On The Road Again

Back on the road after some hometime. The past few days I spent at home with The family where we celebrated a couple of birthdays and had some fun. We went out to dinner, saw Pirates and played a lot of Halo. My son has this fixation on getting through Halo 2 on the ultra uber hard "legendary" level but, discovered it is impossible to do it alone so I was drafted to be his co-combatant. HARD AS HECK, but we had a lot of fun dying constantly. We conjured up this strategy of one of us going in to a battle and killing as many of the baddies as we could while the other would hang back in a safe area so when the first one died he would regenerate back at the safe point next to the other and not all the way back at the last check point. We switched off being the lead and actually made it pretty far into the game. Unfortunately hometime ran out and we weren't able to finish the whole game this time, but have something to look forward to next time I come home.

The coolest thing about this hometime, even though we had to celebrate a little late, was the gift my wife got me for my birthday. I got a USB antenna/broadband card so I can go on the internet from virtually anywhere, anytime. Before I was limited to buying WiFi access and the availability was hit and miss. One of those situations where it's never around when you need it. We added up how much I was spending buying WiFi at $3.99 to $4.99 for 24 hours, and then only using two or three hours. I almost never got to use the remaining time because I would end up running out of hours before I could get to another truck stop that used the same service. We turned off the internet on my phone and a couple of other things and it turned out to be about the same amount to buy the antenna and pay the monthly fee. The bonus is, I have internet when and where I need it, not just at truck stops. Isn't technology grand?

Getting back to life on the road is always a little tough after hometime and today was particularly rough. It all started a couple of days ago when my dispatcher called me at home and asked me if I was ready to go. Ready to go? I just got home! The load I was on last week didn't even deliver until the day after I was scheduled to be home, so by the time I actually got home I was two days into my hometime. So my return date should move back two days also. Well, my dispatcher is new and I guess she didn't notice this and she put me on a load going to New York. I told her I still had three days of hometime coming and I planned on taking every minute of it. So imagine my surprise this morning when I get in my truck and there is that same load, still there, glaring back at me. Now almost impossible to deliver on time. To make matters worse, this load has been sitting in our Long Beach drop yard for four days but, because no one ever took me off of it, the computer system that matches available trucks with loads didn't know it was still there. But wait. It gets better. The trailer this load is in had a bad tire that had to be repaired! Five hours in a truck stop waiting for my turn in the service bay and now we're into the ain't gonna happen end of the spectrum. I can only hope they can find a team that can take this thing off me or there is no hope of it getting there on time. Only time will tell.....