It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, September 26
NO COKE ORDER!!!…I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP!!!
Nothing…Nothing at all…No email, nothing posted to the log book, no original source materials scratched out on Post-It Notes…It was as if there wasn’t a sundry stand that needed stocking…We relieved Chris and he chose not to address the matter.
Who the hell knows what’s going on???….The end-of-month economies are, of course, in place, but even late in the month there’s always been something…Now, this doesn’t mean the Coke gal isn’t going to be coming by…She may well be, but she is going to have to wing it…She’s a Beverage Professional, tho, so she could probably breeze in, snoop around, and then deliver what we need.
Thank God for the consistency of Dray the Dairy Delivery Driver (D4)…As has been his wont lately, he came by around 0350 and the latest news is a buddy of his talked him into helping him sandblast a house on his day off…D4 said he’s leery of ladders and we cautioned caution here because we’re leery of ladders, too, but he said he’s going to do it and give the cash to his wife because rather than retire after the store she worked out closed, she’s working somewhere part-time, and the extra dough will come in handy.
Yesterday we talked about my trip to New York…Here are the particulars:
It’s part of my annual trip to see Uncle Rudy and Aunt Susie in Louisville for Thanksgiving…It’ll be my fourth trip out there and we always enjoy it because aunts, uncles, and cousins are the only family we’ve got and Thanksgiving on my own sort of blows…We got to thinking tho, about, perhaps, maybe, going other places, too…Recall our vacation in May (LA/New Orleans/Chicago/northern Wisconsin was great fun so we started looking for places to go…Any place we’ve been this year was out and we ended up focusing on the east coast, particularly Philadelphia…We’ve only been to the airport there and we have always wanted to see Independence Hall…Not only that, some research showed that on November 18 Penn is playing football against Princeton at Franklin Field, someplace else we’ve also always wanted to see…Regular readers of this crap know that we usually fly out the day before Thanksgiving and stay for a week, but why not be complete maniacs and go the week before???
So we settled in on a trip to Philadelphia, leaving on Wednesday and heading to Louisville on Sunday…A nice little trip…Then we got cute and started thinking about a day trip to New York City…We’ve only been there once and there are some things we’d like to see there, too…Then it got to the point where there were more things we wanted to do in New York City than in Philadelphia, so we changed it up and will only make a day trip to Philly, on Saturday to visit Independence Hall and to go to the game.
We got a couple of deals in the travel department, too…First, we got a suh-weet employee rate at a rather new hotel in mid-town Manhattan, $89 for Wednesday thru Friday an absolute steal, tho we have to pay the same rate the masses pay Saturday nite because they were not offering the employee rate that nite.
(There were other employee rate hotels in town, tho we decided not to use them…Consider this: we would have to checkout of Hotel 1, find a place to stow our bags – probably at Hotel 2 – then go catch the train, go to Philly, and go thru the hassle of checking into the new hotel…Now, New York has a pretty convenient subway, but we decided doing that merely to save $200 would be cheap on our part and while we like a deal as much as the next guy, we’re not cheap.)
Airfares are less than they were last year, too…Recall roundtrip from Sparrow Regional to Louisville (HDN/DEN/SDF for those of you keeping score at home) was a bit over a grand last year, a lot more than in previous years…This year, for more or less the same price, we got HDN/DEN/NYC/SDF/DEN/HDN and, get this, the DEN to NYC leg is first class!!!…I am not making that up…The whole thing, before first class, was about $800…Then we utilized a $300 credit we had from some changes we had to make to the May trip bringing it down to another steal at $500 and change and then we’re selecting seats for each leg and we thought we really didn’t want to be stuffed into an economy seat for 1,500 miles and there were several options for us to consider…Economy+ offered some extra legroom – fairly decent, actually – cheapo snacks and paid beverages…There were other intermediate classes, too, but first-class offers tons of legroom, a reclining seat, meal service, plus free booze, key when you’re not driving when you land…$500…We pursed our lips and stroked our beard like a workingman considering which horse to play at the track and we even stood up and stared at the monitor – not crossly – with our hands on our hips, considering the matter for reasons that may one day be clear because after a minute or two we wondered what the fuss was about: we’re on vacation and even if we blow the $500 we are still paying as much to get from home to New York to Louisville and back as we did to get from here to Louisville and back last year.
Following one hell of a rest (see Sleep Log below) we had really good strength in the gym this evening…So good, in fact, we’re thinking of upping everything for a +1 workout…Next week, because recall we’re going to the big city for a couple of days Wednesday and will miss a couple of workouts…It might even be doable Saturday nite because of the long rest, but we’ll see.
The gym was packed, tonite, too…There some kids practicing volleyball and the weightroom had four people in it, but they were all doing other things and ol’ Sparrow got his usual workout in without anyone being bothered.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Tuesday until 1900 Tuesday…10.5 hours for the day – a dynamite total in anybody’s ballgame – and a robust 26.0 hours for the week…We are well ahead of a 50-hour pace for the week, but the wildcard of two nites in a hotel looms and regular readers of this crap that sometimes hotels can be hit and miss…We’re staying in our usual Casinoville hotel, tho, and that familiarity counts for a lot…God bless all of you.
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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!