Today is a rare day. I slept in til 5:15am, made coffee, took a bath and had a morning quiet time that rarely I get.
I’m in reset mode. Our next load picks up until 2pm this afternoon which Kevin will do on his shift. A reset is 34 consecutive hours off duty (no driving) so as long as I sit here and do nothing, by 3am tomorrow morning I will have 70 new hours on which to whittle away my driving and on-duty work.
Normally mornings begin at 3am. I’m getting pretty good at waking somewhere around this time. Bedtime is somewhere around 7-7:30pm. If our load has time on the schedule, we’ll stop and I’ll make or buy coffee. A quick pre-trip of the truck and trailer to make sure everything looks good and is in good working order, a bowl of cereal and I’m off down the road. For the next 12 hours the truck is my responsibility. Kevin crawls into the bunk in back and gets a much needed rest.
Today, while I’m off, the truck is still my responsibility. I’ll become the active driver in our electronic logbook system and “stand watch” over the truck. That basically means doing absolutely nothing except taking care of the dog, since the truck isn’t going anywhere! Sometimes I’ll run errands like laundry or groceries but I can do this in off-duty driving mode.
We recently changed over to electronic logbooks, a mandate handed to trucking companies by the federal government, but they aren’t as irritating as I thought they might be. We actually track our “real” time at a duty status, rather than the 15 minute increments of the paper logs. So fueling takes 4 minutes off our time rather then 15 minutes. We used to always try to fuel and do a pre-trip (these could be lump together) at the beginning of a shift change rather then in the middle of a shift but now it doesn’t matter. Fueling takes up so little time we can usually achieve it in 3-6 minutes.
So today I look forward to reading, meditating, writing, emailing, and going for a long walk with my dog. It’ll be a good day!
