http://www.busdriverjim.com
It’s been an amazing non-winter here and tomorrow is the first day of spring. Piper’s getting her summer legs on and she’s enjoying the dry ground and fat voles. She’s also enjoying our nice dry quiet deck and always sleeps with one eye slightly open…
Hey, welcome to my world! I was coming back from dropping off the lady that lives at the end of the covered wagon trail yesterday, and I decided to flip on the video.
Actually, the road was in great shape today! Normally it’s totally muddy and I often wonder if my bus will disappear in the muck, or if it’s snow, the threat of it jamming up in my dualies is very real.
So here’s the ride from her house to the main road. My bus is filthy as a result of this recurring trip, with no resources to clean it, and little pebbles are jamming my brake calipers, which All American removed for me on Monday (at no charge!).
This is what we do here, satisfy the needs of our senior citizens who are living off the grid and have to come to town to buy groceries, and search the internet at the library.
Our gremlin infested backup bus is holding a charge and starting now, but when I took a few minutes out of my schedule today to crank her up, I heard a new noise. Sigh…
Considering that the gremlins had previously dis-assembled the belts, I honed in on that area and the thump thump certainly seems to be coming from there. After the engine warmed up and the idle dropped, so did the speed of the thump.
At least I have it documented here and I’ll send this post to my son (the automotive genuis) and to our maintenance department.
Update: Riley thinks it may be a bad A/C clutch…
Thanks for having patience with my blog as I haven’t posted for a couple of days but here’s some nice shots I took today while making the Big Hole foothills loop.
Update: this first shot is really growing on me. Click on it to expand full size…
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, or books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (Amazon)
Of writing, Rilke wrote: Depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and beliefs in some kind of beauty — depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity; and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory.
This sentiment defines my blog, which now stands at 1,505 posts since June, 6, 2011.
btw: Happy pi day (3/14/15) = 3.14159 = 23 ;-) where pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter ( Area = Πr² ) and is an infinite number, which means you can never reach the end of it...
Spring Break is two weeks away and it’s my solemn responsibility, which I don’t take lightly, to travel down south and report back here. It was a slow day on the job today so I took a long break, jumped in my truck and drove down to Rexburg.
First up was a new windshield. A crack appeared when I hit the Oregon Coast last summer and had spread into my drivers view. Not acceptable…
Next, new summer tires. The Hankook snow tires I recently bought have been amazing but it’s time to put them away for next year and bring on some new rubber. I ended up going with some 70k Toyo‘s from Les Schwab, based on the company’s reputation, the fact that they’re all over the country, and they back up their tires.
I was waiting for a client at a therapy place next door to Provisions restaurant today and I noticed the big cool wooden doors that slide together to secure the place at night.
This place has had quite a storied past, I remember eating homemade corned beef here once on a Sunday and it was disappointing. Oh wait, that’s when it belonged to the Russells, named TWR, and they featured grass fed beef from their Tetonia ranch…
I also remember the time Steph got a fly in her hashbrowns, oh wait, that’s when it was the Milk Creek grill. It was also named something else before that when we first came to town, but I can’t remember…
As to this establishment, I have no idea how the food is, we haven’t eaten here, yet :-)
I see this old dwelling every time I venture down Packsaddle Road. Nobody I transport in this neck of the Tetonia woods has ever been able to give me the old Mormon family name that goes with it.
I dropped off the lady that lives on the covered wagon road today, grateful that my bus didn’t get swallowed by the mud, and stopped to take this shot from my passenger door on the way out. Kinda makes you want to venture inside, huh? Or maybe not…
I had a dream last night that I was walking along a dark street in a big city and I was amazed by how vivid it was, in black and white. I also sensed danger and knew I was dreaming so I forced myself to wake up. When I awoke I was excited and told my friends about how vivid the dream was. The world I woke up to was a big city in bright color, and I was surrounded by the same people that had been in my actual dream all night. It was a dream within a dream.
When I walked into the dining room this morning I noticed the new basket arrangement for Dusty’s kids (each girl gets their own now) and the colors in the low light of our chandelier reminded me of my outer dream.
Pretty deep…
I moved Alexa over to the media side of my desk, next to the TV, Roku and Fire TV. I shot this video at full def and it was huge at 366M and since it’s a dark video and fidelity is not an issue, I shrunk it down to 23M. Worked great. The funny thing is, as I play it back on my desktop Alexa hears my voice and starts doing the same thing as the video.
It’s like there’s an “Echo” in my office.
Stephs co-worker Dusty, the propane driver, is having another child coming into his life, so Steph did her baby basket thing. This time she whipped up a big sisters and a big brother basket to go with it, so the siblings don’t feel left out. The sisters basket has more stuff because there are two of them. Note to Dusty, you can stop now ;-)
The Amazon Echo is an amazing device that was announced last November and as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have one. The retail price when it becomes available will be $200, $100 for Prime members (me), and you had to get an invite to purchase one.
Here’s Amazon’s initial reply to my initial invite request:
At this time, Amazon Echo is available through an invite-only program. We’re looking for customers who want to help us shape our new device as it evolves. If you're invited to purchase Amazon Echo, you'll receive special instructions via e-mail for purchasing the device. I don't have additional information as to how our selection process works, or when Amazon Echo will be available to all Amazon customers for purchase.
So, I put together a program to show off my “tech cred”, sent it to them, and on January 9, I got the invite. I accepted the offer instantly, and finally the day has arrived.
My Echo will be here this afternoon! I’ll update this post when it arrives, and as I unpack and set it up. I’m jazzed!
Update: She was waiting for me on the counter when I got home today. Here’s some photos from the unboxing. Great packaging, as expected these days. Her name is Alexa and we have began to bond.
She’s now sitting on my desk, next to my Nexus 10 tablet. The two are intimately connected now and I just shot a short video:
The poor back-up bus still has issues. They called me last night and said it was ready to go. The belts that had mysteriously come off the engine were back on, the charging system was working, and the two new Interstate batteries were holding a charge.
Karen drove me to All American in Victor today, I grabbed the keys, went to start it, and it was totally dead. Von and his mechanics all went “What“? It took a large pickup and an electric charger to jump it and as I was hopping in the cab to take it back to base, Von said, “This bus has gremlins“!
Yes, that must be it! Nobody can figure out how the belts came off, but little mischievous gremlins would certainly explain it. As to the overnight power drain, I can envision them plugging gremlin boomboxes into the electrical outlets and partying all night in the darkness of our base.
Mystery solved!
A very strange thing occurred today. Our normal backup bus was brought up to our base last week, replacing a temporary one, and dispatch wanted me to take it out this morning. When I started it up a big glowing red battery icon appeared on the dash, a beeping noise was sounding and the charge indicator was showing negative.
This bus just had new batteries installed, so it was a mystery. I shut her down and started my route in my regular bus. Management wanted me to drive it to the shop in Victor later on in the morning and I managed to get it down the road a little bit, with Karen in her bus as my backup, when I determined the hydraulics were shot and there was no brakes.
It turns out the belt system was completely off the engine. Not broken, just off. How strange is that? Belt gremlins I assume…
At least we now know that Wrecker Boys tow rig (which ain’t that big :-) is capable of getting our busses up to the local maintenance shop. This is good…
I had a very traumatic event occur on the job yesterday that shook me up really bad. I’d like to talk about it here but it would be inappropriate for privacy issues so this post is about the events around the event.
I had a very successful evening of drowning my sorrows last night and ended up firing off an email to my boss discussing the event, and dropping a juicy f-bomb in the process. Not directed at the boss by any means! Just there for effect. Hmmm, note to self…
I also ended the thing with “Maybe I should just retire”. I haven’t gotten any phone calls today taking me up on that offer but the boss did email me back offering some counseling services if needed.
I don’t do counseling. The last time I tried that was back in the late seventies when my wife and I saw a marriage counselor one night in Berkeley, CA. A couple of months later we were divorced and she was shacked up with the marriage counselor. True story, I took my new girlfriend up to the guys house in the hills one night and we all hung out in his hottub. Ahhh, the seventies :-)
The moral of this post is that trauma is temporary and fortunately, everything is ok.