It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, June 23
The drive back to town was nice…We pulled out of Casinoville at 0430 and dawn was just starting to crack and this is always a good time to have the road to yourself…We made really good time, too, mainly because we drafted behind some people that were driving a tad faster than we usually do and we were in town by 0710, a full 20 minutes ahead of schedule…We had tried to time this with some precision because we haven’t been issued keys to the new county building yet, tho the doors to open automatically at 0730.
So we drove around the ritzy area – where the wealthy have their second homes, a place where we seldom get to and where we came damn close to running into two mooses…Or moose…Or whatever the plural of the moose is called…They were off to the right, probably on their way to the nearby golf course for their morning stroll, and had the sun not been directly in our eyes we would’ve seen them no problem, but Mr Sun was directly in our eyes and we were fortunate to miss them.
At the veterans service office (VSO) we completed two more modules in our training to get access to the VA system and good gravy, it was some of the most tedious training in human history…We don’t know who wrote it, but whoever it was should be taken out back for beating…It is confusing, repetitive, and wordy and by the end of today’s lessons, we wanted to stick pencils in our eyes for the sheer relief it would offer.
We actually failed the test for the first lesson…Twice…We are not making that up…After the test, they show you the questions and the correct answers, and we made note of the ones we screwed up, but when we retook it we missed two others that we had originally gotten right…The questions, tho, appeared to be in the same order, so after blowing it the second time we wrote all the answers down and breezed thru the third test with a hundred percent.
The day’s second lesson (#17 total) had 47 sections!!!…I am not making that up, tho I wish I were because this is where the desire for self-injury first took hold…It concerned appeals and at the end of 47 sections we still weren’t/aren’t entirely certain what VA Form 9 is for or what a legacy appeal is.
Something else we’ve noted about the new county building is the hot water everywhere – the kitchen, all bathrooms – comes out at a very low pressure…So low that it really isn’t practical to use…Plus we needed to quadruple flush the can today (don’t ask) which we think is a new building record, tho not only do we not know this for certain, we don’t really want to know it for certain, though we tend to doubt the ladies in the building could, well, nevermind.
We’re starting to get addicted to the tap-to-pay feature on our phone…We just started using it and, of course, we attached the new American Express Platinum card (AXPC) to our digital wallet…Our phone makes it easy to use, too, because all you have to do is take it out of the holster, tap the button on the bottom twice, put the face up to the machine and BOOM, in a couple of seconds you’re done…The downside to this, of course, is that nobody gets to see you pull the AXPC out of your wallet and use it, but convenience tops putting on a show every time.
We are using the AXPC all the time now, too, even when we’d normally use a debit card, because they offered a pretty sweet deal: charge six grand in six months and get a hundred thousand bonus points…You must be careful here, of course…We have some modest financial management skills, but ol’ Sparrow isn’t Charles Schwab for Pete’s sake, so we are taking care to keep track of what would’ve been put on the debit card and not blow Household Account funds elsewhere.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1930 Thursday until 0230 Friday
1800 Friday until 2130 Friday
10.5 hours for the day and even-Steven 40.0 hours for the week, not the total any of us are looking for heading into Saturday’s finale, but a workable total nonetheless.
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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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!