What's that smell?
Oh man I had just spent probably an hour writing a post about "best friends" that I ended up deleting because it was just too depressing.
It started out as an idea because of a radio show I listen to every day on XM where a girl wrote in asking for advice on an issue she was having with her hubby-to-be wherein she didn't feel like he was her "best friend". She brought up the fact that so many people she knew in marriages spoke of how they had married their best friend and how that made her feel like something was wrong with her because she didn't consider her future husband to be her best friend.
I personally don't feel that you should have to feel like your husband or fiance or boyfriend is your absolute best friend. I didn't consider my husband to be my best friend until we were years into our relationship. But we also lived together for nearly 8 years before we decided to get married and had ample time to become best friends before making that commitment.
I will say, however, that first and foremost my husband is MY HUSBAND, the love of my life. It was simply an added bonus he also became my best friend.
However, with concern to my relationship with my first husband, when I look back on it, I find that it was kind of the opposite. We were best friends before we actually found love for one another.
While the idea of marrying your best friend is peachy, I feel that in order to have a long term, lasting marriage there needs to be the core foundation of true love. And maybe like a sturdy house, that foundation is needed before the rest (friendship) can truly be built.
So for this girl to be freaking out that she's not feeling the whole "I'm marrying my best friend" thing seems like no big thing in my eyes. If she truly loves him and wants to be with him, she should marry him and be content. She will also likely end up being surprised that in time she will find that he was all along or is now becoming her best friend.
And since that was the point I had tried to make before going off on a retarded tangent in my now deleted and forgotten post, I can say I'm glad I made it quite more intelligibly this go 'round and can now move on.
I'm currently in Gary, IN sitting in a hotel while Bruce gets his pipes replaced. I developed what I thought was just a small exhaust leak but learned was actually a really bad leak that could have 1) caused me a lot of headache with a DOT officer should I have been inspected for any reason 2) caused me even more actual headaches than it had already started causing me with the fumes it was emitting into my tractor and 3) killed me.
If I had decided against stopping at the shop here to have it checked out and instead parked for the night somewhere that I decided to idle the truck while I slept, I could very well have been killed by Bruce and the noxious fumes he was pumping into my tractor.
I thought that there must have been just a small hole somewhere on the bottom of the exhaust line under the tractor that I couldn't find. I looked from every possible angle I could without getting on the ground and crawling under the truck to see if I could spot the place where the leak was coming from. From the rear of the cab, from the peep hole where the flap for access to the fuel tank is to the engine compartment. I couldn't see anything obvious.
The only other option for checking was as I said, getting under the truck. Well, I could have removed the skirts and see all of it more clearly but that is a huge pain in the ass. But I digress.
So I couldn't spot the leaky spot on my own and brought the truck to our company terminal in Gary to see if they could find and fix the problem. Turns out that what I thought was just a hole was a hole, only it was a hole all the way around the pipe right smack dab in the middle under the bunk. The shop guy had removed the skirts to see more clearly and spotted it right away. The pipe was severed completely, having rusted out and snapped in half.
So it was no wonder I was smelling the fumes and getting a headache as I drove today. It was basically being pumped right up into the cab, albeit not directly, but since the separation was directly below my bunk it was seeping in through the floor, around the side boxes and for the time I had my passenger window down a smidgen, through it.
So the shop put Bruce on the schedule for maintenance and they said it would be sometime after 8 pm that he would be taken in to be fixed. "The actual job takes less than 2 hours" explained the estimator. And since I didn't want to sit around listening to trucker tales in the terminal all night, I decided to pack my bag and head over here to the hotel for the night.
After having been out of the exhaust filled Bruce for over an hour my headache had completely dissipated, without having taken anything for it. So I can only imagine what would have happened to my head if I'd let it go and hadn't bothered to have it checked out.
Seriously... it could have killed me. *shiver*
So tomorrow he'll be all better and we'll be hitting the road toward Columbus where we will be relaying the load I picked up today in Elwood, IL. After that I'll be heading home, even though I don't think I'll have enough hours to make it home until Saturday morning.
I'm really looking forward to this weekend. We're going to a friends house to celebrate another friend having made it onto the Fire Department he's been vying for for quite some time. And then Sunday hubby and I are going to my college besties house for lunch and hanging out time.
Who knows what else we'll get into.
In the meantime, keep up with what's happening in my trucking life on The FaceBook page or in my crazy brain life on The Twitter .
It started out as an idea because of a radio show I listen to every day on XM where a girl wrote in asking for advice on an issue she was having with her hubby-to-be wherein she didn't feel like he was her "best friend". She brought up the fact that so many people she knew in marriages spoke of how they had married their best friend and how that made her feel like something was wrong with her because she didn't consider her future husband to be her best friend.
I personally don't feel that you should have to feel like your husband or fiance or boyfriend is your absolute best friend. I didn't consider my husband to be my best friend until we were years into our relationship. But we also lived together for nearly 8 years before we decided to get married and had ample time to become best friends before making that commitment.
I will say, however, that first and foremost my husband is MY HUSBAND, the love of my life. It was simply an added bonus he also became my best friend.
However, with concern to my relationship with my first husband, when I look back on it, I find that it was kind of the opposite. We were best friends before we actually found love for one another.
While the idea of marrying your best friend is peachy, I feel that in order to have a long term, lasting marriage there needs to be the core foundation of true love. And maybe like a sturdy house, that foundation is needed before the rest (friendship) can truly be built.
So for this girl to be freaking out that she's not feeling the whole "I'm marrying my best friend" thing seems like no big thing in my eyes. If she truly loves him and wants to be with him, she should marry him and be content. She will also likely end up being surprised that in time she will find that he was all along or is now becoming her best friend.
And since that was the point I had tried to make before going off on a retarded tangent in my now deleted and forgotten post, I can say I'm glad I made it quite more intelligibly this go 'round and can now move on.
I'm currently in Gary, IN sitting in a hotel while Bruce gets his pipes replaced. I developed what I thought was just a small exhaust leak but learned was actually a really bad leak that could have 1) caused me a lot of headache with a DOT officer should I have been inspected for any reason 2) caused me even more actual headaches than it had already started causing me with the fumes it was emitting into my tractor and 3) killed me.
If I had decided against stopping at the shop here to have it checked out and instead parked for the night somewhere that I decided to idle the truck while I slept, I could very well have been killed by Bruce and the noxious fumes he was pumping into my tractor.
I thought that there must have been just a small hole somewhere on the bottom of the exhaust line under the tractor that I couldn't find. I looked from every possible angle I could without getting on the ground and crawling under the truck to see if I could spot the place where the leak was coming from. From the rear of the cab, from the peep hole where the flap for access to the fuel tank is to the engine compartment. I couldn't see anything obvious.
The only other option for checking was as I said, getting under the truck. Well, I could have removed the skirts and see all of it more clearly but that is a huge pain in the ass. But I digress.
So I couldn't spot the leaky spot on my own and brought the truck to our company terminal in Gary to see if they could find and fix the problem. Turns out that what I thought was just a hole was a hole, only it was a hole all the way around the pipe right smack dab in the middle under the bunk. The shop guy had removed the skirts to see more clearly and spotted it right away. The pipe was severed completely, having rusted out and snapped in half.
So it was no wonder I was smelling the fumes and getting a headache as I drove today. It was basically being pumped right up into the cab, albeit not directly, but since the separation was directly below my bunk it was seeping in through the floor, around the side boxes and for the time I had my passenger window down a smidgen, through it.
So the shop put Bruce on the schedule for maintenance and they said it would be sometime after 8 pm that he would be taken in to be fixed. "The actual job takes less than 2 hours" explained the estimator. And since I didn't want to sit around listening to trucker tales in the terminal all night, I decided to pack my bag and head over here to the hotel for the night.
After having been out of the exhaust filled Bruce for over an hour my headache had completely dissipated, without having taken anything for it. So I can only imagine what would have happened to my head if I'd let it go and hadn't bothered to have it checked out.
Seriously... it could have killed me. *shiver*
So tomorrow he'll be all better and we'll be hitting the road toward Columbus where we will be relaying the load I picked up today in Elwood, IL. After that I'll be heading home, even though I don't think I'll have enough hours to make it home until Saturday morning.
I'm really looking forward to this weekend. We're going to a friends house to celebrate another friend having made it onto the Fire Department he's been vying for for quite some time. And then Sunday hubby and I are going to my college besties house for lunch and hanging out time.
Who knows what else we'll get into.
In the meantime, keep up with what's happening in my trucking life on The FaceBook page or in my crazy brain life on The Twitter .
Comments
Do you ever see them in truck stop stores?
IIRC, the Highway Hags were getting more C02 than they expected at one point during their travels.
Interesting point on best friend/husband; it does seem that a good mate morphs into a best friend over time. In some cases observed ... You still always need at least a close friend or two. Mistake to let those relationships go, in the press of daily life.
Have a good weekend!
PS: Where is Trucking Tiger? Miss his blog. (And don't like his log in for commenting software ...)
Generally there isn't much concern for co2 poisoning but when a leak occurs in the exhaust, specifically the pipes that run under the bunk, it can be an issue. The bunks aren't air tight, so even if the co2 gets in it can also get out and doesn't really accumulate until the leak is severe enough.
Mine kinda was, had I idled all night, the co2 could possibly have hung out long enough to put me to sleep forever.
But this is why it's important for us as trained professional truck drivers to perform our pre and post trip inspections. If we can see something like this we can get it fixed before it fixes us for good.
And Trucking Tiger is trucking right along. I suppose he's just not had much to blog about or maybe just not the time.