Life before and after the fire
Well I passed the road test. Need to work on my turns though. The score sheet has three grades for each thing they check; good, fair, bad. Other than turns my entire sheet was marked good with one fair for position on the parallel park. Then you get to the turns section and I lost [...]
Well this is it, tomorrow is the big day. We have to be checked out of here by about 5:15 in the morning. More paperwork in the morning and then over to DPS for testing starting about 8:00. There will be two examiners each doing six people at 45 minutes per test plus a probable [...]
More time spent on the road. It still goes by pretty quickly, at least when I am driving. Today was a total mess when it came to shifting. Down shifting in particular. I think I may be pushing the clutch in too far, particularly when going from sixth to fifth. Hopefully it will be better [...]
Feeling much more comfortable with the driving. Sharp corners are still nerve wracking and we are only pulling a 48′ trailer instead of the 53′ ones we will actually use but all in all it is going well. Weekends feel like I am living two different lives. One is in San Antonio in a dingy [...]
Well today was much more interesting. We drove the damned trucks on the highway and in town. We stayed in south east San Antionio and China Grove. First we went up and down the frontage roads for 410 and also on 410. This helped us with merging and slowing down and stopping for stop signs [...]
More shifting. Pretty boring although we did get to go 15 MPH today. This mornining I woke up around 3:00 and was freezing. At 3:30 I finally got up and turned off the A/C and also went to the bathroom. My roommate gets up around 5:00 and leaves at 5:30 which is when I get [...]
Sunday, day twelve, was a day off and I went home. That was great seeing family, having a couple of home cooked meals, sleeping in my own bed. All good stuff. Today we started shifting. ”Dry shifting.” That means no accelerator, at least not when the clutch is engaged. We shifted up one gear at [...]
Writing this during lunch. More of the same. Monday we move on to shifting. The class behind us went from 27 to nine between Wednesday and today. Given that they only have four trucks for backing practice and only four people per truck they don’t count on having more than 16 by the time you [...]
More time on the range doing basically the same thing, backing up. One more day tomorrow and then we move on to shifting! Yes we have been doing all this stuff in just second gear and reverse. We don’t even touch the accelerator pedal! Tensions are beginning to flair though. We have one guy, about [...]
Well the excitement continues. What seems challenging one day is pretty mundane the next. I have reached a point where I am seeing how fast I can get through the parallel parking drill. Today we began learning how to back in to a dock. We start out parallel to the dock, back up about 80 [...]
I am 53 years old, married, with three grown kids. Two of them have families of their own and one still lives at home. That in fact works out well because it allowed the truck driving part of this new adventure to happen as he was be able to take care of the pets while we were gone. I have five beautiful grandchildren four of which live close by and the other is half way across the world in Guam.
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August 8, 2009
SmokeTX
