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Good morning Oregon and everyone everywhere else. 45 and climbing. Mostly overcast at the moment with some heavy clouds moving this way from the west. A little rain during the night.
Overhead doors showed up yesterday morning. One 8' door and one 12' door had all the old door opener stuff removed and all new stuff installed. The new openers are a lot quieter than the two remaining old ones are. He was able to program the visor buttons on the Mkz (3 buttons, 3 doors) but the F 350 buttons couldn't be programmed. The older tech used in that version of the openers won't frequency match. Thought we could get it set up for the two older remaining openers, one being on the "boat bay", but no joy. So the pickup is stuck with the hand held opener.
Got the electric winch on the boat trailer R & R'd with the new one. Much quieter and it has power in / power out. The old one was power in only. Had to free spool out and the cable easily bound up. Hoping the new one doesn't have the cable binding problems of the old one and if it does, the power out will greatly assist with clearing it.
Good morning Oregon and everyone everywhere else. 49 now with partial overcast.
Murphy visiting and helping out with the preparation for the Diamond Lake Trip. Still have to fix a couple of things this morning and put the boat batteries through some load testing. Went out and found one of them 2.5 volts and 2% charged. The other showed dead, 4% charge, but the "SUL" light came on. Zapped both of them with 100 amps for 2 or 3 minutes then they showed 95% charged. Turned them on and cycled the electric trim tabs. They sounded very weak. Both batteries dropped back to a low charge state. Put the charger on and went off to work on other stuff.
Got in the pickup to go to town for parts, and the battery was dead on it. What the heck? Someone must have flown over in the middle of the night and zapped us with an EMP.
Checked the records and we got the boat batteries 06-24-19.
Finished up some stuff this morning. Pulling the boat out of the garage and going to test the batteries and give them a bit of a load stress test while I hose the exterior off. Got a little road spray and some pond scum on it when we had it out not long ago. Interior has been spiffed up and some new indoor/outdoor carpet laid out in it.
Have to go into Bend this afternoon for supplies. Tomorrow it's off to Diamond Lake for 15 days. One nice thing.....in years past it was leave way early and spend 5-1/2 hours on the road to get there. This year its only an hour drive to get there..
Got some of my gear out and hung on the 2nd story balcony overlooking the living room. Going to put my roping saddle on one side and my McClellan Army Saddle on the other side eventually.
Yes. On Wednesday Costco Logistics, Customer Service escalated this to upper management in charge of delayed or lost shipments. She called me Thursday morning and said she had had a 'heart to heart' chat with RXO management. Suddenly RXO is on the phone and the "no way it can be delivered now before next week", turned into an it will be here tomorrow between 1600-2000. Costco manager called them back a second time and suddenly it was arriving, still on Friday but between 1100 and 1500. The truck is time stamped on the middle gate camera at 1114 AM Friday morning.
Box truck and it was loaded down. We were first off. Hispanic two man crew, one spoke English, the other didn't. The non- English speaker must have been "fresh off the boat" from a pretty far out "backwoods - primitive" part of his country. He was wearing a musk type cologne. The mosquitoes loved him. Whatever he was wearing (both of them in short pants and T-Shirts i.e., lots of skin) he attracted mosquitoes by the millions. The driver and I were left alone. Diana got the can of Repel and gave it to him. The driver explained what it was in Spanish and he smiled, took the can and spayed himself down head to foot. He started smiling a lot after that. Really liked the Strawberry Lemonade Diana brought out too.
Driver explained they had had a screwed up management and dispatchers. (Are you sure Chris that your dispatcher isn't moonlighting for RXO?) He asked me if this had been the first delivery or if there had been others. Told him this was the 6th attempt in a month.
He said a couple of months ago there had been some type of change and they had really messed things up. He said the run we are on used to be an overnight - 2 day run. They've cut it back to a box truck and a one day run. Said they wouldn't be finished and headed back to Portland until around 1900-2000 that night.
The way I figure it, they are illegal as all get out. PUC, so all laws and regulations, Federal and State should apply. 218 miles from the terminal to us via I-5 and 58. 50 miles from here to Bend and then there is mileage - time for getting to drop off locations in Bend then 186 miles from Bend back to their Terminal. They left at 0630 this morning. That makes roughly a 16 to 17 hour day and over 454 miles in a 24 hour period. They could save 19 miles if they went over 26 (Hood) going back.
Their truck was full. Now considering that RXO normally makes runs up here on Monday and Thursday's and if the trucks are all as full as that one was, and we know there was an extra special truck on Tuesday - so that at least 4 trucks this week, the way they are running that company makes absolutely no sense and seems illegal as all get out. When I was a cop......"creative" log books were fun. I'll bet in this case its being treated as a less than 400 mile "local" trip so no log books are kept. Surprises me they don't get caught up in all of this at a scale or inspection. There again, in the box van 28,000 lb license, they probably don't waste time checking them that close.
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