Morning after Christmas.
Like, woke up at 5am stuff. 
No particular good reason for it, excepting I had to go unload the truck.
Well, I fell back asleep and here I sit, lol, 45 minutes late and will probably be an hour and a half late.

It's bitterly cold out there and the truck is a piece of ice, basically. I went out, turned it on, put on the defrost on high, set it at it's hottest setting and figured at least 20 minutes before that's going to deal with the ice on the windshield.

I wasn't particularly liking the ice crystals on the ground, either.  It's 27 degrees outside, it never did snow that I can tell.  But I have to go stand out in this nonsense for an hour and a half or more and the only thing I can say is it's a darn good thing I brought all this heavy winter gear with me.  I've got a jacket from Ferguson - yes it's mine, they bought it for me and said I could keep it - but the one I picked out is extra heavy duty.  It will keep you warm at zero degree temps.  But I can't really wear that thing under the fireproof jumpsuit so I'm switching to thermal shirt and a sweatshirt and see if that works.

And more info from home, the place is wicked sick.  I'm not even all that interested in going back there right now.  It's 2 days back anyway tho, perhaps that stuff will pass by then.  Whatever the case, it would be nice simply because of that to get home and turn around and go back out somewhere.

Brownsville would be nice.  I know I always say that, but it's just a good deal. 

Ugh. I'm looking at the truck from my hotel room window - the ABS light is on.  Actually wouldn't care if that truck totally broke down after this delivery and I was stuck somewhere for days and days.  See, with a truck approaching 700k miles, that's always a possibility.  Everything has been running on the engine for all those hours and that stuff doesn't last forever.  Water pumps, alternators, turbo chargers, fuel injectors, fuel pumps, etc etc etc. 

Very likely this truck will have continuing problems with all the miles on it.  And it doesn't have an APU - auxiliary power unit - meaning no other source for power and AC/heat when parked, so the truck would have been running pretty much 24 hours a day when the team that was in it before me was using it. 

Hotel breakfast fare was untouchable. Not surprising in a low budget hotel brand.  The only thing I could take out of there was coffee. What I thought interesting last night was all of these hotels here including the one I'm at are veritable ghost towns.  The Holiday Inn didn't have a single vehicle parked in the parking lot at 10 pm.  And yet, they wanted $130? lol good luck with that.  Hilton Hampton across the street is a much nicer hotel and was cheaper. 

Well, I guess I best get this show on the road.  The truck should at least be getting warm by now. I mean, it takes quite a while for a semi to warm up when it's this cold out side.  The only thing that can help it is to shutter the grill closed, but this truck doesn't have one of those on it.  It stop most of the air coming in from the front to cool the engine, hence the engine heats up faster.  In cold winter weather up north, you will see trucks with blanket looking things covering the entire front grill.  It's simply so the engine can generate more heat, it gets cold in those trucks lol. 

Off to the races.