Kiss and Tell?

 I'm not usually one to kiss and tell - but my husband kissed me and now I have his cold. Share and share alike I guess. Going to keep taking time off to rest.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Short and Sweet

Just a short post today.

I took my mom out this afternoon. Picked up the fudge I ordered from a friend through Facebook, then we picked up our Walmart orders. After fueling the car up, I swung into Dunkin's for hot coco and a donut (maybe 2). Then got us both home before it started snowing.

Now I have to go get back to laundry. Yay.

A Jump Turned into a Hop

Me last Monday: Ooh, an extra day off! I can get a jump on my blog posts!

Me last Thursday: What happened to this week? I have to do a post for Veterans Day and Monday and - oh bugger it, I'm tired.

I did have this nice post in mind for Friday, I even had a picture all picked out. But I lost track of time and it didn't get written. Maybe next year. For now, we'll just pick up here and keep on moving forward.

There are certain things in life I will always try to get a picture of if at all possible. Flowers. Pets. Deer. Moon. Husband. Mother. And as seen above, rainbows!

This particular photo is from July 15, 2019 near Shakopee, Minnesota which is just outside Minneapolis. That was in our first year of driving truck, and according to Google Photos we were coming from an Amazon center.

This particular day was one of the more interesting ones because it happened to be the day this warehouse had a strike. We decided not to cross the picket line and whichever one of us was in the sleeper bunk, I think it was me, had to call up the satellite image of Google maps for the area to see where the would be a safe place for us to get off the road and sit while we waited for the strike to end. We called our Dispatch to let them know what was going on and, well, there's not a whole lot that could have been done. We found a lot large enough for us to sit and just waited.

I'm not sure how long we waited, but the sky ended up opening. It poured buckets.

I don't remember if we decided to see if the strike had ended on our own, or if we talked to Dispatch first. But it was over by then, so we got in and got back out in time to see that amazing rainbow. In this second photo you can see better the faint double rainbow it was.

A little over a year later, coming up I65 in Kentucky, just outside Cave City there was this cool rainbow that pictures just don't do it justice because the fact that it wasn't a solid curve but a little bit wavy didn't come through very well. It was taken from the sleeper bunk by a somewhat cranky husband while the truck was still moving. In my defense, he was already awake as we were soon to be switching in just a couple exits. It's his picture posted above and to the right.

And one of the cons about driving truck locally is that I don't have someone in the sleeper bunk to take pictures when I can't just pull the truck over! This past weekend as I was coming north on I81, I was climbing the long hill after the I80 exits and even though it was noon, the angles were just right that there was a rainbow visible at the top of the hill! Given how miserable the weather was, it was a definite bright spot to driving that day. I think it was Sunday, but it could easily have been Saturday.

I can tell I had a cup of caffeinated coffee earlier today, I'm just running off at the keyboard! I've been trying to cut back on caffeine since July when the DOT doctor was giving me a hard time about my heart rate, rightfully so, but man oh man - life without caffeine is hard. Especially when your day begins at 3am. Earlier if you count the time the alarm goes off.

Okay, shutting up for now! Until next time!!

A Picture's Worth

 

I absolutely love having a camera in my cellphone. Even before the digital age, I loved taking photos even though I had to take the film to a store to have someone develop them. With the cost of film, it was a hobby I had to take care not to spend too much on since at the time funds were limited. Still. I have more than a few old photos of animals and flowers. When I took off for college after high school, I even took a bunch of pictures of the mountains around home to help ward off homesickness. It didn't work, but that's another story.

But as technology advances, I can indulge myself in snapping a photo of whatever strikes my fancy. The photo I've posted first is an older one, taken with one of my first cellphones. I'm not sure if it was the flip-phone or my first iPhone, but it was one of them. Mr. Janney and I were walking along one of the trails on Round Top Mountain during one of my family picnics and here was this old stone wall covered in forest. I just liked how it looked, and the questions it sparked that I'll never have the answers for. How old is it? Why was it built on the side of a mountain? Who built it? 

In the early days, device memory was an issue. I was always faced with the dillemma of not enough space. I usually emailed the photos to myself to save them before I deleted them from the device so I could take more pictures and repeat the process. Now though, there are different online 'clouds' we can store our digital photos. That, coupled with phones with larger memory capacities, I have a lot of photos stored. In more than one spot because for some reason I can't quite explain, I'm terrified of losing photos. I loathe deleting photos. 

I don't even like deleting work related photos because 'what if' I need to call them up for some reason. I have year old photos of Bill's of Laden that I've only begun to weed out. But the fear that management will someday ask for the bills from back then persists. Irrational, I know.

One thing I just started doing in my Google Photos is to sort pictures into albums to make finding photos for blog posts easier. Photos help break up large chunks of text, something I try to avoid anyway. In a perfect world, I'd slap in photos that actually pertain to whatever I'm writing about. But that's not always possible, which is why there are a going to be alot of flower photos put in just because they're pretty. They probably won't have captions, because for some reason that throws off my formating and then I have to spend way too much time trying to get one paragraph match the others.

It's also easier these days to get the digital photos printed in physical form. If you have a good enough printer, you can do it yourself at home. If you don't there are bunches of online places you can order them, just the ones you want instead of the entire roll of film, and they can mail them to you. Although honestly I usually have them prepared at my local CVS because I go there at least once a month to pick of meds of one kind or another.

I may pick out older photos as I do this and write a post about them, just for something to write about and post for when life is absolutely boring. A boring day may be great for truck driving since it means nobody did anything out of the ordinary stupid for a change, but it doesn't make for good blogging!

Until next time!

A Lack of Oxygen?

One of the things that happened when I began the process to become a truck driver was a sleep apnea diagnosis. Because I'd had no previous testing done, they gave me a 6 month period to get a sleep test done and implement any treatment if I was diagnosed with any sleeping disorder. I was irritated because it was based solely on my weight and not whether I had any symptoms. But it was a moot point I guess because I knew I did snore so there was a chance I had sleep apnea.

And I did. Not bad enough that the technician observing me that night had to come in and immediately connect me to a sleep machine. It was weird enough knowing that something like that could happen.

Something that I noticed shortly after I started sleeping with c-pap machine, was an uptick in my dreams. I've always been a dreamer, but I never noticed that they had dropped off over the years. Which is weird in retrospect since many of my stories are birthed in dreams. Not all, but more than a few.

I noticed not only was I having more dreams, but more vivid dreams. Now, this is fine for good dreams. It's okay for normal crazy dreams. But I don't like it when the dreams are - not so nice. What's a girl to do though? Sometimes if I'm aware I'm dreaming, I can change it to a lighter theme, but that does not happen nearly as often as I'd like it to. At least there has been less sleep paralysis dreams - man, I hated those.

I must have been somewhat aware I was dreaming this morning, Tuesday morning. I was having this weird dream that I was still in high school and missed the school bus, but it was no big deal because my Rogue was sitting in the driveway and I told my mom I was just going to drive myself to school since that's what the car was for - and then proceeded to tell her in the dream that "I dream about missing the school bus all the time and I hate that because I'm not in school anymore." Of course, I also dreamt that I was getting a class ring - and then was having an in-dream conversation about how that never happened.

I really do have that dream about missing the school bus a lot. I don't know why. Unless it has something to do with that fact that I absolutely hated riding the bus because it was a living hell every single day and wished I could have driven myself to school back in the day. No telling what my subconscious is trying to do there.

But some dreams are easier to interpret than others. Tornado dreams for example. Tornados usually represent feeling out of control, change - either positive or negative, and/or destruction. I've dreamed about tornadoes 3 times in the past 2 weeks, and since I usually feel as though I have no control in my life, I can kind of understand that - except for the 3rd one.

The first two were similar. I was watching the tornados form and approach from a distance. Then they hopped and were skirting alongside the buildings, doing damage and harm to others around me. Not the level of damage one would expect from a tornado, but still damage. And no one wanted to listen to my warnings that 'hey, there's a tornado coming.'

But the third was something truly special. In it, I was a member of a team who used supernatural powers to actually create tornados in a building and then 'released them into the wild'. The wild was an extension of the lab we were using. It would have been okay except one of the teammates decided to tie another to a tree in this outdoor lab so that they'd be killed when the tornado was released. Boy, were we pissed - but we covered it up anyway. Imagine trying to wipe down a tree to remove prints., good grief! And I have no idea who any of these people were. Since we aren't supposed to be able to dream of people and places we've never seen, I'm going to guess they were one of the zillion extras on tv shows and movies. Probably some of the plot if from one of the end of the world movies I've watched recently too.

Except for that one time I did dream about a place I'd never been before. And would have had no way of seeing it in any way, shape, or form before hand. But that's another story I don't feel like getting into.

I wonder if I should start keeping a dream journal. But damn, that sounds like a lot of work.

Please Stand By

Do they still put up the "please stand by" message on the television when they're having technical difficulties? I'm usually streaming rather than watching live TV, but even when I do, I don't think I've seen that message in a good long while. Maybe they've just gotten better with the technical stuff.

When we were kids, my siblings and I, we would get the biggest kick out of actually getting up and standing next to the television when that sign came up on the screen. What can I say, we were easily entertained and amused! We were goofy kids!

All that lead in to say that loads have been short the past week or so. When that happens, it's not unusual for one or more of us drivers to get a text message saying that we're on Stand By until an hour before our normal start time and if there isn't a call off or a new load that pops up by then, we'll be benched for the day. Since my normal start time is 3am, I don't get up to actually stand by anything! Ha! No.

Nope, this girl stays in bed and just cat naps until the deadline has passed. I have gotten a load dispatched to me after receiving the Stand By message, so it does happen. But most of the time, it doesn't and we'll get a surprise day off. We have a guaranteed minimum each week so long as we don't call off or schedule a day off.

It's nice once in a while, but when you get it more than once in the week, it's a little frustrating. Even with my four day work week, I can still average more than the guaranteed pay. It was frustrating Monday morning though mostly because I couldn't fall back asleep for more than an hour once I realized there wasn't going to be a load dispatched. I should have just gotten up, but I'm also not feeling well - so it didn't hurt my feelings that this was my second day being benched during my work week. I have a one-sided - something - going on. Soreish throat and a mild ear ache. Hoping it's just some sort of weird allergy because it kind of comes and goes throughout the day. Although, it's been doing that for about a week or so; for example, I felt fine yesterday.

At least I was able to get a jump start on the blog posts this week.

Scribbles and Scrawls

So when I can't be on the laptop, or rather when I chose to just let Mr. Janney play his games out of the goodness of my heart, I'll write by hand in a notebook from wherever I left off. And do you know what would be GREAT when it comes time to transcribe into Word??? If I could read my own handwriting!

I used to have nice penmanship, but five years working in a cold meat processing factory has left its mark. That's ok though, because the notebook is just a guide anyway and things tend to morph as I type. You're just gonna have to take my word on it that I used to be able to scribble nicely, because I'm too tired at the moment to go looking for an older example. Mr. Janney has been running me ragged the past few hours trying to fix some technical glitch with his RC car. His hobbies always seem to occupy my time because I'm the more computer literate of the two.

Such is life.

Posts About Nothing

 So, Robin, what do you plan to write about now that you're going to try blogging again? Any specific topics? What are your grand plans there?

Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zip.

That's one area I'm not going to put pressure on myself about. I'm just gonna write about the mood of the day. Banal inanities if I have to. I looked that up to make sure I had the definitions correct for banal and inanities, and yep - it translates to "boring nonsense". Maybe it'll bring amusement to someone somewhere.

So in my last post I mentioned the wash machine was singing its song. And I figured now would be as good a time as any to tell the story of how I'm actually glad to be hearing that little ditty.

At the beginning of August, we had an out of state family wedding to go to. Due to reasons I won't go into here, after some scheduling rearrangements, Mom was going to be riding up with Mr. Janney and I. She was going to be remaining up there to spend a few weeks with her sister afterward, and when the remodeling at her home was done I'd be returning to bring her back.

Fast forward to that day. It was going to be a day trip. I was going to go up early enough to spend the afternoon with whatever of my NY family was home, have dinner with them and then come home. Mr. Janney hadn't come with me because it was one of his work days; sadly we don't have days off together right now. And so, because this trip was going to change my weekly routine, he decided to be nice and do some laundry.

Imagine my frustration when he called in the middle of dinner asking for help because the washing machine wasn't working properly! He tried describing what it was doing, not spinning the way it should - just kind of jerking back and forth. It wasn't throwing up the code for an unbalanced load, and he'd tried moving things around anyway. He turned on the video portion of the call to show me what it was doing and it was definitely doing a new move.

Keep in mind, I'm roughly 2.5-3 hours away from home. There's only so much I can do remotely, especially since the app for diagnosis is on my phone. I told him to just leave things the way they were and I'd look into when I got home or the next day.

Even when I used my app. there were still no codes. In fact, the one it gave me when I ran the diagnostic said there was nothing wrong. Well, quite clearly there is. It's not cycling at all, just doing a violent wobble. I tried called the 800 number and the call kept dropping. I managed to have an online text chat with a representative and they finally said, 'yeah, we can't do anything more this way. we'll send someone out.'

In the mean time, we were doing our laundry up to his parents. Well, I say 'we' but it was actually Mr. Janney who took the laundry up on his days off and washed them. He even took care of the drying when he brought the wet clothes back home so I could sleep for work. Except for that one time when he was helping his dad and it was his mom who finished washing them. I don't know if I've ever said a proper thank you to her, so Mom Janney here's a THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for letting us borrow your washing machine.

The technician came and did a diagnostic on our machine on one of my days off while Mr. Janney was working. I can't help but wonder how the conversation would have went had the Man of the House been home. The Tech told me that it was the rear bearings and would cost almost as much as a new machine for them to replace them because it would take 2 of them to change them over the course of 4 hours. And the same if we just ordered the parts and changed them ourselves.

I'm not sure where they would be ordering their parts from. but I got mine off Ebay for about $40. I'm not sure how long it took Justin to change them, but he took the machine out to a friend's place where there would be more room so it was a bit of a process. It was an interesting process to be sure. He managed to get it out of the house on his own, and a neighbor helped him to get it from the steps and onto the back of the truck. I'm still gimpy but I managed to help him get it back in. And out again a second time, but I'm betting ahead of myself.

Needless to say, the diagnosis was incorrect. The machine still didn't work and was in fact still doing its violent shimmy, Mr. Janney visited a couple different places in town, asking if they worked on front load smart washers. The one place told him that they didn't even touch the newer machines at all. The second place said they worked on them, but there was no guarantee as they weren't fond of them either. Only they didn't do house calls, we'd have to take the machine to them and pay a fee up front. Which we did.

And fix it they did.

It was a loose wire in the RPM sensor. They weren't able to order a new wire harness for it, so they just soldered the wire back in place and didn't charge anything more. No promise to how long it would last. So we brought it back home and put it back to work.

I kid you not, the thing works better than it did before it broke. We've always had trouble with the machine not wanting to finish loads and not wringing the clothes out as thoroughly as it did in the very beginning. The techs back then just said, 'yeah those front loaders have that problem if the load isn't balanced. You need to be be make sure your loads are balanced.' Etc. Etc.

I wonder how long that wire was loose?!?!?! And we were basically being told that it was all in our heads!!!! At any rate, the machine is fixed and that's all the matters.

Tentative Plans

 

The best laid plans of mice and men are laid to waste by the tides of time and poisoned traps.

Well, there's a bastardization of the line in Robert Burn's poem "To A Mouse". If the older English is hard to understand, here's a modern translation.

I decided to look it up when I typed my opening line to make sure I wasn't outright plagiarizing someone. Since the poem was originally written in 1786, I think I'm safe. I originally thought it might have something to do with John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", but he got it from the poem too. 

All that to say I have a plan to keep my blog active again, but it seems like every time I say I have a plan and try to stick to it, life comes along and throws me off course. And then, instead of getting back on track ASAP, I just give it all up for a while. Months, sometimes.

Since I am lucky enough to have a three day "weekend" from my job of driving truck, what I would like to do (and have managed to pull off for a WHOLE week now) - is to take a few minutes one of those days, or each day if needed, and type up a few quick posts and then schedule them out for Monday's through Friday's. I'm writing this Wednesday morning, but will schedule it for Thursday.

This will hopefully give me time during the week to share the posts and interact with any comments left, either here or on my Facebook page. I won't post anything on Saturday's and Sunday to give myself a break since I work the weekends unless I schedule off for a family doing - IF that family gives me enough advance warning to schedule the day off (looking at you youngest brother and giving you the stick-eye).

Although honestly, if the event is out of state, I usually have to schedule the entire weekend off. Just to give my autoimmune diseased tired-ass body a day to recover from the fun. I absolutely hate that, but that's just how life it I guess. I even have to deal with that after working only four days. If I've had a full 40+ hours in those four days, and I usually do, it's not uncommon for me to need all of Tuesday to feel like doing anything other than sleep. It sucks.

Ha! If I only had 40 hours during that work week, it'd be nice. And nicer still if it was all on one pay period! The pay period runs from Sunday to Saturday, so my days are split. It's not unusual for me to work 45 hours in those four days, but only end up with a paycheck for 38 hours. Overtime is after 8 hours, so there's that nicety!

Well, I just heard the wash machine singing the song of 'back to chores biotch' so I'm gonna wrap this little post up, schedule it and then work on another. Granted, it might still be another ten minutes before I get out there because I'll have to do a preview post to check for spelling errors and the dreaded formatting errors. Ugh, a simple picture can throw everything off and then I spend too long trying to fix everything so that fonts and sizes are consistent. Which is one reason why I haven't been "Justifying" my paragraphs and everything ends all choppy on the end. A little less hassle if something is askew.

Wish me luck!

Robin's Trying to Write

 

This picture wasn't taken today,
but ironically I'm wearing the same shirt

Forever trying to write.

Sometime I actually do get something written.

I count writing blog posts as writing.

I count scribbling scene starts for my WIP (work in progress) as writing.

I'm at the point where I count staring at the screen for an hour and then changing a sentence from yesterday as writing.

Things are awkward at the moment because I'm sharing my laptop with my husband. He's been using it for gaming so it's in the game room at his desk and when I want to use it, I don't want to be bothered with moving it back to my desk. And his desk chair is decidedly uncomfortable.

It's an old chair, something we got at a thrift store years ago. It swivels, and rocks. There's something off in the rocker, and it clicks just like my bad knee does...almost as loud as my knee too.

I'm so close to finishing the third book in my series, but it's been like pulling teeth. Not just to find my laptop free, but to get the words out of my head and onto the screen. Which is why I've resorted to writing in a notebook when Mr. Janney is playing a game. It helps jostle things when I got o transcribe later.

He tells me that all I ever have to do is let him know when I want the laptop and he'll let me have it. I've tried explaining that sometimes I just can't focus long enough to write. Not sure what the problem is exactly.

But I have been inching closer and closer to the end. I'm a little worried, because it's not going to end with a traditional Happily Ever After ending. Something I'm told Romances are required to have. I've never considered the series strictly Romance, so I'm not sure if the ending would be forgivable.

Although I'm not sure who would be in charge for that forgiveness; I don't know who decides these things. Things will end on a happy note in the romance romance department for the main characters, but not necessarily for some of the side characters. And it's a series, so there has to be a hook for the next book.

I'm probably worrying about nothing.

I hope I'm worrying about nothing.

Whose Voice is it Anyway?

 

One of my new winter hats

I hope you can forgive the cutesy title, and that Whose Line doesn't sue me for trademark infringement! I've been watching so much Whose Line is it Anyway before bed that they've crept into my dreams, and let me tell you - those comedians on Chopped would be hilarious! They were a riot in my dream!

Obviously, the voice I'm trying to regain and exercise is my own.

So much of my life is spent silent and mute. Even when I'm part of a conference call between two other drivers, I spend most of my time just listening. I'm not sure if I honestly don't have anything to contribute to the conversation, or if I'm just too tired to get a word in edgewise. What would it tell you though, if I were to say that I'm the only female on this phone call? Although to be fair to both men, it's hard having a 'fair' conversation between more than two people.

I mean, we've all been in conversations where the talk just kind of flows around us. And even if we try to say something, or tell a story, all too often we're interrupted...and no one even notices. 

Most of the time, instead of on the phone with these two drivers, I'd much rather be listening to an audiobook. Even though one is my husband.

I've been far too introspective since the last audiobook I listened to. "Finding Me" by Viola Davis. When a friend suggested that I use an old journal to write my memoirs, I balked at first because - well, I didn't really know what a memoir was. Even after I looked up the dictionary definition, I still wasn't sure. So I decided that maybe I should read some. Or in my case listen to them, since the bulk of my 'reading' is listening to audiobooks while I drive. So far, I've listened to two. At least, I think "Not Just Me" by Lisa Jakub counts as a memoir. Maybe not.

Either way, Viola Davis convinced me that someday I should write a memoir someday. Her story made me feel less alone, and even though I'm nobody famous, I like to think that my memoir would make someone else feel less alone too. Even though my story isn't all that unique or terrible, it's still my story.

Just another thing to put on my list of things to write.