Going back on the truck today. Hopefully it starts up since it's been sitting in the cold for the past three days. I hope we stay out of the northeast.

Our laptop is out of commission now, but we'll get that taken care of shortly.

Had fun in Omaha and may post something about that if I get the chance but, in short, I'm glad I got to hang out with everyone and glad I got to see all the people I saw. Hopefully I can get to see Brenden & Pearl next time around.

"Best Fishes,
Steve Martin"

Last Night

was pretty awesome and definitely a lot better than I could've ever imagined.

As usual, when I come to Omaha I don't want to call people because a) we're usually not here that long and b) I always think that people don't want to see me or something.

I called Head to see what he was doing and was available so I told him I'd call him if I could do something at night. I got inspired and decided to call other people so that I would be forced to go out. I called Strachota, Bobert, Justin O'Connor, and a bunch of others and decided to meet up later.

We went to the Brother's and Kyle, Jake, and Adam were there and I talked to them for a while and talked to Trey and Lallaya (sp?) but didn't have a new joke for Trey. Though I said something dumb like, "Uh, I don't live here anymore."

Anyway, throughout the evening I got to see Matt Stamp, Bobert, Steve and Mandy Micek, Jeff Tafolla and Coster, but the best part had to be the I got to see Drew. I hadn't seen him since he moved to Berkeley with Vince a few years ago.

So tonight I'm going to the Stay Awake Ladyfinger show. And since I'm always the broke-ass I got on the guest list, but I am pretty stoked to see them after all this time. Hopefully see people I haven't seen for a while. Strochota's picking me up in a while and we're going to chill at Justin's prior since he lives near Sokol now and he's gonna show me this new wrestling game.

Got new running shoes and dress shoes today at the thrift shop. Also got an unauthorized Britney Spears biography. Should be awesome, right?

You know what I thought was weak? I think it was the Fiesta Bowl and I think it was Boise State, but the guy who scored the winning touchdown ran to his girlfriend, who's a cheerleader for same school, and proposed to her in front of everyone there and on national TV. Of course she said yes, but I just thought he took advantage of her in a vulnerable position.

I mean championship game. You score the winning run. She's a cheerleader. She's all elated and into the moment and you ask her something like that.

In a country that prides itself on racial diversity and "all men are created equal" and nothing is based on race, sex, color, or creed, I find it ironic that race, sex, color, and creed are of the utmost importance pertaining to any newsworthy event. A lot of things from getting hired on at a company to running a political campaign has a lot to do with image.

An image of a suit, being clean cut, professionalism, and, basically, spewing out pre-written speeches that tell the people what they want to hear. It's funny that Jesse Ventura got a lot of crap for being a professional wrestler. It was hard for people to focus on anything other than that and even though he was honest and did what he promised to do, it was hard for people to see past that. But hasn't the political campaigns, as well as job interviews, been like a wrestling event? Wrestlers do interviews and it's all crowd pleasing. They know the way they want the story to go and the way they want the crowd to react and that's what they say.

And what's funny is that people eat this up. They know it's all a front, but they eat it up and it works. John Edwards has it right when he says that politicians now are too afraid to do what they actually believe in and care more for just doing what people want them to do. It's what I don't get with resumes and job interviews. They have all these books and people to tell you how to portray yourself at an interview and what to say and all that fucking crap and you get hired based on your ability to say the right things. I think that's pretty pointless. I would rather go out in a casual environment like to dinner or for drinks and talk to the person honestly, openly, and see and hire them based on who they actually are as a person. There wouldn't be much need for experience or credentials, but if I saw what they are capable of doing and finding the true person behind them, they'd be hired.

It would not have to even do with their past, which seems to be a main attack point for not only job interviews but in any political campaign. It shouldn't have anything to do with what someone did years ago but what they are doing now. For instance, there was a lot of focus on the fact that George Bush was an alcoholic-cokehead. As much as I disagree with, pretty much, anything he does now in office, his alcohol/cocaine past doesn't even occur to me. It never once told me of who he is as a person now and what he is capable of doing as a president. (Even talk about some memoirs that Barack Obama had written about when he was in college and did coke and whatever. I'm glad that he at least said he wouldn't deny that even if it hurt his political career and it shouldn't. )

That, to me, is what should determine the right person for a job. Someone honest and hard-working. Someone who is not afraid to be themselves and stand for what they believe in. Which is what I hate in the news and in the campaigns in the past and once again it's reared it's prejuidiced face again in the upcoming presidential runs.

When Al Gore ran with Joseph Lieberman in the 2000 presidential campaign, one of the things that turned me away from their's was the fact that not only was the media focusing on his being Jewish and he'd be the first Jewish vice-president, but the fact that he himself started using that as an angle. I had never heard of him prior to that election campaign, but since then, I've never seen him wearing his yamaca out in public. But everytime you saw him then, it was always with it and he looking all holier than thou and I thought that was cheap and weak. Sort of like the Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl the other year when it was the soldiers walking through the airport and getting applauded as they walked through the herds of people.

Now with the 2008 presidential campaign coming, there's all this press about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Both, in my opinion, are really great candidates for the job and that's not based on anything other than who they are and what I've seen of both of them.

They way that the media is hitting this is with race and sex. How do you tell your kids to not judge people based on prejuidiced opinions when you just turn on the television and there are people saying, "I don't know if America's ready for a black president or a female president"? Granted, the way that society is it may not happen and that's only because of the way that both blacks and women are portrayed in the media and in religions and just in the world in general.
I would say that in this day and age we should be getting past all that ignorance and ignore any statements like those and just focus on other things like issues on hand and where they would like the nation to go and how they will go about doing so. You know, the things that actually matter.

This Place Sucks

It's been a relaxing though very depressing weekend thus far. I have been trying to enjoy it but am finding it hard to due to financial burdens that seem to plague me in whatever I do. Even in a Rick Santorum-less PA depression can kick in full force. I do take the responsibility for that to a certain point as I've had a couple opportunities to dig myself out of this mess. But we are at a point that we're trying very hard to do something but it just doesn't work.

I would like to see if we're able to get compensated somehow for this downtime since it's not our fault that the truck keeps breaking down. Right now, if we had some very minimum wage job we'd be making way more than here and it's not too far from us doing so.

I keep trying to keep myself up but am struggling to do so. Everytime I get myself motivated, the truck breaks down and then we get a hundred dollar paycheck and bills to pay and all that shit. For my part of the bills, I need $200 a week to pay the current utilities and storage and food for us and we're barely even making that. Sometimes even having to get advances. It's very depressing. I couldn't even imagine if we had regular rent and a car payment to make how we'd get by.

In the past how many months, though, I've been trying to get ahead with my personal stuff and what to do when we quit trucking. We really just need to save enough to get an apartment and a car for Jeanne and extra for the bills and get a regular job. I'm used to working two or three jobs at a time, so it's no big deal.

Just ordered some Chinese food and as a result, we're waiting in the driver's lounge here. If we had more money, we'd opt to stay at the motel down the street while our truck sits out here all weekend. The only good think thus far about being stuck out here is that I just checked the route we would've taken for the run we had to give up due to this truck thing and it's all iced bridges and overpasses and all that jazz that we would rather not deal with. Especially since it would've been overnight driving.

I'm pretty sick of the weather and can't wait until winter's over. It can't just be a boring couple of weeks for a while it's always some new hazardous storm coming in. Not to mention that it just makes it harder because not only do you have to deal with driving in hazardous conditions, but places don't get plowed or get plowed really bad so nothing's really better. Like if we go to the shipper to get loaded, the place is sort of plowed except the snowdrifts are taking so much space you don't have much room to pull up and that messes you up for trying to back up. Also a lot of places, including truck stops and terminals, just don't plow at all. This creates a problem with getting stuck and sliding around. Granted it's always full of trucks and stuff but you can do a little more than not doing anything at all.

I'm also tired of truck stops having frozen window washer fluid. This is dumb because in snowy weather your windows get a lot dirtier than normal, which is the obvious thing. But what's stupider is that they make fluid that doesn't freeze unless it's negative twenty-five degrees or lower creating a freeze-less washer fluid. It's not a new invention and all the places that don't have it there like in Utah, Montana, Oregon, Missouri, Kansas...are all places that get below freezing temperatures and, a lot of times, it snows in those places.

One more week until Omaha. Less than a week, actually.

I just finished reading Metamorphosis and it was only sixty pages. The bulk of the book is an analysis of it and critical analysis of it. I don't feel like getting that into this book right now but I'm also out of anything to read. Ack!

"...what goes around comes back around."

I was just thinking about this one time I was walking to Cubby's from Ted & Wally's. Right by the antique shop there was this big, monster truck type truck that stopped to let me cross. He was blasting Superchunk's "Hyper Enough." I thought that was really weird as I was listening to that song a lot at the time and it's certainly not a radio hit or anything of the sort.

So what weekend wouldn't be complete without our truck breaking down in some way and being in the shop. At least it was noticed before we left the terminal, but, still, we're not in the greatest financial situation at the moment and we were already out a week moving our stuff back to Omaha, meaning that we'll not have a paycheck this next week and the next week will be small since we only had one run. A long run, but I was hoping to get this other one in to get a little better check. This month has been very slow and I would appreciate it more if we didn't have the debt so we could enjoy ourselves guilt-free. As opposed to spending money that should be going to bills, but I don't want to just sit around all weekend doing nothing here.

This type of deal makes me wish we were stuck in Omaha, the Edwardsville terminal, or the Denver one. The Denver one only because there's a shopping complex next to it with everything you could possibly need.

Currently listening to the stuff you're dealt listening to at terminals and trucks stops: highly fabricated stories from truckers about how they don't take shit from anyone and you best be ready throw down. I don't what it is that they always have to prove themselves. No one leaves the place talking about how cool that guy in there was because he told the security guard to "fuck off." Or you deal with the ones who find out that Jeanne and I drive together and they ask how we can put up with each other. And it's always how I can deal with having her around. It always kind of takes me aback for a second and I just say something dumb. It wouldn't matter anyway as nothing can satisfy them. No matter how well you tell them it's going, it's always, "Just wait. Sooner or later, you'll start getting to each other."

"But it's been 12 years."

"Just wait till 13."

Pretty much anything you say about anything it's the wrong answer and they tell you why and usually make up some unbelievable story. A lot talk about women like they get chicks on the road left and right and they're always like the dude-type guys that you've gone to bars or clubs with that always are like, "I'm gonna get some pussy tonight," or they just talk about how ugly some girls are and all this stuff and they themselves I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.

The one good thing that we've noticed about our truck breaking down that's been good is that we're always missing bad weather. A blessing in disguise I guess.
There's this commercial on now with a song I know really well but can't lay my finger down on it. It's the one that goes, "Dun, dun, dun, dun."

Watched the River Niger last night. Super good. James Earl Jones is awesome in it. Actually, everyone was. The only part I thought was dumb was when the dope fiend was trying to get some dope and sweating and was in pretty bad shape and then, shakily, narced the guy who killed the other guy's brother, he gave him the dope and he took a couple of snorts of it and he calmed down. At first I thought it was cocaine and thought it was dumb because no one fiends that bad for coke. I mean, when you have it, you'll do it all and fiendishly snort all night long until it's gone, no matter how much you have. But when it's gone, you're just like, "Oh, shit. I wish I had more." But you don't get violent or shaky or anything like that. But through my powers of deduction, I figured out, by clues later in the film, that it was heroin.

War does the music in the film, too.

Everytime I read High Fidelity, I want to do the birthday thing he does. The renting Robocop 2, Naked Gun 2 1/2, and Terminator 2, and get some beer and just hang out all day and watch it.

I want to order Chinese tonight.

I started writing an essay and a storyline for a screenplay. I hope I get some time to work on them.

I was thinking of getting a mic for my minidisc player to record these conversations at the terminals. Maybe even join in on some to see how far I can go with them.

Justin Timberlake is dumb. Jeanne likes his music, though I can't get myself to find anything musically brilliant about him or his dumbass music. It's like diary entries that 15 year olds write and he's still writing about Brittney. Jeanne says that he really loves her and they should get back together and he really misses her. I just think about anything he could be missing. Like the endless, vacuous conversations. "Remember the time I put on your pajama pants and thought they were mine?"

Oogah!

Well, just checked the truck for any preplans they may have sent and, so far, none. I took this as a sign that it'll be okay and ordered us some dinner. I really shouldn't be spending money, but I'm lazy and tired, for the moment, of the food in the truck. I could've even gone the cheaper route on go down the street to get some food, but it's not that far a walk, but there's no walkway and it's a very busy highway with trucks always going by.

It also doubles as a street with houses and residents in them and a forty-five mph speed limit which I never drive as it seems way too fast to drive in a, techinically, residential neighborhood. I could live my life without the guilt of killing a kid going for the mail (which, funnily enough, is right along the street where cars, or trucks, could get you. Making mail getting a sort of life or death game that these people apparently are willing to deal with).

It's super cold here and I think it's supposed to snow lots tomorrow. I hope not, or at least not until the afternoon, giving us a chance to deliver this load and get another one and get the fuck out of dodge.

I've the dream run in my head being a pick-up from the Mott's/Cadbury DC here and deliver to the Wal-Mart DC in Spring Valley, IL, since I've been to both and it's a good run and, chances are, we'll probably not get a run during the weekend, leaving the next week to be around the midwest since we need to be in Omaha by Friday. Of course it will probably be the opposite and it'll snow like crazy and we'll get routed through Oklahoma or Texas with all that ice. It'd be just our luck to finally get routed to Texas and it be all shitty.

My cell phone has been doing this weird thing where it shuts off automatically. Unless it was always supposed to do that but has been malfunctioned and now it's working. And it's a flippy type phone so it's not as if I'm accidentally hitting the power button.

We got a new AC convertor for the truck. I don't understand these things. You plug them into an outlet to convert the power from the outlet in the truck to power your regular appliances or electronic devices. The plug-in is the normal cigarette lighter plug-in, but the device itself is always this huge thing that can barely support the weight of the plug. And with the way the truck shakes on every bump on the road, it falls out or gets jutted out of place so as not to supply power. I guess they figure you'd use it while the truck is just idling.

I've been having lots of dreams about family and friends since we've been truck driving. It sucks. I miss everyone a lot. I can't wait to get our debt paid off.

I'm outs.

PS: I ordered wings.

Jonestown, PA

Sitting in the terminal. Read the paper and inspired a bunch to write about in me notebook.

Sitting nervously because we're at the terminal and have a delivery tomorrow morning and this is where team-driving becomes a hassle. We got a shower and laundry in, but now we have to just sit back and see if there's some run they need immediate help on and send us on it. If we were solo, we could just sit and relax knowing that either of us would be out of hours soon and could just deliver the load tomorrow and get another one then, hence, you could get on with your evening and get dinner and watch a movie or go somewhere knowing that you're not, basically, on-call.

For the time being, I'm re-reading, for the fourth time, High Fidelity. Always a great read, especially when you don't want to think too much. The only other book I currently have is Kafka's Metamorphosis, but I started reading and just wasn't in the mood at the time.

Next Friday we're set to head back to Omaha for Uncle Tom's (seriously) 80th birthday party. I like knowing that we'll be in Omaha shortly and I like the fact that we'll have two fun days of not driving. Also, I have a lot of minidisc recording to do.

Boo-ya!

Still in Omaha. We woke up at six thirty this morning and called a cab to go to the palatial Omaha Greyhound station for a 9am departure. After the $40 cab ride we got our tickets to Denver and waited. And waited. Only to be told four and half hours later that the bus was full and we'd have to come back for the 8:45pm bus, which is all right for me because I'd like nothing more than not doing nothing on a Sunday. I just wished I hadn't had to wake up so goddamn early and waste $40. We could've gone out for breakfast or something.

Speaking of that, on the way to the Greyhound, we passed Leavenworth Cafe and I thought I saw Drew there with a table of four. I used to go to there with Drew every Monday morning for their early bird special with Dilley. This is the thing I hate about coming to Omaha; I just get so homesick and it just makes it harder to go back to trucking.

It's not so much the missing Omaha and the people here, though both are really great. It's the fact that we're stuck in a situation that's just been really depressing recently and it's making me miss having some routines in my life like having an end to the day and looking forward to doing something after work. Like no matter how bad work goes, you have an end of the day.

It has, however, made me appreciate the simple things in life that I had and that I shouldn't be wasting my time like I used to. I need to prioritize (sp) my life and start moving forward. I've realized this before, but I've had all these debts and unfortunate events go on, but I've still had some opportunities in between all that to do something and just kept saying that I'm in debt and have all these problems, but I'll get out of it someday and just kept being semi-complacent. Now I haven't even the time to do the little things I could to get moving.

Well, I'm working at it. I think a lot has to do with the weather. I can't wait till winter is over.

Anyway, today worked out fine since there's a "Monk" marathon on today. I should be catching up on some sleep but, oh well.

I get like this before I go back to work because I know that I'll have to head to Denver or be sent the usual, miserable route between Denver and Seattle. I'm actually a little excited to get back knowing that we don't have to go in that area anymore, but we still have to go to Denver to get our truck and we still have to take a Greyhound there and catching the Greyhound, out of the Omaha terminal, no less, is just as exciting as...

...while trucking through the bad areas and being depressed and stressed out and broke and all that and thinking of quitting, I always think about the horrible experiences on the Greyhound and thought that I'd rather be in that horrible situation than driving through all this shit. Then you get to the Greyhound station and want to kill yourself and everyone else.

I'm all for just going full force now so we can get some money saved up for an apartment and car and try to get a local driving job. I hope winter ends soon.

Charlie's on the Lake

Last night we had this big dinner plan that started in the early evening. We went to the grocery store and bought provisions and got back and was starting to make the salad and the sink got backed up. The disposal turned on and worked, but there is something deeper than that backing up the sink. No plumbing things here and the plumber won't be here until tonight (which yesterday was tomorrow).

So we decided to go to Charlie's on Maple where it used to be a Denny's and just less than two years ago it was a closed down Sprigs. We drove down and it's closed down which is funny because that means that in less than, or just more than, a year, it went out of business. It's one of those funny things like that restaurant space in Dundee where any business that opens there is just doomed to fail. Meanwhile every other shop around those places flourish. I don't understand that. I always have been thinking about opening a restaurant and if you're that worried about failing, open it in a big city or in a busy area because no matter what, on a busy night you'll at least get the overflow from the other more prominent restaurants.

So we ended up driving to Charlie's on the Lake out west. Super awesome. They have a huge list of martinis. So I got a regular gin martini. Bomb. I tasted a dirty martini for the first time and loved it. I don't know why I had such an aversion to those since the whole reason I love martinis is to get to the olives. It's like your reward for drinking the martini. I could just eat those all night. Anyway, almost all the other martinis had like tropical stuff or fruity stuff in it which I just couldn't get behind. We also had the luxury of a waitress that would pour our martinis to the brim and tell us we need to start sipping it because she still has more to pour in. So in essense you're getting one and a half martinis.

The only downfall about the evening meal was that I really wanted scallops and salmon but they didn't have that combo in anyway, but I did get a dish with salmon, mahi mahi, and bacon wrapped shrimp. It also didn't come with rice pilaf and steamed vegetables which I usually like to accompany seafood or steak.

After dinner, Bouchra and Mbarak came and got us and they rented a room at the Suburban Inn, which I'd like to go back to. You get the room for $40 with a CDL and they have a minimart and lounge there. I really like hanging out at hotel lounges. Especially when it's snowing, like it is. I was hoping for snowstorm so our Greyhound would be cancelled and we'd have to stay in Omaha for a couple more days.

I have just been informed of a job opportunity come April. It's either driving a dumptruck or flatbed in Omaha. All you do is go back and forth from a place to pick up cement or dirt or whatever and drive it to the work site and go back. It pays like $13-$15/hr plus full benefits and, we've been told, that we'd definitely get the job because it's Bouchra's friend's friend's work.

So we're at the mother-in-law's place just hanging out for our last day in Omaha. Tonight should be fun, though. I really would like to hang out with everybody out here, but we're usually here for so short a time we h

Omaha, NE

We've been in Omaha a lot recently, which is good, except that I don't want to leave.

Went to Boulder the other night to load up our stuff from storage and stayed at Bryan's place, which is in the old Naropa house behind the Co-op. I could've gone to the Co-op but I didn't want to bump into thirty people asking me how it's all going and stuff. I probably wouldn't have minded another time, just not that time.

Anyway, upon arriving at Bryan's, he left to go somewhere with his buddies. We hung out by ourselves. Then a friend of his came over and hung out waiting for him. After a long while, I called Bryan and over the phone worked their stuff out. He leaves.

Ten minutes later, another friend, who was there earlier, came back waiting for Bryan. Again, after a while, I called Bryan and handed the phone over and they worked it all out. He leaves.

Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. As I approach the door, I see through the door glass that it's DJ, a friend of theirs that I knew from before we moved. He used to live across the street from our old apartment complex and he always hung out with them guys. Based on that knowledge, of course I let him in. Little did we know that since then he's turned into violent outrage son of a bitch.

So he hung out and it all seemed normal and after a while I let him use the phone because he's talking about moving out of Boulder because everyone there sucks. We later found out that he's been trying (or saying) that he's leaving Boulder for the past year. Anyway, I left and started doing something during which time, I didn't see but was told later, he started getting angry at the person on the other end of the phone and swearing and throwing my phone around.

There's a knock at the door and it opens and Jared (little Jared) walks in and surprised the shit out of each other. We were the last people that he expected to see being that we haven't seen him since we left and didn't tell anyone aside from Bryan that we were in town.

Bryan then came back home and we were hanging in the kitchen and Bryan was whispering that he wants DJ to leave. Jared says, "Fuck. It's your place. Tell him to go."

I go to the bathroom. Bryan says, "DJ, would you please leave."

DJ says, "You got a fucking problem?!"

Words are exchanged and I use the bathroom. I come back out to DJ on the floor, mouth bleeding, tooth on the floor, boots off for some reason. Bryan goes up to him pushes him towards the door and says, "Get the fuck out of here and don't ever come back," and then throws his boots outside and helps DJ out.

I'm about to ask what happened and the door glass gets shattered and DJ yells something about calling the cops. This poses a problem due to unmentionable reasons, so Bryan loads his bag and we get our stuff and head to Jared's place a block away. It's funny that everyone used to live the northern area of Boulder not too far away but within a block of each other. We moved out and they all move out of their places and ended moving a block away from each other by Pearl Street.

So what happened while I was in the bathroom was that DJ ran towards Bryan to hit him and Jared just punched towards DJ, instinctively, and punched his mouth and broke his tooth. Jared had a gash on his knuckles and I told him he should clean it because Rollins did that once and his arm got septic because the guy's plaque entered his bloodstream.

So we go Jared's place and his brother and brother's girlfriend are there. We tell what's happened and it's then that we start getting informed about DJ's falling apart over the past months which included attacking Jared's brother with a knife amongst other things. Bryan goes back to his place because his neighbor freaked out by what all happened and may have called the cops so he went to let her know and calm her down. Meanwhile, phone calls were being received about DJ being jumped by five guys, one of which was Jared and all this stuff going back and forth. It was like junior high or something.

We end up hanging at Jared's place for the rest of the evening and Peter came over. It was pretty awesome how the evening progressed. It was like when I used to trip on acid in high school. I would take acid and go out with someone or by myself and by the end of the evening, everyone I wanted to see or thought about ended up meeting together some way or another. By chance. Not like, you know, everyone calling each other and meeting up someplace.

So we're in Omaha now and getting our stuff into storage and need to find out about getting back to Denver. We have no money until Tuesday. We got the Uhaul and they gave us a 14' instead of a 10' due to not having any available in Denver. They gave it to us for the 10' price and we're all thinking we're awesome. We ended up spending about $170 on gas. We budgeted about $60 since we did the fuel calculator we used last time and it came out pretty exact. So we're either here until Tuesday or maybe our company could get us a Greyhound ticket. If they do that, we'll have to make sure that the hotel shuttle runs from the Greyhound during the weekend else we'll be stuck at the beautiful Denver Greyhound station.

Denver, CO - terminal

Our truck is waiting to be fixed again. We're setting up our Uhaul to move stuff from Boulder to Omaha. Hope it works out. We'll probably have just enough to do it.

Been going through a lot of emotional stuff recently. I've been missing my family and friends and just having a normal life. I don't mind the trucking around, but I wish that we could stop for the night and just relax and sleep. I don't like having to have to drive around all the time and try to sleep while the other is driving through bad weather between midnight and four in the morning.

Talked to our driver/manager today and it seems to be all cool now. More on that later, maybe.

Be back. Gonna get another cup of bad coffee.

One bad thing with trucking is the endless cups of bad coffee you're left to deal with. Once in a while you'll get a good one, but you'd think that they'd have good, strong coffee for the drivers, being that they're driving on the road and you'd want to perk them up. But they all have this uber week, dirty water that they pose as coffee. Like they had a batch of good coffee twenty years ago and they keep re-using the same grounds and filter.

Some places even high highly caffienated coffee, but all it is is almost regular coffee. And it messes up your stomach.

I've been trying to put a bunch of movies on minidisc but not having good luck doing it. Our DVD player is so sensitive that the slightest bump makes it reload again and again and being on a truck the bumps are never ending. I have Angels & Demons on CD but it's a CD-ROM, which is dumb because they don't put that on the cover and that seems to me to be a very important thing to put on there. But what do I know? I'm just a cynical, over-opinionated asshole.

I needed to correct a blog I made a while ago. I mentioned reading the back cover of Angels & Demons and thought it was dumb that Dan Brown was making a prequel to Da Vinci Code on account of its success. Little did my ignorant ass know that it had already been out for a long time and Da Vinci Code is the sequel to Angels & Demons.

Dan Brown: 1/Brett: 0

It's supposed to snow here in Denver in the next couple of days. I would like to get out of here before then. They say it's not going to be as bad as the previous ones. The accumulation of those were about three feet. That means that this "not so bad one" could be two feet and be considered "not as bad." I don't like putting snow chains on.

Denver, CO

I posted something the other day but apparently it didn't. It was from Princeton, IL. We spent the weekend there and had a pick up on Monday from Chicago. We could've gone to Chicago and hung there the weekend with Jeff and Margaret, but I didn't want to spend time driving there and not finding space at a truck stop and drive back or something. Also, had to do laundry and shower and charge up laptop, minidisc player, cell phone, and DVD player since all but one adapter outlet in our truck is out. One of the evergoing series of electrical problems our truck has.

Anyway, we're in Denver and our truck is in the shop again. I don't mind as long as we're out before it snows again. The road to our terminal and the terminal itself isn't plowed. It's just huge patches of black ice that's like a foot high and craggy and slippery. It's not good being that 80,o00 lb. trucks drive through and slide around through the streets and in the terminal. It's not good and I don't see why they don't see this as a problem.

The plan is that we will look for a Uhaul and hopefully transfer to the Edwardsville, MO (or Kansas?) terminal. It'll be all good then. We're also moving our stuff to Omaha. It's more accessible than Boulder.

I really wish we didn't have this debt and could quit soon. We have May to look forward to where Jeanne can quit and I can just drive solo with her along, so we can actually stop at night and sleep and hang out and stuff.

I just found out that Kevin Smith isn't doing Fletch, Won anymore with Jason Lee and some chump who does Scrubs is doing it. Also, someone else from that show is playing Fletch. I checked it out and even though Garden State was a good movie and I think he'll be okay as Fletch, fucking no one could play Fletch as well as Jason Lee. He's still the one I see when I read the novels. And Kevin Smith...how could you go wrong with him?

I just listened to Rollins spoken word on Joe Cole's death. Fucking strong. His Stallone impression is funny as fuck. "I was pulled out by a monkey wrench and that's why half my face doesn't work." The "LA Riots" thing was funny as well, especially the computer store. The funniest shit, though, was on "Live From the Conversation Pit," and the, "This is Henry!" thing.

I wish I had something better to blog, but this is what you're getting.

Stopped in Omaha last night. I hate it. I always get homesick and miss all the family and friends and want to quit when I go there.

I need new music.

Sumner, WA

So much has gone on that I haven't blogged about, but all that in a nutshell is that we talked to a driver we met at orientation and he said I should call our orientation co-ordinator and talk to him about our situation. We did and it's all set up to switch terminals. I just have to have our current driver manager call him and set it all up.

I think this will allieve us of a lot of the headaches and stuff that's making us hate this job and be on the verge of quitting.

Think of this, 95% of our runs were in the northwest, which is all mountainous, which we're used to by now, but it's also all bad weather and busy and non-stop mountains, ice, snow, rain, wind.

So we asked to switch terminals, which was our original plan anyway. He said it's frowned upon, which makes me wonder why he said we could before. So we compromised and he put us in a comfort zone.

The first time he said he'd do it, he didn't. We asked him again and he said he did. Now 99% of our runs are in the northwest. Then every job we get going back into our comfort zone, we have to drop in Salt Lake City and get another going back. If we question it, we just get told we need to do it. It's just so ridiculous now we had to go over him to get this done.

I wonder how he'll take it? I don't care. I want to let him know why, even though he should already know.

At first he said that we'll have to run outside our comfort zone, which we knew and was why we accepted the first runs. But all of them? The only time we've been given one in our zone was to route us back for Christmas (after refusing three runs to to the west which would have got us stuck in Wyoming or something in that snowstorm, which we almost did, anyway).

I hope things work out now, because if not, we're saving up money to get an apartment and car and quitting and moving to San Antonio.