Man,what an adventure I had today! Last week was pretty routine,went to Triadelphia with a load of piling,Galv-tech back to Lynchburg,then I took a van load of kyanite to Orchard Park,and brought a load of hay back from Edinboro,Pa. to Altavista for Stacy Compton,the race car driver. (ok,that part wasn't so routine) He drives in the Craftsman truck series this year. I had 580 bales in the 53' van.Hay is scarce around here because of the drought.

So I left Sunday going back to Point Marion,Pa. with another load of piling.I told Todd Friday I didn't want to go back up there because the job site was such a mess.He said this was going to the other side of the bridge,across the river from where we unloaded before,so I said "OK,maybe it'll be better"...WRONG! When I got there this morning,after running rt.119 out of Morgantown which is crooked as a dog's leg,I saw the crane sitting there and said "that doesn't look bad at all". Then they told me they parked the crane there over the weekend in case it flooded.When they walked the crane back down over the bank right to the edge of the river-actually on a platform of crossties on a pile of rip-rap in the river-it didn't look so easy anymore. No wonder they moved it in case the river got up. I had to back down straight to where the crane was at first,then cut the trailer over to the left...or right,depending on how you look at it. The problem was a great big hole they had dug on my left and the chain link fence on my right,so I had very little room to turn the cab. I had to pull up and back up several times,working the trailer over a little at a time. I finally got backed into position and unloaded,and of course the bank was so steep they had to pull me back up it with a bulldozer. I took a couple of pictures,but they're not developed yet.

When I left there I had to go to Galv-tech in Pittsburgh.I was going to take 88 up to 21,but I didn't think I could make the turn onto the bridge when I came out of the job site,so I figured i'd just go up 119 to Uniontown and then 51 north. And I thought the first part of 119 was crooked! I kept hearing the dump truck drivers that are all over the area saying "southbound at the wall" or "northbound at the wall" and had no idea what they were talking about. I found out pretty quick though-a little ways out of town I got to this curve to the right with a big concrete wall on my right,and it took every bit of the road for me to get around it-if i'd have met anybody in it somebody was going to have to back-up.

Got to Galv-tech and was the only truck there,got loaded pretty quick and was going down rt. 40 somewhere between Uniontown and Keysers Ridge when the engine light came on and I lost most of my power and my engine brake was doing little or nothing. I struggled onward to Keysers Ridge truck stop and pulled in and checked the fault code-intake valve actuator malfunction. Jeff said to try to make it in and take it to Cat in Lynchburg,so I did. Only took about an hour longer than normal,got passed by everybody on the highway. When I dropped the load of coils in Lynchburg I tried to phone home so Jobyna could pick me up at Carter Cat.The phone rang,and rang,and rang-no answer,not even the answering machine. Billy-Bob was at Handy tarping his load when I dropped the trailer and offered to give me a ride,so I got him to pick me up at the Cat place and he brought me over to the store two miles from here,over on 699.He could turn around there easily and go back to 29 and continue on to Duluth,Ga. I walked the two miles home. In the dark. By myself. Only one dog came after me and he turned out to be friendly,even walked with me for a couple hundred yards. When I was about a quarter of a mile from home my phone rang-it was Jobyna. She said the phone hadn't rang all day and didn't have a dial tone.I told her I walked all the way from Lynchburg.

My investigation found that the phone line was pulled part of the way out of the wall plug.The line goes behind other dog's (that would be the beagle,not me) bed and aparently he had gotten tangled up in it and pulled it loose. That's all right,I needed the excercise anyway.