I'm baaaaaack!!!!!!!!

Never did get around to sacrificing Phredd...some might say I should have and everything wouldn't have gone South on us there for a while.

All kidding aside, since I got that dirt bag planner out of my hair I've been running like crazy. I'm still a little gun shy (more like hypersensitive) when normal trucking crap happens, but the thick skin is slowly growing back. We're on track to be ahead on all the bills in a few weeks, and (FINALLY!!!) socking away some savings as part of the budget.

I will never understand/relate to the mindset or world view that makes someone set out to make somebody else miserable, nor would I want to. I refuse to put myself in such a place and I fervently want that kind of person to remain a mystery to me. An Ugandan proverb says that revenge is an arrow that when fired pieces the archer. A Jewish proverb says that holding a grudge is imprisoning yourself for another's crime against you. The Wisdom of the Ages says to forgive freely, not seven times but seventy times seven (which was an admonition to not keep score of offenses and always forgive).

What it also means is that you have to forgive the same offense repeatedly. We are human and can choose to forgive, but we can't forget--and we have to let go all over again. Forgiveness is the relinquishing of one's right to retribution. It is often of no benefit or consequence to the offender, but it isn't about the offender--is about the offended. Holding a grudge imprisons one to bitterness and hatred, chaining one to an event of injustice, while the offender continues living his or her life. This can boil over into a rage that feeds upon itself and is never satisfied no matter how much it is vented. In some cases this is how murder is birthed, meditated, planned, and committed.

The Good Lord knew what He was doing when He lay claim to all rights to vengeance. As far as I'm concerned only He is qualified to wield a sword of justice. And thanks be to Him that His mercies are made new every morning, and that this mercy tempers His justice, or I would have been a pile of ashes long ago. He made a way for anyone to live by His mercy instead of falling into the hands of His justice, and it all started in this world with a baby in a feeding trough in a stable behind a roadside inn who was visited by foreign magi and local shepherds and whose arrival was announced by a choir of celestial beings and whose very birth had been prophesied thousands of years prior.

It's this beginning we observe today, the birth of someone so influential He became the center of our measure of history.

I hope and pray you each had a wonderful day today, and to those of you out here with me following that long white line, may your road home be swift and smooth. Even those of you who don't like me. If we were all the same, things would get mighty boring awful quick.

May you all find whatever it is you're looking for in the coming year, even (especially!) if what you're looking for is a worthy goal to strive for.

Most of all, be safe out there and keep on truckin.' We may be some of us outsiders, but we are the reason this great nation is alive.

Peace on you!

 

(Frantically hiding Playboy magazine) Huh? Whazza--Oh, er, um... Yeah, sure, you bet. Send money.

(PREVIOUS POST WAS FROM THE HEART, THIS POST WAS MY TELEVANGELIST IMPERSONATION. I have a low opinion of most of those guys... Almost as bad as an Amway goon)

 

Oookay, I'm getting a little random and weird, even for me.

Time to hit the rack. G'nite!

 

You are humongously weird, He Hoo Must Not Be Named Guy.

580 miles to Hermiston OR by tomorrow. Stopped in Ogden for breakfast and fuel, and to give the sun time to burn off the fog. Gonna see if I can get there tonight but not rushing--heavy heavy load (79,993 gross with full tanks) so the uphills will slow me (actually so will the downgrades).

Hot Chick is eager to see the I-84 scenery going into OR; I've told her it's pretty spectacular depending on the time of year.

The Blue Wonder is gonna be due for a service soon. I reckon they might route me on up into Pacific to the Home Terminal. Would be nice to see the place.

Hot Chick's medical symptoms have abated, thank goodness. We're due home in late January to hole up in a hotel and do our taxes, so she's made an appointment to see the doctor. I think she's trying to get out of helping. She doesn't like math as much as I do.

(Go ahead, say it--"NEERRRRRRDDD!!!" You know you want to)

 

Heavy fog and pitch black night, shut down 125 mi short. Still several hours ahead of schedule.

 

Ack, ugh, woke up 0200 feeling very nauseous. Gonna have to talk to doctor about this; has happened 3X in last month. 1X is too many.