Fuel for Thought

The Weekend Report

How do I spend a four day weekend without freight you ask? If I was closer to a home or friend’s place I would have trolled to one of those locations. I usually have good luck along the I-81 corridor in Virginia, so I sat tight. No sense in trolling over a quiet weekend burning up miles when the chances for freight are just as good here when freight reopens this week.

40 miles. I only put about forty miles on the van since Wednesday. I stayed within Christiansburg and Blacksburg and only moved enough to keep the van loose and charged. The qualcomm and sitting three days leaves only enough power for one weak start; four days equals no start. Today was the first day with decent sun for charging the auxiliary batteries. A few hours in the library keeps me from adding extra loads to the battery bank, so it will end the day on a good healthy charge.

9 movies. Ripping movies wastes a lot of time. One feature length movie takes about 35 minutes to backup from its dvd to my hard drive and another 20 minutes to convert to a format that I can watch on my mini tablet. I’m not a fan of battling the lines for Walmart Black Thursday (I did roam the store just for the experience), so I waited for Black Friday to raid the discount movie bins. I averaged about $3 a movie.

Weekend chores. The regular weekend chores are good for wasting at least half a day. Most of the work involves laundry and housekeeping. I manage to stretch that out by sorting quarters, loading up the outgoing laundry, washing, drying, folding, and resorting the clean clothes to their proper place. Housekeeping works the same way…sweeping, vacuuming…

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