Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, February 4
One inch. ..I am not making that up.
Yours truly left the VSO early Wednesday and declared a Snow Day for today for one inch of snow…Oh well, what are you going to do???…Sometimes it snows when Mr Weatherman says it’s going to and sometimes it doesn’t…Actually, it usually snows when the weatherman says it’s going to but it looks like the system that was moving in had some travel delays and won’t be here until Friday.
Still tho, you stick to your commitments: you planned a snow day, you execute a snow day and the plan for today was to do squat and not leave the house…It was a good plan, well-executed, neither arduous nor unrewarded.
I slept in a bit for Thursday (see Sleep Log below) and the new grocery store donut shop knock off coffee made its debut replacing – perhaps temporarily, perhaps not – the retailer’s donut shop knock off…It was pretty good, too…You could tell it was different right off the bat and was the usual quality you get from store brand donut shop knockoffs, a subject on which yours truly appears to be becoming rather expert in: good, but perhaps a notch below the Leading National Brand itself.
Still to be determined, of course, is whether the grocery store brand replaces the retailer’s house brand…The new routine doesn’t have me going to the next county on Thursdays like I used to, so I can’t buy the retailer’s brand if I’m not at the retailer (recall it’s not sold at the retailer in town) and I’m at the grocery store a couple of times a week anyway for vegetables.
The weather was good enuff that ol’ Sparrow could have headed into town for a workout but a Snow Day is a Snow Day after, so after project work was done I was in the chair reading before 0600, a wonderful time to already be done for the day.
I’m reading a book about the Brooklyn Bridge and it is really good, providing not only the story of those responsible for the bridge but also insights into the corruption of the Boss Tweed regime in New York City at the time, which influenced the bridge…Anyway, regular readers of this crap know the mechanical aspects of something like this might as well be written in Greek, but the author does a really good job of putting it in terms even a dolt like me can understand.
Specifically interesting were the caissons that were put under the river that were the foundations for the towers on the Brooklyn and New York City sides…(They were separate cities back then.)…The river bed had to be cleared out down to bedrock (they settled for hard sand on the New York City side) so the caisson was filled with compressed air to keep the river out and then men would enter the chamber thru an airlock and work in the compressed air all day, digging out the riverbed…A lot of men got the bends and they had to suffer thru it because the cure – very slow decompression – wasn’t known then.
I remember the bends from submarine training in the Navy…The escape trunks utilize compressed air and to avoid the bends when fleeing your sunken submarine you were taught to yell “ho, ho, ho” when heading to the surface…(In the old days, there was actually practical training on this at submarine school…They had a big tower and you’d exit the escape trunk on the bottom and swim to the surface…It was gone, tho, when I was at sub school.)
About noon I actually wandered outside to clear the snow from the driveway…It took five minutes because, as noted, there was only an inch of snow and the driveway isn’t all that big.
Dinner was really good…Wednesday afternoon I went to the market here in the small town to pick up some Snow Day eats…Offhand, yours truly was thinking of a frozen pizza but once yours truly was actually in-store I lost interest in that and ended up getting a box of frozen deep-fried shrimp, the plan being to pair it with one of the remaining holiday beef Wellingtons still lying around…This turned out really good…I didn’t make the entire box of shrimp – I don’t know why I didn’t make the entire box of shrimp – but there was enuff for a growing boy like ol’ Sparrow to appreciate.
Around 1530 or so, perhaps groggy from the big dinner, yours truly decided that sitting in the chair reading was entirely too much work and retired, for the first time in ages, to the couch…I am not making that up: the Snow Day had been so successful ol’ Sparrow was now too lazy to even read…The couch, strategically, does not have a reading lamp, so all I could do was lay there and listen to some stuff.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1730 Wednesday until 0230 Thursday…9.0 hours for the night and 30.5 hours for the week – the highest Wednesday total (WT) since early October
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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