In which we see the glorious return of my unsolicited thoughts

Wow.  I'd completely forgotten about this until I started poking around some of the dustier corners of my account.

I've really let this go. Sorry, folks, will try to keep content coming.

At the present moment, I'm doing one of the most trucker-ey of trucker things: I'm eating an omelette at a Denny's in Lodi, California,  My next load doesn't pick up until three this afternoon, so I have time to sit down at a table and eat a meal off a plate with fork and knife (Look, he thinks he's people!) and clean the truck out and get a shower. And, apparently, do some blogging.

The Lodi I'm in is, of course, the same town Creedence sang about.  It's a smallish community in the Sacramento Delta, a suburb of both Sacramento to its north and Stockton to its south. It's wine country, as well.  Folks, I am here to tell you, terroir in the Delta is overrated.   It's all flat, hot, and dry. The naked eye can see no difference in soil from one vinyard to the next.  I'm not going to say all the wine coming out of here is equal, obviously that's not the case.  And they do get some very nice wines into America's drinking glass; Earthquake and Seven Deadly Zins are grown and bottled about five miles from here. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

Get it while the getting's good, though.  I am not optimistic about the continued survivability of ANYTHING in California except for cheat grass and sand.  The water situation is getting dire.  For example, the town of Yuba City, just a couple dozen miles away from where I write this, recently had a deal on water go sour.  They had been going to buy water from the Agricultural&Water District, at the swingeing rate of $700 per acre-foot (One acre of water in area, one foot deep; 43,560 cubic feet; 325,851 gallon); the ag district backed out when it became apparent that they werent going to have enough to go around.  Time will tell, but I see the situation getting a lot worse before it gets any better.

A big part of the problem is people. Just sheer raw numbers.  In terms of habit, all the people in California all need clean water to drink and cook with and bathe in.  This is where the second problem with people comes in, and I am here referring to the Nestle water-bottling plants in California.  I have no idea how much water they actually get through in a year, but I can tell you that all of their plants are always busy shipping water.  The water that gets pulled from the ground in Los Angeles (An area that is currently thirteen trillion gallons below normal) gets sold and shipped elsewhere.  Just because you have to start somewhere, using the figure above as a marker, Nestle is buying the water for around a fifth of a penny per gallon, reverse-osmosis-filtering it, bottling and shipping it, and selling it to you for about what gasoline costs now.

Lesson learned?  Buy a Britta filter.


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The waitress is giving me the stinkeye, I think I need to get going.  Maybe a nap.  The two best times of the day are brunch time and nap time, after all.


Y'all keep the shiny side up.

HENCHMAN clear.

Of a day, I became a trucker.

Stuff gotta move around, right?  Everything you use, everything you buy, got there by truck.  I figured it's the one job that can't be outsourced or offshored, though if you listen to the sourer voices in the truck stops, we're soon to be overwhelmed by Mexican and Canadians in unmaintained vehicles.  It pays the bills, I get to travel (I am a very nomadic person, both by inclination and blind dumb luck) and it gives me lots of time to think.

It was kind of a big jump for me, as I'd been working in Minneapolis as a bicycle mechanic.  I am a very avid bicyclist, and at one time I was racking up 40-50 miles a day.  So I carry a bike around with me.  It's nice to be able to unwind after a long day wrestling the rig through traffic, and it lets me lead the semblance of a normal life:  shut the truck down, lock it all up, and ride into town.  Sit down at a table with a tablecloth, eat with a fork and a knife, enjoy my weekly glass of wine or one beer on a Friday night.  Maybe see a movie, walk around, talk to the locals.

It's not a bad life.  More later, okay?

Y'all keep the shiny side up, y'hear?

HENCHMAN clear.