Happy New Year 2025

 Here we are, almost at the beginning of another new year.

The calendar page flips and that's about all. Depending on how you view the seasons, we're either at the start of winter or in mid-winter. Regardless it's cold and often snowy here in Northeast PA.

I checked the last blog I posted and it was near the end of 2022. So two years have passed since I've given you a peak into my life. Not much has changed. I don't have a head cold like I did in that post, although I have recently gotten over a sinus infection. Those are always fun; this one lasted about two weeks.

Hubby and I are still driving truck, still local. The pay is good, the hours long, the scenery unchanging. Granted, at 3am all scenery is too dark to see! I miss seeing the Rockies though.

Pete's second favorite hobby
is napping in my lap

We did get a new dog in January of 2023. He is a little turd that we love dearly even when he is demanding that the tennis ball be thrown down the hallway, which is quite often. When we're not doing that, we're sitting in my recliner pictured to the right.

I also don't have to share the laptop anymore. We were able to get Mr. Janney his own for gaming. I'm still not used to that change in things, but here I am typing on a new keyboard he got me for Christmas seeing if I can't remember how this is done.

How does one string words together anyway?

One after another.

I have been working on poetry here and there over the past few weeks. A friend recommended that I install a voice-to-text app on my phone for when I'm driving and it has helped me get those old gears grinding again. I usually drive with my phone mounted on the dash so I can keep the map on even though I know where I'm going. The map usually gives me a few minutes notice about slowdowns ahead and accidents. It also has a setting that allows me to control whatever I am listening to, whether it is an audiobook or music. And it allows me to see who's calling in the middle of all that.

I am looking at a preview of this post and it shows font changed that shouldn't be there and it's so discouraging. Why is this so hard dear BlogSpot? Just because I added a picture?

Not going to lie, I don't know if I'm going to keep up on this blog. Not because I don't want to really. Just because I'm not sure what the point is. Of any of it right now. With all the various social medias, is this even worth doing anymore? I don't know.

I guess we'll just see what the new year brings.

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.