Very, very long day. Not because of the tropical storm, rain, driving or any of that, but because of how I woke up this morning. It never left me. Even now, 15 hours later, I still feel groggy in the head. It happens. Wake up in the middle of a deep sleep and it can mess up your entire day. I'd literally rather wake up 2 hours earlier, not in deep sleep and even tho I don't get enough sleep? I feel far better than this.
I don't know where people get off saying that truck drivers have an easy life and do much of nothing. If you think getting up at 5:00 am for work and getting done with work at 8:00 pm is easy, then please tell me what kind of job you are doing that forces you to do that and what you have to do all day long?
Because I can tell you, driving near 80,000 pounds of machinery down the road for near 11 hours and everything else that this job entails? Isn't "easy" work by any stretch of the imagination. I digress and not going into all of that.
I'm just glad to be done with today, kick back in my bed in my sleeper, wind down and hopefully get some good rest and wake up feeling better tomorrow. It's only 8:17, I can't go to bed this early. Even with my head throbbing, just going to give it another hour and then hit the sack.
Oh, today's drive? Not really that much. I saw a lot of red on the radar on the weather app - that always means a heavy downpour, but I didn't experience any of that. I was getting pushed around by the wind a bit - quite a bit in a few certain areas - but I was surprised with all of these forecasts and not experiencing anything near what they were predicting. Perhaps it happened after I drove through there? Or the forecasters are way off, yet again. I didn't alter my course, I was going to go an alternate route starting in Henderson, Texas. I just had this feeling, no explaining that, just went the normal route.
Unfortunately, we are back to the manager's "old" ways of getting rid of detention pay - which our company doesn't pay for, the company we haul for does. The dispatcher was a gem, a gold coin, a rainbow with piles of gold buckets at the end. This dude, however, is too new to the company, is being hounded by his managers, but I am still perplexed at the idea of free money that goes to the company and the driver. OH, well there were 2 empty trailers sitting here when I got here. No point in wasting time, got hooked up to one, but I doubt I will be leaving too early. Set the alarm for 7:00 am, if I wake up before then and feel ok fine, otherwise, I'm "sleeping in" until 7:00 am.
As for the boating trip. It fired right up at the dock. We went down quite a ways to a point where i was able to tie off to a floating log and do some fishing from there. Tho I didn't feel like fishing, I was just enjoying being out on the water, Taylor was trying to catch something. When we wanted to move somewhere else - what happens? The engine won't start. It was a good thing I charged that battery over night.
I was sitting there after 20 minutes and looking up Allstate and my boat coverage to call someone out, it wasn't trying to start at all. I let it sit for a while, then squeezed the fuel bubble several times and after a few tries it finally fired back up - and kept running. We went back up the channel we had come down and were admiring the houses - the entire right side of the channel for as far as we went up it were lined with houses both on land and on stilts over the water. Some houses were million dollar homes - guessing of course but yea, they spent serious money on that stuff. Other homes not so much but still cool to look at.
Some of the stilt homes actually had elevators on the sides of the houses, lol. We dreamed of living off of a place like this. The thing is, tho, you are hearing boats roaring up and down that channel all day long, at least on the weekends. Still, the thought of it was very alluring. Anyway, going way up the channel, finally found a place. The engine died, but it fired right back up. That 45 minute thing where it wouldn't start, tho? Not fun.
Then, later on ,back at the dock, it died again and wouldn't start, tho I only tried a few times, I figured we could just pull it up far enough on the trailer that I could get the strap on the hand crank on it and just pull it up.
Yup, the boat is going back to the shop. They actually did get it working much better, but there is still something that needs addressing on it, what I don't know. I still think it has a fuel problem.
I'm hopeful they'll figure it out. I don't have the time or patience to pull out the flooring over top of the fuel tank - it's not a small job - and see if there's a problem there as that one dude told me a long time ago. Well I might have the time - occasionally - just not on my list of things I want to do, lol.
And with that, this one's over, for I want to go to sleep.
