While Craig was polishing his Kuhaku pitch in bookstores across Tokyo, I was calling truckers, trying to figure out the best way to get 46 boxes of books to our distributor, Consortium. My first call to a local trucking company turned into a conversation with Bob about a Seinfeld episode where Kramer goes to a fantasy baseball camp and ends up pitching to Joe Pepitone. Here's some of the dialogue:

Kramer: Well, you know, we were playing a game and, you know, I was pitching, and I was really throwing some smoke. And Joe Pepitone, he was up, and man that guy, you know, he was crowding the plate.

Jerry: Wow! Joe Pepitone!

Kramer: Yeah, well, Joe Pepitone or not, I own the inside of that plate. So I throw one, you know, inside, you know, a little chin music, put him right on his pants. Cause I gotta intimidate when I'm on the mound. Well the next pitch, he's right back in the same place. So, I had to plunk him.

Kramer ends up punching Mickey Mantle in the mouth during a fantasy camp bench-clearing brawl. (A nice use of "chin music" here, and we can now add Michael Richards' mug to our pantheon of chin music users).

Back to trucking: Bob's company only hauls freight to Alaska and back, so he referred me to another local company, which quoted a price of $800. Frankly, that was way more than I wanted to pay, but I really had no idea how much this kind of thing costs. I called some more companies and realized I could get the freight to frosty St. Paul for less than $400. But which company to go with? None of the names meant anything to me. The national brands like UPS were all way too expensive. Finally, I came across Freight Quote, a company in Kansas that offers shippers instant online quotes from dozens of freight companies. I signed into their site, began looking around at different functions on the site, and ... the phone rings. It's Rob from Freight Quote ready to walk me through the site. There's something disconcerting about being jarred from your solitary online search by a phone call from the site you're searching, but all the same, Rob was very helpful in explaining shipping terms and helping me figure out the freight class, etc. It seems like a good operation, so, fledgling publishers, when you get to that very exciting state where you're asked to send 1,518 books out the door, I recommend going to Freight Quote first.