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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Friday, December 31
The Wife and I met ten years ago today!!!

She can write her own diary if she wants her version out there…She traditionally lies about how we met, usually implying that I was “hard-up” for a date at the time which I wasn’t, don’t even start,  I was going out with babes left and right…Doubt that at your peril…To repeat: I was NOT hard-up.

We were both working at a large hotel/casino on the Sin City Strip and we met completely by accident when some oaf dropped a table on her leg…I was a security supervisor at the time  – she worked in banquets – and I was dispatched to perform and eye test that involved a flashlight and following my index finger to see if there was probable cause to send her in for a drug test.

(The joke, of course, is there was, but I hid the evidence in exchange for a date).

Anyway, she was all over me from the start…Don’t let anyone tell you differently…No siree…All over me!!!…As it was, I happened to have some open slots in my social calendar and was able to squeeze her in for a couple of dates.

Our meeting was pure luck because our paths did not normally cross…I asked her out, she had no choice but to say yes, and the rest is Cupid history.

Boy, the cat was really laying it on today when I got home from work…We usually give her her daily canned yummy ration when it gets dark and it’s winter, of course, so it’s getting darker earlier and she was on me as soon as I walked in the door.

She was on the kitchen table when I walked in the door and followed me to my desk while I cleared out my pockets and, since her food bowls are kept nearby, began eating from last night’s yummy plate, glancing up at me to make sure I saw her dining on day-old cat food…Her look implied I was making her eat a felt tip pen…I gave her yummies at the usual time, tho.

Work was busy, but we had two desk clerks, Gabriel and Leah, so I was able to do supervisor stuff all day…I assigned rooms for tomorrow, we are completely booked with a couple of rooms out of order, but when I left there were only two unassigned, which isn’t too bad…Alice the GM said she will take care of those tomorrow.

I am taking partial credit for this, since I’ve been assigning rooms for a couple of months…Two is manageable…Last year there were times when we had 13 unassigned, which was a living hell.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Thursday, December 29
Felt better today, but we had to put a new battery in my car.

Here’s what happened: The Wife, whom you will recall drove home Tuesday night after I ralphed on the side of the road, fiddled with the interior lights in the car and they stayed on all night and all day Wednesday because the car wasn’t used…The batter was dead this morning…It wouldn’t accept a jump, either, so we said screw it and bought a new battery…By chance a couple of the neighbor boys – strapping young lads who were probably waiting for Her Majesty to favor them with a curt nod from her window – were outside and they installed it for us…Regular readers of this crap know had had I been obliged to do it myself I would probably still be at it.

Work is getting busy…With it come guest who seem to have air about them that says they are accustomed to being accommodated.

We have a shuttle that takes guests to the mountain…Usually we have two shuttles going, but we only have two drivers right now and they can’t work seven days a week, so only Earl was working today…The lack of two shuttles had one guest annoyed…He was talking to Gabriel about it and Gabriel wasn’t able to produce anything he wanted to hear and one of my duties is to look out for my desk clerks in this situation, so I waddle out.

The man’s point seemed to be there was a second shuttle parked right out front so why wasn’t it in service???…I told the guy, rather than slapping him, that we only had one driver working and only two on staff, it being tuff to find employees right now…This really didn’t please him, but you can’t really argue with a reasonable point made by a nice guy, unless you’re a dolt, of course…This guy wasn’t and eventually left the lobby still breathing.

Then I had the pleasure of talking to Mr Patrick…Mr Patrick and I have chatted several times over the year-plus I’ve been at the resort…He is always a guest in Bldg 1, which we manage for another company and Bldg 1 was built in the Harding Administration and doesn’t have an elevator…Mr Patrick has bad knees and needs a first floor unit…Last year I put him in another building, which I got reamed for because I was not supposed to do that.

Anyway, Mr Patrick has this folksy, good-old-boy quality that gives the impression he usually gets what he wants, mainly due to his incessant whining…When we talked a couple weeks I told him the company had put him a third floor unit…He said that wouldn’t do, he required something on the first floor…I told him truthfully that I had no control over the room he was assigned and was powerless to move him and gave him a contact name and number.

Well, he called back today to thank me!!!…I thought he was going to nag me, but I checked and they moved him to a first-floor room…He seemed to think this was my doing and I said it wasn’t but I was glad everything worked out.

I’m feeling good again…Had some ginger tea and chicken soup at work and when that stayed down tried some leftover prime rib for dinner…Some good rest tonight and I should be good tomorrow.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Wednesday, December 28
The Wife took care of me today.

I slept reasonably well…The stomach settled down but it still felt like I’d been hit by a train…I woke up every couple of hours overnight and tried some water, first a couple of drops than a sip or two and I will able to hold that down, so I upped the dose to half a glass, which was key because I was very thirsty.

About 10am I requested a hot bath…I got more than that…The Wife made me an Epsom salts bath, then drained the tub and made me a bath with Tibetan salt…Included was being wrapped in towels and hot water poured over me…Then she put on my jammies for me and put me to bed, but not before I got a coconut oil rub on my thyroid…This entry would be longer, except I went to bed at 3 in the afternoon.

That, boys and girls, is how you take care of your husband…Ladies, please do not marry a man you are not prepared to do these things for and, similarly, do not marry a man who will not take care of you like this, altho you will probably have to provide instruction…It is not reasonable to expect most men to have a working knowledge of hot, salted baths.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Tuesday, December 27
A long, good, day…I hadn’t seen Cousin Babs in 20 years and if her daughter Marley and I had ever met neither of us remember….Her brother Mike and his wife Barb, who I see from time to time, were there, too and The Wife and Her Majesty got along famously with everyone.

Mike and I are so alike it isn’t even funny…One, at lunch we both decided to have breakfast…He ordered biscuits and gravy, substituting hash browns for whatever the other option was and throwing in a couple of over-easies!!!…Crap, that more or less what I was looking to have, too, so I told the waiter I would have the exact same thing.

This enabled me to bore Mike with my biscuits and gravy story…I didn’t grow up with them and first had them in the navy, coming off watch at 0600 one day…I was hungry and biscuits and gravy were on the menu and me being me at the time I thought who in the hell would want to ruin a perfectly good biscuit with gravy???…Well, a competent and highly trained US Navy cook, of course, and I’d been in love with them ever since.

Later, we sitting at some bar specializing in hard cider and we both sat the same way in our chair and crossed our legs the exact same way, too….His mom and my dad were siblings and his middle name is Sparrow, so these things could be expected, I suppose.

We were out the door here at The Shire at 7am and got to town about 11:15, giving us about 45 minutes to kill, cause Mike and Babs and the crew hadn’t even left their house about a half-hour south yet…While The Wife and Her Majesty were off at stores that amuse the feminine short, I stopped in at a Pendleton store…I’ve been wearing their stuff since I was a boy and it’s not often I get into one of their stores…I was met by a pleasant sort who asked if he could help me.

How many times do you get someone in here who says they have some Pendleton item they’ve had for 30 years???

The guy looked up at me and smiled.

Oh, twice a day…
Well, put me on the list…I still have jacket my folks gave me in the 80’s.

I bought a long-sleeved t-shirt…I am not a slave to fashion, but it will go great with my overalls.

The only downside to the day was the biscuits and gravy didn’t sit particularly well with me and I was obliged to pull over and throw them up on as we were coming down the pass on the way home…This meant The Wife drove home because even ol’ Sparrow had the good sense not to drive in that situation…I felt lousy, but not lousy enough not to pay attention to her driving…No husband, of course, thinks their wife is a good driver, even if they really are.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Sunday, December 25
Merry Christmas from the Sparrows!

A pretty nice holiday, today, perhaps not too much different from yours, although if you left your house for any reason whatsoever yours was different than ours because none of us could be bothered to get out of our jammies, much less go out and do something.

We all had presents…I got The Wife a couple of Beatles CDs and a Beatles coffee mug and I got Her Majesty a pretty cool zippered pouch and a stuffed pink owl…I got some much-needed new slippers and Her Majesty gave me my favorite present ever, a picture frame with three pics of us from our road trip this past summer which immediately was placed in a prominent place on my desk.

The biscuits and gravy were good…Not the best The Wife has ever made, but it had been a while and she was out of practice…The prime rib was great and was accented with Her Majesty’s patented Brussel sprouts and her famous mashed potatoes.

After dessert, we played some cards, a game called Phase 10…It’s a stack of cards, numbered and colored and in each phase you have to get a certain combination…The Wife got out a huge early lead, but Her Majesty came back and won on the last hand.

The only constant through the whole game was ol’ Sparrow couldn’t get a goddamned card to save his life and I was always a phase or two behind the leaders…More than once I was one card – one lousy card! – away from breaking the game wide open, taking command and sashaying to the winner’s circle but no, fortune wasn’t my friend tonight.

I had a tasteless, tho somewhat funny line, tonight, too…It occurred when my beloved sister-in-law Becky called…Everyone was on speakerphone and the latest news from the Heartland was that my brother-in-law David’s brother, Jonathon, has a girlfriend…Jonathon is a unique sort and it turns out his girlfriend is unique as well, spending her time in a wheelchair.

The line was too easy, frankly, and is in no way a candidate for Line of the Year honors, and I am not going to quote it here, but it had something to do with the lengths that people in wheelchairs will go to in order to secure a companion.

Right in the middle of dinner preparations Her Majesty made homemade ice cream…Or ice milk, rather…What brought this on was the extra rock salt there was laying around after the prime rib went in the oven…The box for the rock salt actually said for ice cream and cooking and Her Majesty had actually made ice cream as a project in school so before anyone knew what in the hell was going on, she was mixing some sugar and milk and some vanilla flavoring, sealing it in a bag and putting it in a larger bag that had rock salt and ice in it…We all took turns shaking it up and in a few minutes we were all enjoying homemade ice cream…It wasn’t too bad, either, and since we didn’t have a proper Holiday Bake Off this year, Her Majesty was declared the winner for making homemade ice cream.

All in all a very mellow day, much needed after the four nights of not too much sleep.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Saturday, December 24
Boy, I’ll tell you, when I went bed Christmas Eve night I was plenty tired.

Friday was long…I did my usual stint at the resort, but my retailer shift didn’t start until 5:30, giving me a couple of hours to kill, time I spent in the retailer break room cat-napping and watching the usual Barney Miller reruns.

It was an even longer day because I gave Michelle a ride home…It was 9pm or so and Michelle was making her way thru Aisle 5 for her usual post-shift smoke purchase – Pyramid Red 100s…Michelle was crying, too, because she did not have a ride home because she hasn’t had a car since she plowed into an elk last month…She had been catching rides with co-workers who also lived in the southern part of the county, but they had all gone home and Michelle was making noises about having to walk home.

Good gravy…Michelle lives about as far south of the retailer as The Wife and I live west…It would take a healthy person eight hours to walk to her house and Michelle, who is older and walks with a limp, might make it home by New Year’s…Also, if she was left to actually try and walk home she’d probably die…It’s winter, and while the skies were clear it was still plenty cold.

Of course I offered Michelle safe, dependable ground transportation home and, equally, of course, she accepted…It was well out of the way, of course…Once I dropped her off I could’ve taken a shortcut that goes from her town to the small town we live in, but I’ve driven that road before and it is scary…It is slow and curvy and I don’t like it at all, so I drove all the way back to town and then headed home….Miles-wise, it was about 40 miles extra, but time-wise I don’t think it was more than 20 minutes.

I went to church with The Wife and Her Majesty tonight…I had 13-years of Lutheran schooling and long-time readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall ‘ol Sparrow noting the differences between services of his youth and some of today’s churches: dress is very casual, traditional liturgy is virtually non-existent and the sanctuary has neither an altar or a cross.

Now, I don’t particularly care…I have no particular religious convictions at this stage of my life and people can worship however they want…But boy, the influence of youth is tuff to shake…The music was splendid…I’m an old fuddy-duddy now, but even I appreciated the hard rock version of Go Tell It on the Mountain and other traditional carols were well done, too.

But boy, the introductory video and the skit towards the end were childish and flippant and probably sacrilegious to boot, tho I’m probably not qualified to issue that declaration anymore…Also, the church announced they would not be having Christmas Day services…What kind of church doesn’t have at least one service on Christmas Day, especially when Christmas is on a Sunday???…I don’t understand this at all…It’s like a bar closing on New Year’s Eve.

Still tho, church on Christmas Eve is one of my oldest memories…In third grade I was even the MC for the service, something I still have one or two clear memories of, so it was nice.

Biscuits and gravy for breakfast and the traditional Sparrow Christmas prime rib for dinner tomorrow!!!…There are no plans for lunch, but we’re probably not going to need lunch anyway.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Friday, December 23
Sparrow has had a very long couple of days, is tired, and is taking the day off.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Thursday, December 22
Gabriel, who comes in at 5am because our full-time night auditor can only be bothered to work till 5am instead of 7am like every other night auditor on the planet, actually had some coffee made for me when I favored everyone with my arrival at 7am…I harp on him constantly about not having coffee made for his hard-working supervisor and about how this will be reflected in his eval and he finally got around to making some this morning…It was vanilla flavored, which I, frankly, could do without, but no matter…Sparrow did not have to make his own coffee this morning.

The InfoStation in the breakroom is up and running again and one the new features is a pic of an employee when they were a kid and the first one happens to be a pic of ol’ Sparrow when he was just a couple of months old…There are prizes for guessing it correctly and Austin, who’s in charge of the project, reports there have been “a few” correct guesses already.

In fact, Dan-o from Maintenance came by the front desk and asked if it was me…I didn’t say anything either way, but Dan-o noted that one, most people at the resort wouldn’t have a black and white baby pic and, two, he recognized the eyes.

You can’t really argue with the eyes.

At our weekly supervisor/manager meeting today Alice pointed out that from now on people who win raffles and drawings at work have to sign for their prizes because – get this – they are taxable…This means the candy I won last week is taxable, so I asked Alice what exactly was the tax, a couple-three caramels, or maybe several of the deals with peanut butter in them???..She thought I was serious and said she didn’t know…Then I asked if I put the candy out on my desk – which I did – do I have to issue 1099 forms to everyone who takes one.

Signed up for another shift at the retailer today and had the usual Name Your Price episode…This one involved a small square thingy that opened like a book, but felt like a bean bag or something like that…There wasn’t a barcode attached, so I asked the guy, who had limited English, how much it was…I might as well of asked him what the Dow closed at…He had no idea…Not only did I not know how much it cost, I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell it was…So I entered Housewares as the department and Kid’s Toy as the item name and haggled a price of $2.50 with the customer, who seemed happy…I was, too, because Name Your Price is much quicker than Price Check.

Then there was a funny moment with an older couple…They had a case of water in their cart and I could not remember if I had scanned it or not, so I asked the lady, who assured me I had…I said thank you and she said it was OK, we were busy and then she muttered the line from the famous poem about keeping your head when all others are losing theirs…I looked at her:

Kipling…
Indeed…

 I noted, professionally, that you don’t often hear Kipling quoted in the checkout line at the retailer and her husband said especially from the cashier, tho I didn’t actually quote Kipling, tho I did recognize his work.

Then the husband had a funny…His credit card purchase was awaiting his signature on the screen and he said, apropos of nothing whatsoever:

I’ll sign as Crystal Gayle…

OK…Whatever you say, sir.

Picked up another shift tomorrow, my last for a few days.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.

It was inspired by the 19^th-century British novel of the same name.

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