, of humanity and just being human, is that you technically should ask permission before taking a photo of a stranger. But at the same time something can be lost or ruin the composition of the picture when people give their consent to be photographed and know this beforehand. In the past I have worked it both ways, both asking for permission and begging for forgiveness for taking a shot.

Either way, it was missed opportunities for some very colorful pictures that day. I've got to return to this area on my bike later on the way down to Mexico and hope I can find some pictures.

I love it down here but I hate the humidity. The weather makes me want rain just to break up the heaviness of the humid air. I enjoy being here and I say it every time I'm down here. I like that the counties are parishes. Life seems slower and ticks by the minute asking you to stay on the front porch for a while. It is different from where I was raised, almost a polar opposite, and maybe that is the attraction - that of something foreign. Its like a life fully colored in, less greys and blacks, painted with bright oils and set to dry out in the sun over time. When you get away from the Walmarts, interstates and mega-chain restaurants and stores you find where the people really live. I'm going to miss it.