This, that, and the other

This
The vagaries of manufacturing. Last night I showed up at a plant to pick up a load. They'd gotten about half of it done and were revamping the production line to make the rest. (Just-in-time manufacturing is a wonderful thing on both ends...) The changeover was a fairly quick procedure. I should have my load in another hour or so.

A half-hour later, the forklift driver came out to ask how much my truck could legally haul. Seems he'd looked at the load list he had and added up the weights. It came to about 50,000 pounds. That sounded a bit off to him.

Uh, yeah. I've never hauled more than about 46,000. And I was at the ragged edge of legality then. 43,000-45,000 is as much as you can reliably load. Anything much over that is a crap shoot.

I told him that and he said “Thought so.” Then he went back inside.

Five or six hours later, he came back out. The production line changeover hadn't gone as smoothly as they expected. It had taken them this long to admit it wasn't gonna happen tonight. So they guessed I could just take what I already had.

By then I was so far past my legal driving limit it wasn't funny. Slowly and carefully I crawled out the gate and parked on a piece of shoulder they leave open for just such unfortunates.* And then I went to sleep.

That
Woke up this morning and wended my way back toward the Interstate. A half mile down the road I topped the hill and saw a beautiful white cloud below me.

The fog bank looked like cotton candy, or that stuff they use nowadays to stuff pillows and soft toys. Somehow insubstantial and solid at the same time. I would have loved to sit on the hilltop and look at it. Driving down into it was another matter.

But duty calls. So I continued over the hilltop, descended into the grayness—and out of it in seconds. It was much “shallower” than I'd expected. Like driving through the ghost of a huge loaf of French bread.

Through it and out, and down the road I went.

The other
Barreling into the city** this afternoon I suddenly realized a pigeon had merged with the traffic.

Don't ask me why, but that bird had settled into the stream of cars, about two cars up from me. It changed lanes two or three times before it had an attack of good sense and went for altitude.

The stuff I read when I was a kid was right. Pigeons can fly at sixty or so.

- - - - -
*I count my blessings. A lot of companies won't do anything of the sort.
**--at a legal speed, of course—but anything over twenty is barreling along in this thing. Feels like it, anyway...