Sooo... 1,213 miles driven to Winston-Salem and back, ten stops, over 50 gallons of diesel, 1,500 pounds of cargo, 33 hours worked (11pm Thursday to 8am Saturday), two full nights of sleep lost. I was driving a seriously underpowered truck with a 4-cylinder diesel engine that had issues with even slight hills. At times, I couldn't go above 52 mph on the PA Turnpike, and even worse speeds near DC, but thankfully I did ok on most of the straight roads.

I wish I could state what it is that I hauled, but it's unique enough that saying so would then identify the client, and my route could then inadvertently compromise some of their scientific work. Suffice to say that you have heard of this item on the news recently, but it's still pretty rare, despite the heavy publicity. (Drop me a line if I know you, and I'll tell you individually. No public guessing, ok?) There weren't placebos in these particular shipments, but the same client often sends out shipments for double-blind studies, which makes labeling boxes for carriers (and the TSA) a bit sticky.

One twist is that each box had a sensor (inside the packaging) that kept an ongoing record of temperature over time, and a shipping requirement was that all recipients had to check the sensor on every single box before accepting shipment. Opening all of the boxes took up time at each drop-off, and I don't think anyone had budgeted for this time when my schedule was written, so I was running almost four hours late by the end of my run, despite my starting almost an hour early.

I had never been to the cargo area at the Philadelphia airport before. Space seems a bit tight for US Airways, at least. Even though the bodies of the aircraft stay within the barbed-wire-fenced restricted area, the wings and the tails extend over the fences, and I actually ended up driving the truck underneath one of the wings. I realize airport vehicles do this all the time, but it's somewhat unnerving when I'm driving on what's technically a public road.

It's been a long time since I'd been to North Carolina. I'm not used to being the one perceived as having an accent, especially in the more rural areas. No matter how slowly and distinctly I enunciated my words, I still got questioning looks for words like, "bag", "water" and "fork". I also noticed an interesting split on the radio, where the announcers and larger scale advertisers used a more neutral American accent, and then local advertisers and customer testimonials all spoke with the local twang, sometimes even within the same commercial.

My cell phone's battery is dying a slow death. (They wouldn't replace the battery when they swapped out the phone for exchange the other day.) I've already purchased a new one (for $5 on eBay, rather than $60 at Sprint, thank-you-very-much), but it isn't here yet. This is seriously becoming an issue for work, but we got through the problems as the day progressed (and seemingly never ended). I had to carefully budget when to even turn the phone on, much less use it.

H&R Block had had computer issues lately, for both the website and the company's call center, but I managed to enroll (by phone) in their basic tax prep class at the very last minute. My particular class had actually already started, but I was able to make up the first session yesterday morning, immediately after returning from my marathon drive. Thankfully, the first class doesn't require very much brain, as I didn't have any to offer by that point. :-)