Skip Caray

I saw the news on the internet on Sunday night; Skip Caray passed away a few days before his sixtyninth birthday. It was originally announced he died in his sleep but Monday his wife said he died feeding birds in his backyard. I am still processing his death and what it means to me. Its a quarter to three in the morning and I have spent the last four hours or so going throught the internet reading what everyone has to say and watching videos of his most famous calls. I even posted to the columnists blogs at the AJC, something I had never done before. It is still sinking in. His sense of humor is what I will probably remember most. One of my favorite moments occured in August of '85, the Braves were playing the Dodgers in LA. The cameraman spotted a woman walking down the steps to her seat wearing a very skimpy neon lime green bikini. When she reached her row she turned to reveal she was wearing a thong (unheard of in '85) and Skip and Pete got very quiet for a few seconds. Skip finally snickered, "That reminds of the butcher who backed into a saw and got a little behind in his work!" I was watching the game alone and nearly fell out of my seat laughing. I was reading the blogs at the AJC tonight and everyone was giving their favorite "Skip-isms." Among them, the "chopper to Chipper" the foul balls that were caught by a fan in....(insert small town here) and when things were going badly for the Braves "The bases are loaded and I wish I were too." When he was calling Hawk games he used to declare it was "cocktail hour" after a win. One of the ones that used to bug me was "he hit it hard but out" which sounded too much like a home run call but meant the batter was out. Now I wish I could hear it one more time. Actually I wish I could never stop hearing it. A lot of people were noting what a shame it was that TBS had taken the Braves and Skip off the air, and also that they wished he could have been admitted to the Hall of Fame before his death. But the reason for both probably was the same reasons we all loved him: He didn't look, act, speak (both tonally and his words themselves) the corporate way. He told the truth even when the truth was ugly and he did it with a sense of humor. A lot of readers remembered times when the Braves were being blown out, Skip would tell the viewers that if they promised to patronize the broadcast sponsors, they had his permission to go walk the dog. A lot of readers compared his passing to that of Lewis Grizzard, which was funny to me because I was thinking about a favorite sports saying of Lewis': "Losing hurts worse than winning feels good." And the more I think about Skip the more it hurts. I mean, I have been listening to Skip do baseball and basketball games (he actually came to Atlanta to do Hawks games) for two thirds of my life. I can't imagine the number of hours listening to him. I have been reflecting, too, on how appropriate it is that Skip is most famous for calling the game that most reflects life; baseball. Its interesting that Skip's declining health coincided with the decline of the Braves dynasty. I can't help but wonder if this event isn't the final blow. It has been the worst Braves season in almost a generation (think about THAT for a moment) and just when you think it can't get any worse.... Well, I am remembering another Lewis Grizzard saying,"Life is like a dogsled team; if you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes." Skip never had a backside to look at and he never kissed any either. We have lost a true original, an Atlanta Icon.

Trucking note: We got a job almost immediately after the last post taking us from Dallas TX to a town near Ocala FL. We went home from there, I had lost a filling that needed replacing which was done on Thursday, on Friday we caught a job picking up in Cleveland TN going to a town on the New Mexico side of the Texas border. From there we dh'd into Dallas, which is where we are now.

Boredom Part II

Well, we are now in Dallas but we had to deadhead (DH) to get here. Called dispatch where I asked them to ask Planning (the guys who figure out where the freight is going to be coming from and authorize trucks to move there if needed) what the forecast was for El Paso. For some reason FECC doesn't allow drivers to speak directly to these guys, we have to do it through dispatch. The word came back that they would pay us to go to Dallas, that El Paso was "dead." Could have used that knowledge on Friday! In the past, Planning would be available on weekends, (but no more) so we could have called Sunday and then been on our way to Dallas and set up for Monday. Instead, we spent all day Monday DH'ing to Dallas. So here we sit again. As I said, I knew when we accepted the El Paso that it was a gamble; I was prepared for the possibility of it not working. In retrospect, I still would have taken the job, but I would have called Planning late Friday so we could have moved. We checked in and there were 8 trucks in front of us last night, just a few minutes ago it was down to 3, so there is a good chance we will get out of here today. We got up relatively early this morning to beat the heat (supposed to hit 100 again today)and did our 30 minute walk with Buffett, since then I have been surfing the net and Donna has been reading and Buffett is asleep in front of the air conditioning vent. So we wait...tick...tick...tick...

Boredom!

This job is one of very high "highs" and occasionally very low "lows." The worst for us in three plus years has been having a blown engine in the Nevada desert and hitting a low bridge in Chicago. Right now we are in El Paso, Texas. We took an extended break at home after spending two solid months on the road and then caught an LG Electronics load out of Atlanta to Memphis. The afternoon following the a.m. delivery we were accidentally offered two different loads within minutes of each other. We had to choose between a load going to the Dallas area and one going to El Paso. The Dallas load paid more per mile but the El Paso load paid twice as much in total dollars and was still a good paying load per mile. We have had much luck getting out of Dallas rapidly and we had never picked up or delivered to El Paso, but I had heard stories of other truckers getting the best load of their lives out of there and others who sat for days waiting for a load. We have delivered fairly often in the Brownsville area of Texas (also on the Tex-Mex border), with somewhat mixed results in getting a load out. Sometimes great, sometimes not. So we had to make a judgement call. (Actually, since we have the option of declining any load offered us, they are all judgement calls) I opted to roll the dice and gamble on El Paso, thinking we would have half a day thursday and all day friday to get a load. Oops! It is now sunday afternoon and here we sit. Actually times like this is when we have some great adventures but the remains of the hurricane that hit South Texas earlier this week are sitting and spinning over the Southwest. The thing about a desert is when it rains it turns into a mess, which is not fun, especially when you have a 95 pound golden retriever with you. But like the cliched quote; when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, we have used this time to finally start organizing all our pictures and learned how to use this blog. The temperature is actually very comfortable right now and hopefully if the weather breaks we may get out to a minor league baseball game later this afternoon, which is one of my favorite things to do out here during the baseball season. So we make do, and wait for a load out of here tomorrow.......hopefully!