Well, we had a bit of a scare this last week.  We had a load of kitchen cabinets that picked up in Indiana and had three deliveries in the Bay Area. Sacramento, Fresno and Union City.  The problem with this load is we had the first stop at 9 AM on Thursday and the next stop was at 7 AM on Friday.  That kills our weekly miles when we have to sit like that but what can you do.  We made our first delivery and then headed to the 49er Truck Stop in Sacramento to hang out for the day.  We had a great lunch in their restaurant and then Anne took a nap.  At dinner time we walked to a nearby diner.  On the way Anne told me she was not feeling well.  She was having abdominal pain and nausea.  We debated back and forth on what to do and finally decided we would see if it got better in the morning.  It was about the same the next day.  We made our deliveries and got our next assignment.  We were to run empty to Yuma AZ and pick up a reefer load of veggies at Dole headed to North Carolina.  We had a lot of time in the schedule so we decided to stop in Santa Clarita and go to the ER so Anne could be checked out.  We were concerned at this point that she had appendicitis and I did not want her getting into trouble in the middle of nowhere.  About 6 hours from LA I had to get some sleep so Anne took over.  She woke me up in Ontario (an hour past Santa Clarita) and told me that although she was not feeling better she did not want to spend the money at the ER and besides, she was NOT going to the ER on Friday the 13th.  So I took over driving again and I decided she was going to the ER in Palm Springs.  If she had to have surgery than she would be fairly close to family.  We got to the hospital at 2:00 AM (on the 14th, yea!) and they started checking her out.  They assumed Appendix also and ran a Cat Scan, and Ultra Sound and blood tests.  After all that it was determined to be a kidney infection.  They pumped her full of antibiotics and many hundreds of dollars later we were on our way.  Because I did the responsible thing and called our fleet manager (night weekend guy) to tell him we were stopping to have Anne checked out, we lost our load.  So we dropped our trailer at the Pilot and ran up the hill to Yucca Valley for a quick visit with Anne’s mom.  We had been told that we would probably be sitting in the Colton terminal until the next morning but just as we got to Yucca Valley we get a message to pick up a load in Colton going to Dallas TX.  So our visit was very short.  It was a pretty tough run as Anne was not recovered yet.  We are at the Irving terminal and head out tonight to Oklahoma City for a Fedex run to San Bernardino.

The Air Conditioning we had fixed at Freightliner is not working again and we do not want to stop to fix it.  It gets VERY hot in the bunk even in moderate 60 degree weather.  Here is hoping for cool weather in California.

Also, the idling issue Anne mentioned has been resolved.  The company had decided that to save fuel they were going to set the trucks to have the engine shut off after 5 minutes if not moving and the temperature was between 30 and 70 degrees.  I am sure it sounded like a great idea to some Vice President who has never lived in a truck,  But at 60 degrees, it can be 85 degrees in the bunk and if the batteries get low you cannot idle to charge them.  After a near riot on the company Facebook page, reason prevailed and they stopped the software “upgrade”.  If implemented, we would have had to accelerate our truck purchase goal.