Live from Plymouth, IN

It's a beautiful day outside today. Close to 70 and very sunny.These are the days I long for. It would be an absolutely perfect day but I'm sitting in an International truck dealer's garage while my truck is being worked on. No big deal and I shouldn't be here long, Lord willing and the creek don't rise. I passed through this little town about and hour ago and east of here is a Pilot truck stop where I made use of their facilities, grabbed a couple bananas and some Diet Pepsi, and headed back out on the road.

About a mile down the road the trailer valve on my dash starts blowing air out all around it. You know that sound you get when you blow up a balloon and then stretch the mouth of said balloon as you release the air? Multiply that about 10 times. Scared the crap out of me. Or would have had I not already made use of Pilot's facilities.

Anyway, I quickly realized what it was and also saw that my air gauges were dropping.Not super fast but dropping nonetheless. I pulled over, checked it all out, and after walking around to see what I could hear leaking outside the truck, came to the conclusion that it was probably the valve on the dash itself.

For those of you not intimately familiar with the workings of a tractor-trailers braking system, there are two knobs on the dash that set the brakes and allow air to flow through to the brakes. They are usually colored yellow and red. The yellow knob controls the air going to the brakes on the tractor portion, and the red knob controls the air going to the trailer portion. Unless I have lost a brake chamber and the air is backfeeding through the lines, then the red trailer knob on my dash has just given up the ghost. No big deal, just a swapping out of parts.

So what else? Made five stops in Chicago yesterday and got to the last one. They have one dock for semi's. I pull up and there's a trailer already there. Not the first time. But this trailer has no tractor on it. Meaning it's been dropped there. I walk in and check with the big cheese. Seems this trailer will be there for a few days. Now why would you do that? They know that I'm coming. I've been coming every other Monday for 8 years and another guy came every other Monday for 10 years before me. Like clockwork. So they drop a trailer in the only dock I can use. Big cheese's idea? Use the dock that the pickups use. I see that there are about 5 guys around and so I say sure, as long as I can get some help getting these things off. It's a little tight but I manage to get it in there without tearing anything up, always a good thing, and the deck of the trailer is about a foot higher than the dock. But they get to work and I'm unloaded in short order. It's on to Milwaukee, or more precisely, Waukesha, WI.

I learned last week that one customer up there moved and so I called and got directions to their new place. YUCK! One way into their lot and you have to back in off the street and then jockey around to the left, then the right to get into the dock, then the left again or else you're blocking all cars from leaving the lot. So I get it in there and get their one window off my truck. That's when I notice something. The service guy, who has been there as long as I've been going there, is calling me Mike. Again, I've seen this guy every other week for 8 years, and all that time my name has been John. He's called me John before. I've called him Brian. I've never called him Todd, or Jim, or Esther. So why am I now Mike? And you wanna know something? I didn't correct him. I got the feeling that he was pleased with himself for having "remembered" my name, and I didn't want to embarrass him in front of the other guys. So I can be Mike in Waukesha. I don't mind. My personal philosophy is if I can't remember your name, I call you Boss, or Ma'am. And why does ma'am have an apostrophe in the middle of it.

I learned something else this week. I don't like Slate Podcasts. Any of them. On one of them the sound quality stinks and on all of them they sound like a bunch of whiners. Give me the informational stuff. History, how-to, why does, that sort of thing. That's what I like. That and Meatloaf, the singer, not the dish.

My mother makes good meatloaf though. Not sure what's different about hers. Maybe when she reads this she'll comment and we'll all learn something else new for the week. Hint hint, mom.

It was a nice weekend though, other than the fact that my cluster headaches are back and I went to the ER on Saturday morning. They gave me a shot of Toradol? and put me on oxygen for about an hour and that did it. The doc also gave me some pain meds that seem to work but only if I take them before the headache gets there. So I take a couple before I go to bed at night, since the headaches only come when I'm asleep. And they work very well if you wash them down with a couple of dark beers.

And I will leave you with this thought for these tough economic times. If you want to make money, run a highway construction company in Chicago. I've been going through there for, again, you guessed it, EIGHT YEARS and the construction has not stopped yet. They finish one part and start another. I want that contract. That's almost as lucrative as a department of defense contract.

Adios.