 It's 5 a.m. February 7th, 2022. It's about minus 14 Celsius outside, or seven degrees Fahrenheit. Bit of an earlier start today, I'm just gonna be good. It's supposed to warm up later. Monday morning, the light is still purple. Had our intersection. Still haven't changed it. Is there anyone keeping track? How long it's been? I should probably be keeping track. I'm the one showing you guys. It's been at least a month. In the beast today. So this is the picker truck. This is not my truck, not my regular truck, but I'm the fill-in guy for this truck. I'm gonna show you what I mean by picker truck here. It's got a 20,000 pound front axle, so she's heavy duty. She's an old Kenworth. She does the job good. She does the job. She's got this big picker on the back here. It's like a big crane, eh? Big seat up there, that's where I sit. And I have to unload some freight. I gotta load up some freight first. And bring it on over to Nipah, Wamanitoba. A couple hours from here. And then lift it off with that crane onto the ground. So this truck does require extra training, obviously, and that's why I'm the fill-in driver. Not my usual job, but I dabble. I'm a part-time crane operator. I was trained on this truck. The regular driver, for whatever reason, isn't in today. So here we go. Let's go pick up our stuff, figure out where it's going. And let's pick some stuff up and put it back down. This is sort of a last-minute deal. I was supposed to be going up to Arberg first thing this morning, and then this popped up. Everything sort of, it's trucking. Everything changes, right? It's okay. It's okay, this is kinda cool. I like doing this. Gotta drive the old beast for a day. Just rolling into Nipah here. I've got two pieces on my trailer. That's it. I think I'm taking something back too. It is about a two-hour drive to get here. Nice little town here in the valley. Got some kind of like cabinet in the truck here. Think this is fridge. He's got a fridge strapped in here into a kitchen cabinet by the looks of it. It's not my truck. It's all in there nice and safe, but it actually works really nice. There's no passenger seat in this truck, but this cabinet makes a nice little table right there. It's got little ledges on it so stuff doesn't slide off. It's all tied down. I kinda wanna do that in my truck, you know? Clever, clever, clever. Ah, you made my windshield a little dirty. Where's the, where are the wipers now again on this truck? There we go. These are the kind of interesting wipers that go like sideways across the window. I actually like that design better. It leaves less of a blind spot. I've got to turn right here. Oh dear. Am I gonna have enough room to turn? People coming in behind me. Oh yeah, it's a pretty big intersection. I've never turned this way before, so wasn't too sure. Look at this, lots of room. No problem, Trucker Josh. So with it being winter and cold and everything, I'm gonna have to sit up there in the cold unloading this stuff. I won't be able to film it for you. I'll be able to describe it for you afterwards. It's just with all my winter gear, my hard hat and everything else on there, there isn't really time to set anything up. So I apologize. I disappoints me when I can't show you some of the more exciting parts of my day, but I just got to unload two pieces, sort of like use that big bucket as a crane, just lift them off, put them on the ground, lift the returns back onto my trailer and we'll be back on the way to Winnipeg. Do any of you live in Nipahua? I've never been down this street before. I didn't know it even existed. Yeah, the guys are apparently there waiting for me already, which is another reason why I won't be able to set up my shots and everything. Because with YouTube and everything, I can't just put whoever on my YouTube video when I'm unloading and stuff. They've got to make sure that they're okay with it. So sometimes I get to put the good shots in there, get all the exciting parts, and other times I sort of have to skip over some parts of my day. Giant Tiger, that's Canadian Walmart right there. Do you have a Giant Tiger in your town? What do you got one in Steinback now? Never been in there. I don't know, wait, I was in there once, wasn't I? I should probably go check it out. This truck is just a beast. No one's gonna mess with me. Two, I guess this is a two-way radio and this is CB radio. Not too many people use CB radios up here in Canada. There is, there's a few, but I don't run with one because there's no one to really talk to ever. Unless you're running with a buddy, like in convoy, then you have, but then you can just use one of these. It's a two-way radio. Easy, you don't really need the CB radio up here because it's more of a popular thing in the U.S. But yeah, there is a few people who use it here. I don't know why there's both of them here. I don't know if it's just to look cool, just to look super trucker. Cause I don't know that thing right there just screams super trucker to me, that whole situation. That's a lot of, a lot of action going on here bouncing around everywhere. It's not mine. All right, I'm just joking. I'm just bugging them. What I've gone and done is I've delivered a new one of these. It's just like a transformer or something. And there's just a few boxes in this crate. I'm bringing the crate back into Winnipeg and I'm bringing this old broken down transformer, whatever that is, back into Winnipeg as well. I just picked it up with the crane. It was just underneath the weight limit for that crane. So we could just barely pick it up, but we got it up here and I got her tied down. If you haven't seen this truck before, I'm the fill in guy for the crane truck here. And today was my day to fill it in or fill in. That's where I sit up there when I'm operating it up. I'll give you a quick look of how I get up there. Just in case you're wondering, this truck is a beast. All right, so if I wanted to get up there, ladder on this side here. I just climb right on up here. I'm holding the seat down. See, carefully sit down right here. See, and then there's feet controls here. One of them makes the crane go like this and one of them makes the crane extend and retract. And then I got levers here and here. Two shangles there, a couple more shangles back here for the supports and the feet. It's got a heated seat up here. I don't know if it works or not, but and then I sit up here and unload by freight and I place it on the trailer over there. So this is my little work zone when I'm up here. But since I'm not gonna be working, reattach this bungee here. We wanna keep this seat forward like this so that snow doesn't build up on there, right? And other things, rainwater and stuff like that in the summertime. Getting down from here is a little tricky. You gotta be very careful. Always have, oh, you know the drill, three points of contact, all that, you know all that. You don't wanna mess up or mess around going down here, slip and fall. It's a long way down and it would hurt. It would hurt. And I got a ladder here. Oh yeah, that's what I was doing today. I got you guys strapped my head here right now. I hope that the angles were good and that you were able to see everything. Now I gotta bring this freight back into Winnipeg or at the Flying Jay, just east of Portage La Prairie right now. Very small, small load, right? Not much, not much going on today. I'm just gonna drop this off and then head back, park it and go home. Now that'd be my whole day. That's a lot of fun. That's a lot of fun. I'm not gonna lie, I like using it. Yeah, there's like this kitchen cabinet in here, but it's all secured and it's all good. I was just bugging him about the mics there before. I don't know if he's gonna be watching the video or not, but you super trucker, how many mics do you need? Man, got one radio for this, one radio for that. Is there any more radios around here? Bugging them. Anyway, okay, so that's that. Just wanted to give you a quick tour, you know what? One thing I wanted to do while I was here, may as well. I mean, I did check the straps there over just out there. I just want to give them one more notch. Just want to tighten them up just a little bit, just to be sure. I like to make sure my straps are tight. Because remember I was talking the other day about running with an open deck, right? Anything that would fall off of an open deck like this is my responsibility. Falls 100% on me. I think that makes sense. Okay, let's go drop this off. Should get there in good time before the end of the day. He's got some pretty nice pipes on it too, but they don't sing as loud as my truck. My truck's a lot louder. Is here honking? Oh, there's a train over there. Poor digital prairie here actually has quite a few train tracks coming through here. I think they have the CN rail and the CP rail, which is the Canadian national railway and the Canadian Pacific railway. They both go through this little town here. I'm pretty sure anyways. There's a lot of traffic here all of a sudden now, of course. Hey, Trucker Josh is trying to get on the road. Everybody come now. They all got the memo. Everybody all at the same time. Look at all the way around the corner there. Highway was dead a minute ago. I don't want to cut in front of this guy. Don't want to cut in front of that guy. There's another two guys coming over there yet. I don't want to cut in front of them. I could, but should I? Probably not. Like this guy here, I could have pulled out in front of him and he could have taken the next lane. But see that would have been a bad idea because he couldn't have taken the next lane because there's a pickup beside him on that side. So you never want to assume that they'll just move over. Sometimes they can't. He's got a pickup overtaking them right there. All right, this guy's turning. Okay, hitting the flashers on. This truck's got a big old cat engine under the hood. Pure power, little bit so we can see where we're going. That was an unexpectedly exciting day. I was not expecting to be on the picker truck today when I went to work. Like I was saying before I had my truck all warmed up and ready to head up to Arbor. And everything lined up. I was just about to roll out and then I got switched onto this, which is pretty cool. Cause it's fun to do that every now and then. And it was a nice day today. It was actually pretty warm. So it's not like it was, you know, minus 30 with a minus 50 wind chill. That would be very cold sitting up on that seat. I don't think that little seat warmer could keep up with that. I couldn't even tell if it was warming or not today. I turned it on, I couldn't feel it, but I don't know, I'm also wearing a line jeans. So it was fun, a little bit of an unexpected treat. But it seemed to go quick. It was a long day, but it seemed to go by really quick. And we're headed home now. One quick stop on the way home. We went grocery shopping this weekend. We forgot to pick one thing up. That's my fake beer, de-alcoholized. It's actually tastes really good. Have any of you tried this before? It actually tastes really good. As good as it's gonna get for de-alcoholized. I haven't had a drop of alcohol in seven days, 20, no, seven months, 26 days and 23 hours. That was eight months. Eight months, not a drop. And I'm not a recovery alcoholic or anything. It's nothing like that. I've just decided to stop intaking alcohol for our fertility to help in our fertility journey. And I know I'm still drinking coffee, but I've reduced the amount of coffee I drink. I wasn't able to cut that out. I guess I could've wanted to, but it just, it's one thing that I held onto, okay? Gave up all the rest. Cut my coffee down probably to about half. And then I have four cups a day now, approximately. And sometimes less, which is the recommended amount, according to my Google doctor, which is Dr. Josh. I am the Google doctor. According to what we've read, that's a pretty decent amount to have in a day. That's what I'm sticking with anyway. Cut the alcohol out so that we can boost that because we're going through our IVF journey soon. We're waiting in line. As soon as our names pop up, then we begin on the next cycle. So the last time we heard it could be as early as March, could be as late as April. Hopefully it doesn't get pushed back any further than that. But my goal is to not have a drop of alcohol until my wife can enjoy a drink with me after she's done breastfeeding. So if you think about it, that's over a year. If it were to happen, if we were to conceive in March, nine months down the road, boo, baby, yay, baby comes out. And then after that, another one, I don't know how long women breastfeed for, I don't know, six months. I'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Haven't thought of that yet, but I'm guessing about another year yet. So it'll be pretty much two years. I'll have just cut it out completely. I think that's good for my health. I think it's for a good reason. I had to have a good reason because I didn't, I enjoy a beer here and there. I enjoy beer. I like beer. I love the taste of it. That's why I drink this O'Doos De Alcoholized beer now. It's the only beer I've found in our local stores here that actually tastes decent. You know, I've tried Budweiser Zero and all this other stuff. Kind of, it just doesn't cut it. Even this, this doesn't hold any water, so to speak, compared to actual, like a Coors banquet. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Coors banquet. But I think for a good two years, it's good just to keep my mind off of it. That way I know that I haven't been developing a problem or anything. It's good for my body, for health-wise. Not just for fertility, it's good for everything. Your liver takes approximately a year to regenerate if you're healthy. So after two years, I sure have a brand spanking new liver all set and ready to go. So it's a nice little reboot for my system in there. And I feel good about it. I feel good about it. It's like a goal I have. And you know, one day we'll have that celebratory Coors banquet. There it goes again. And you know, it'll taste better than it ever has before. But until then I drink these old duels. Have you ever had one? Give them a shot if you're into de-alcoholized beer. If you're not, I totally understand. Don't waste your money on it then. But if you are, it's a pretty good option. It's pretty awesome. I usually have one every night after work, maybe two. Sometimes I party on the weekends and I have three. I'm a party animal. So I guess I should explain that for people who may not even know that de-alcoholized beer exists. I don't blame you. I would have never looked at it a year ago. Who knew it was even on the shelf at Superstore? I didn't. But since I've been on this quest, we've been on this journey. I've walked past it, I was like, what's this? Beer in a Superstore. We don't sell alcohol in our grocery stores in Manitoba. You usually gotta go to that building over there as a liquor mark. That's where you would usually go to, you get it, liquor mark. Pretty self-explanatory. Or a beer vendor, which is like the back of a hotel or something. You can go in there and pick up a case or something. But yeah, this de-alcoholized beer, you can buy it at Superstore. If you don't know what that means, there's no alcohol in it. It's just beer with no alcohol. I call it fake beer. But it does the trick. It satisfies my taste buds. I think it tastes good. I'm not trying to justify it, but it's just where I'm at in life right now. It's tied in me over, all right? It's doing its job. So I can enjoy, you know, I can go crazy on the weekends and have three and it'd be good to go out if we want to. Thanks for watching this today, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. It's always exciting when I get to go out on the crane truck. Sorry I wasn't able to show you unloading it, but it's pretty straightforward. It does have the claw, but we have materials and straps that you use to tie onto the claw. And then it goes down onto that piece that we had on the trailer, right? And then we lift it off. It's just like a crane, except it's made for unloading logs, but you can also use it. You can use it for whatever you want to. And that thing was just strong enough to unload that. I think that thing was, it said 2,390, so 2,400 kgs, which would be over 5,000 pounds, 5,500, 6,000 pounds. Well, the heavy little bugger I had on there just for that crane. It's not the most powerful crane in the world, but it does the job and it's very handy to have. Hope you enjoyed it though. I will see you guys tomorrow. Take care.