Boredom busters for OTR

You could also work on your ventriloquist act

 

Knitting.

It's portable, time flexible, and if you get good you can make a nice bundle off it.

 

CR England fired me

 

You might be able to knit a scarf and drive, but the money is in socks and patterned sweaters. Those take a little more concentration.

 

You might consider starting a blog or a youtube channel. I've noticed a lot of drivers doing that recently.

 

I think trucker youtube blogs are pretty much maxed out.

 

Trip plan, read permits, Netflix, ttr, talk to wife/kids, inspect tarp job, have a cup of coffee, hang out back with skateboard and thermos haulers and have a beer, shower, watch redwings on nhl tv, and clean cab. I seem to be less board pulling open deck than van. Getting rest from a hard days work takes over time being bored...

 

Inspect tarp job. Not on your break, you have to log line 4 on duty to inspect your tarp job!!! Omg you outlaw.​

 

When I was OTR, I would plug my guitar into my pignose amp and jam away, or facetime with the fam.

 

I did alot of model work in my time. Particularly after Faller in west germany released a line of brush tipped liquid bottle glue that is a cross between pure super glue (That was invented to close wounds FAST btw... by surgeons, as those do damage to eyes etc) and toulene orange tube glue that can alter and get you high as well as turn your cab into a sort of a bomb with fumes.

Note West Germany was a seperate nation in the cold war years until the fall of the berlin wall and the soviet union shortly after around the 1989 time period. So when I state West Germany, it is intended in those years of my early trucking that it was a seperate nation. We have a united Germany now for the most part.

Other liquid glues showed up later with something like a 20 second adhesion time and very less odor and mind alteration.

I realized after a while I could go through a mountain of kits take em all home, to be painted. There was no point in continuing as most parts have to be painted. Taimya water based paints were best. Cures top dry in 20 minutes and no fumes. Water soluable to brush.

But I digress. That was then.

I use laptop and games that require critical thinking. I once took a week fighting a all out invasion of the south korea in a 1984 era from north korea on a CD Based game of that time period in the late 90's I managed to do alot of thinking over the military problem presented with each turn while I drove. Took me about a week to complete that scenario. 1500 XM1 experimental tanks formed a V that channeled the east and west invasion routes to the rivervalley above seoul and all 1500 tanks were deliberately used as a anvil to destruct most of the NK attack on the ground. The tanks were lost but for the most part the invasion was halted. The game declared that China would use a nuclear option at the end to break a hole to seoul and destroy supply at pusan.

But it goes to show the differences between downtime in the 80's all the way to the modern technology down time until the end of our OTR work in 2001. We actually purchased on impulse the very first ever modem for a laptop slot with a wireless celluar antenna so that it will take internet off the towers at a fixed cost per certain amount of kilobyte traffic. We learned really fast downloading a cat picture cost like 5.00 in celluar billing. Much less a modern webpage with all the videos etc today. I think we paid 400 for that little card. It was a wonder in it's day. But a dinosaur already dead pending smart phone invasion that was to come a few years later.