I bought a food truck. It took me a while to write about it.

I read from a number of food truck owners the things they wished they had known…and a theme emerged: get ready to do a lot of things that have nothing to do with cooking.

I knew this would be true, I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. After the five hour drive back to Seattle in my new (used) truck, I started to feel more comfortable behind the wheel of a 27-foot-long beast that makes wide turns, accelerates like a disinterested sloth, and has a backup camera that only shows the world in charcoal and black.

Excuse my awesome photoshopping, here’s the truck…new paint job to come. And no, I won’t acutally have Hambulance written on the hood, last thing I need is for sick pigs calling me for help.

As soon as I got home, I realized it was too tall to fit in the driveway under the tree branches. Without a ladder at my disposal, I stood atop my Honda Element in the rain on a dark Seattle night cutting branches back…only to find out that once I was done, the angle was too steep and I couldn’t pull it in anyway.

So I bought and shoveled a few thousand pounds of gravel to level things out, and now my truck is dead. The battery wiring is…weird…the back of the truck is filthy. I spent two hours one day on a single corner of the thing…and it still looks dirty there. I’m seriously considering putting sponges on a belt sander and seeing if I can invent the future of cleaning so I can still get things going before my 75th birthday. Or maybe I can get one of those giant car wash brushes on some kind of mobile device and just bring it right down the middle. We’ll see.