Comments By Grinch

My call sign since 2004 has been grinch. Bestowed upon my by some of my junior sailors. (I made them work)

Still go by it to this day

Hasn’t slowed down a bit in my flatbed work. Still running 2500- 3500 miles a week

Davey, you gave the best advice you could, that is all you can do. “ you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Reminds me of one of my last students. Decide he could study better, and do things better him self. I showed him everything he needed to be successful. So I could sleep at night. He is an overconfident impatient individual. I Voiced my concerns to our driver qual team and our driver leader. Last month he left a terminal without the bol’s. The result was him delivering the wrong product to 2 stops and out of order. It took him an extra 2 days and 600 miles in the snow to correct that. The other day I get the” i jackknifed the truck” text. Slow spin at least minimal cosmetic damage and no other vehicles involved. But when we talked on the phone I realized he had his Jake’s on in the snow with an empty step deck trailer on an off ramp at a faster speed than I would have been for sure. I know we specially had the snow / Jake conversation while he was in training when we hit early season snow. Some will learn the hard way unfortunately and there is nothing you can do.

Micheal update for the group since he has been silent again. He has been texting me every couple of days. He is currently on his trainers truck, doing a dedicated Target account in the southwest. He has been doing good so far with only a couple of missed turns as he put it. He will be on his 3rd week this week and sounds like he is hitting his stride.

I Haven’t slowed a bit or my running mates overall. We have a couple of slow down areas / clients but others have picked up. I just pulled 3200 miles in the past 7 days. For perspective I’m running general flatbed loads.

Thank you Grinch for your ideas. You are a week late about the freezer haha. I ended up ordering a 10 qt freezer from Amazon. I chose this one because I didn't want anything too big and I could not find an upright freezer slim enough that could slide behind the passenger seat. It's a bit small but it works. It holds 3 bags of chicken and a LB of salmon. In the truck fridge I have another bag of chicken and placed raw spinach leaves in the freezer. Please do send over the link for the crockpot recipes.

I spoke with the wife, found out she pulled them off of Pinterest. So I will check those out when I get home next week. I had also done some looking and found this which has some I will try. Prep them at home and freeze in gallon bags and just drop in during the day.

https://www.delish.com/cooking/g3849/best-slow-cooker-recipes/

P.s....For Momma Anne or any other OTR driver that reads this....., is it possible for you to send me links to posts about cooking food on the road? I know there are some in this site but I can't find them and I don't want to make another thread about it.... I'm staying out for 6 weeks this time and the most I have ever done was 4. I usually cook 4 weeks of food at home and bring it to the truck. But I have ran out of food on week 4 right now and I'm already tired of eating this truck stop garbage. I do have a microwave on the truck and I was thinking about bringing my air fryer and/or crockpot to the truck. Also I will need another freezer for the extra food, if anyone has any ideas on which one I should get.... Thanks.

Two sides glad you are doing better, I run swift flatbed, I usually pack / prep for 3 weeks plus and store in a alpicool freezer that is about a 36 qt. It sides behind my passenger seat in front of my cabinet in my kenworth. You can find it on Amazon. It works great. I just slide it out if I need to get in the cabinet. My air fryer is built into my microwave, saves space, and getting cooler I will start using the crock pot more. I’ll still hit a Wally World about every 2 weeks to get fruits or veggies coffe creamer etc. I just time those Walmart trips so i am at a terminal doing a 34 usually and bobtail to it. I allow 1 cheat fast food meal a week. And I force my self to eat in a actual restaurant once aweek as well to get out of the truck and interact with other humans and be civilized. Tonight’s menu is honey bbq chicken strips, steamed and seasoned broccoli and a salad for me and my student

My other half found a bunch of new prep crockpot recipes for me, I’ll get her to send me the link and get it over to you.

And stay with knight flatbed… or do a transfer over to our side of flatbed. Knight swift is a great company with a lot of great people supporting us. I know we have quite a few drivers that have left knight and swift that come screaming back because the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.

Anne, We forgot the selfie.. Mike found me this morning as he was walking to the range. While I was getting a replacement tarp, since one of mine decided to shred this week. Chatted for a few hen and we had lunch on his lunch break. We had a great chat and he got to meet one of my mentors as well that ran a similar load here as well.

Yes weigh everything. I repowered a load from another driver the other day to run from Martin’s burg, wv to Elkhart Indiana. That driver handed me the shipper scale ticket. Which was handwritten.. it had his empty weight at an even 30,000. He never scaled it separately at a cat scale. That’s about 1100 lbs light for our truck/ trailer combination right off the bat. Looked at the load of pipe on the trailer and it looked too far forward to me. In the am we drop down the road to a pilot . I was right front heavy. But I had 50 lbs legal leeway on my steers still. But we could only run 1/2 tank of fuel or less all the way to Indiana. Made it there and got it unloaded with out issue.

Micheal, I will be there in Pheonix all day Monday doing a reset. Let’s get together with you and your buddy. I put my number in my bio. Shoot me a text when you see this so we can connect up.