Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, November 20
Mr J came by the Veterans Service Office today, tho since the building is closed we were obliged to meet in the parking lot…Mr J is the one whose daughter in New Zealand contacted me on his behalf a couple of months ago…He has a long-estranged wife and works for trade or cash and hasn’t paid taxes since 1993 or so…Last month we filed a claim for a non-service connected pension, which the VA gives to vets who have qualified wartime service and whose income is below the poverty line (about $12,000 for one person)…The pension makes up the difference between current income and the poverty level, so it is not very much, but it is, I suppose, if you have nothing.
Anyway, Mr J got a letter from the VA and the letter threw him into a tizzy, like VA letters do due to some people…He showed me the letter and it was very routine…They had a couple of questions about his application and they were very easy to answer.
We also filed an application for medical benefits…He had actually done this a couple of months ago – with his daughter’s help – and mailed into the main center in Atlanta and hadn’t heard anything yet, so we sent another one directly to the VA hospital south of here. ..The only fly in the ointment was he was not allowed in the building, so I had to call him on his cell when I had questions for him and, of course, I had to take the forms to the parking lot for him to sign.
I was also a complete idiot regarding Mr J, too. Recall we had also – through a state fund administered by Stanko at the Legion post – paid some ER bills for him, but the state is getting snitty about paying it due to some technicality regarding the billing that had them thinking part of the bill had already been paid…It hadn’t and it was a simple matter to fax the company a letter requesting they send us his statement…Or it would have been a simple matter had I included Mr J’s account number…Good gravy, that was stupid…I found out about this idiocy when Stanko called me wondering where the statement was because the address I’d included was his personal post office box, so I called the billing department and the nice lady asked if I’d included the account number, leading to me reviewing the fax I’d sent and discovering the account number was missing…I resent the fax, including the account number not once, but twice, as if making up for forgetting it the first time.
I also got a COVID test today, in preparation for my trip to see Uncle Rudy and Auntie Susie next week…I realize this doesn’t mean I won’t get it between now and when I leave, but a negative test and the usual precautions that have kept me healthy so far should be sufficient.
I got it done at the county building…They have four spots in the parking lot set aside for drive-up testing and all of them were full when I walked out of the county building to go to my car…Crap…I pulled into a spot next to a testing spot and called the number, but Brooke told me to call back when I was in a spot, so I backed up into an empty space…There seemed to be some others in their cars waiting for a spot but who knows…When the car in front of me pulled out I pulled in and no one shot me or otherwise made a scene.
The test wasn’t one of those they stick up/down your nose, either…It was a swab that you run around your mouth for 20 seconds or so and it didn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
34.036 MPG
Regular readers of this crap know this is almost identical to last week’s figure, but there’s an asterisk next to this one because I didn’t reset the odometer, so the mileage entered figure, while in the ballpark, is not exact, to the MPG is not exact, either…I reset the odometer at the pump, so we will have an accurate figure next time.
I filled up at the convenience store in our small town and the big news, tho, is I used the store’s app to pay for the fillup…I downloaded it last week after deciding I spend enuff money there to warrant some freebies…It’s not much, but a free breakfast sandwich or a 10-cent gas discount is better than a kick in the face, as Pa Sparrow used to say…I got to the pump, opened the pump and the app recognized I was at a store and asked what pump I was at and I entered Pump 8, my home pump, and after a couple of seconds the pump beeped and BOOM, I was set because my credit card number had been already been entered in the app.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1730 Thu until 0030 Fri
1630 Friday until 2130 Friday
12.0 hours for the day and 41.0 hours for the week…I know all of you noted the earlier-than-usual start time for the Friday Afternoon Nap…It’s about an hour earlier than usual because I knocked off early from the VSO.
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 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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