Happy New Years!

I know I'm a little bit late, but I figured I'd provide a brief update and well-wishes.

I had requested hometime for Friday and New Years, rather than Christmas, because I know that doing so allowed some people to whom Christmas was an important family thing to get home.

And then of course, I ran into pretty much every possible delay in getting myself home. Going from Ohio to Texas I got a very light loaded trailer and combined with rain and wet roads and wind it took a lot of very careful driving and several times of shutting down earlier than I had necessarily intended to and put probably an extra day into getting to Texas. On the other hand, better an extra day and getting there safely than ending up in the ditch somewhere, every time. After all, I had plenty of food, found safe places to park, and the delay was annoying rather than anything else.

Had to wait in Texas a bit for them to put a new screen on my Qualcomm , which had fallen in two pieces somewhere around Texarkana.

Got another load from Laredo over to Tuscon, deadheaded to Nogales, and shut down Friday evening in Rio Rico in order to have enough time on my 70 hour clock to be able to make it home after I dropped off the load in Fontana.

Saturday afternoon I got home with about 40 minutes to spare on my 14 hour clock for the day and about an hour on my 70. Although I did get to use personal drive time, still always better to play it wholly safe.

It's been nice to be home. My mother cooked one of my favourite foods, and my cat has been just about glued to my shoulder the whole time. Turns out he missed me. Yesterday my father and I drove back to Fontana so that I could take my car home, and today I'm getting the last of the various errands and stuff done and getting ready to head back out bright and early tomorrow morning.

I also bought myself a new iPad pro for the holidays and picked it up, in hopes of having a better computing solution while over the road. Although I do have a power strip inverter in the truck, a lot of the time getting out my laptop and turning it on and waiting and all of thatis more work than I have energy for at the end of the day. This is great so far and I'm getting used to it, and it should let me do most of the things that I want to do without having to get out my computer.

So yeah. Hope everyone else had a nice holiday, and drive safe out there.

The other thing that I've noticed is that after almost a month out by myself, things are starting to get easier. Not easier as in I'm overconfident, just easier as in I'm no longer having the moments where I think to myself that I can't do this, that I made a mistake, that what in the actual world was I thinking.

I'm still having a lot of times where the backing is challenging. Had one dock at a delivery in Texas that frustrated me just about to the point of tears— but here's where the difference lies. When I catch my breath and get out and look now I can see what I need to do, and I just take it slow and do it. I'm incredibly grateful to the various other truckers who have taken time out of their day to help me when I get stuck and frustrated; but now that help is mostly for the reassurance of knowing that there's a second set of eyes on that tight turn rather than not knowing what to do and needing guidance; and I definitely hope that I'll be able to pay that forward eventually in the future.

I also run my day relatively early. I try to start driving before 5 in the morning wherever I am, so that I can shut down at a reasonable time in the afternoon, and by shutting down at a reasonable time in the afternoon I avoid frustrating parking situations and very often get to either pull straight through and into a spot, or back into a spot where there's no one on either side of me. That's nice, especially because tired at the end of the day is NOT the time that I want to be trying a challenging backing. (As an aside, I was at a truck stop the other day and had someone else doing that right next to my truck and at one point I had to pull my horn at them because they were dead set to do a 90º backing… right into my front bumper. So I've gotten to kind of see it from both sides, and I definitely don't want to cause someone else that kind of stress either.)

I finally got myself a cooler, one of the compact vertical ones which nicely enough fits right between behind my driver's seat and my cabinet. I also got myself one of the lunchbox stove things, which are nice for heating up a frozen burrito or whatever, and doing so without it getting soggy or ick. Hopefully the combination of this will allow me to cook a little bit more and eat out a little bit less. My pocketbook will certainly appreciate that.

I'll probably make another response to this thread in a bit, because I know there's a few more points of things that have either happened or that I've learned that I'd like to share.