Eden, North Carolina. Man, what a night. What a day yesterday. I'm not as depressed this morning, but I was in pretty bad shape last night. Okay, so here's the deal. I delivered my last load on Monday night. I wasn't assigned another load until Tuesday morning. That load didn't pick up until Wednesday morning and couldn't deliver until Thursday morning. For the most part, this is what sent me into a tailspin. I'm looking at our finances wondering how we're going to pay our bills until Mara gets back to work, and USX doesn't have freight for me? I felt really lost and lonely and I really needed to be with Mara online for a little bit, but she was distracted. The first time I saw her was kind of a bum rush in that she popped online, asked me to help her with something, and then left for a nap. Then I waited all day for her to come back and, when she did, she didn't have any time for me. Now, I'm not really the needy type. I don't need constant attention. This only bothered me because I was kind of in desparate straits to begin with. That made it worse.

In Mara's defense, she's recently been elevated to High Council in our Guild in Everquest II. I think it's a bit more responsibility than she expected. I talked to her last night on the phone. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Around 17:30 yesterday someone at U.S. Xpress started trying to get me to bobtail to shipper. As I mentioned in my last couple of entries, we had a little sparring match over who was actually going to take responsibility for that one. In the end they actually put it in writing. Now, they tried to get me to hurry up and come up here, but I didn't see the point. Sure, it was a preloaded trailer, but the load still couldn't deliver until Thursday morning. So around 23:00 I headed this way. Well, surprise, surprise. When I got up here the customer would not give me the load because they have a strict policy against giving drivers loads if they don't bring in an empty. Hmmm. Seems like I read something about that somewhere. Let me see. Load info, maybe?

Well, long story short, this was just the perfect end to the perfect day. It sent me even further into the proverbial abyss. My melodramatic gene took control, and in a fit of frustration I send Mara the message; "A perfect end to a perfect day. Christ, if I only had a sharp knife." Dumbass. I'm so embarassed about that now. But I sent it. Needless to say, this concerned Mara a bit and we wound up talking on the phone. I wasn't much in a talking mood, so after we hung up she sent me a message saying that she had tried to call to help and I had alienated her. That really helped my outlook on things. Okay, that last sentence was meant as sarcasm, but I think maybe it did help things. It was like a cup of cold water in the face. I talked to her in text messages a bit more, and that made me feel a little better.

Anyway, someone wrote me about 02:00 and told me to wait until morning, that they'd get it all straightened out in the a.m. Well, they straightened it out alright. They took the load off of me about 30 minutes ago. At that point I just shook my head and tried to decide if I was going to head back to Greensboro or what. Well, my dispatcher sent me a message a few minutes ago. Now they want me to head to Charlotte for an empty. That's about 130 miles from here. Then, get this, they want me to pick up in Lynchburg, Virginia. That's about 75 miles in the other direction. So let me see. That's about 335 miles bobtail and empty to pick up a 368 mile load. Hmmm. Well, I have the hours to drive it. That's not the issue. But the pre-plan load info says that my empty miles is 100. Hehe. That won't fly.

Man. I'm going to be 30 miles from home. I'm going to be making some hard decisions on the drive down to Charlotte. Okay, so I'm being melodramatic again. I'll go pick up my empty, and then I'll go pick up my load. But at this point I can clearly see the writing on the wall. I can't make a living at U.S. Xpress.