Yesterday Was a Long Day

Wow. 8 hours is a long time to spend alone in a car.

I misreported on facebook via twitter that I had driven for 6 hours and gone 260 miles during my work day yesterday, while I visited 18 convenience stores on a list that had me testing (as part of the training program, rather than getting people in serious trouble) whether I would be carded when trying to buy tobacco products.

Unfortunately my tired brain was incapable of basic time-math and thought that 11am-7pm was 6 hours. No, it’s 8. I am aware of this now. My first stop was at 11:10am and the last one was at 5:10pm, but then required a nearly 2 hour drive from West Virginia over US-33 back to Harrisonburg and up to Broadway. This involved a near miss with a deer (a couple had run in front of me, and one stopped short of running into the side of the car while I was doing ~ 55mph), and several near misses with 25mph turns over 33, which when they said “25mph” actually meant “You should probably do 25mph, not the 40mph that you could do one the 25mph turns further down the mountain..” It was on these that I really felt the vibration of the brakes that really needs to be looked at soon, as well as the transmission error light that has been coming up for a couple of weeks. I really hope that is just a faulty sensor that needs replacing and not a serious transmission issue, but who knows. I’m about 75% sure that the vibration issue is a warped brake disc on the front left wheel, but it is too cold to try looking at it and even then there is no guarantee that I could spot it. With our luck recently, if the car breaks it is probably an indication that we are about to get a job or something to keep us barely-floating still, rather than providing a useful means to dig ourselves out of this hole we are in.

In better news, and still on the job front, I’ve been talking to a lady from church who knows a lot of people (IE: companies/organizations) who are or may be in need of IT people. She gave me one set of contact info and was going to call around today and tonight and give me another call to let me know if she came up with anything. It really seems to be a case of not so much what you know (although it certainly helps!) but who you know.

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