Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Monday, April 30
Crap, crap, crap.

Crap.

I thought I got off without damage in Sunday’s Great Pen Washing Episode but I didn’t…I took some clothes out of the dryer today and the khaki work pants I’d washed the ballpoint in looked like a Rorschach Test… Click here to read more

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Sunday, April 29
The bad news out of the garden is the artichokes didn’t make it…The Wife reported that today and it made me sad because along with the robins the artichokes were one of our treats from last year…We let the artichokes bloom, too, we didn’t merely pluck them off and eat them when they were green…Our good fortune because boy oh boy, they put on a show blooming not with leaves but with purple thingys that stick straight up…We ended up with about 12 of them, blooming at different times, so we had purple all summer and I was so thrilled with them I personally took responsibility for watering them…Just for funsies we entered them in the fair won the blue First Premium ribbon, an upgrade from a couple of years ago when The Wife’s turnips won a red Second Premium ribbon.

But maybe the artichokes will be back…They could have left some behind after all and Mother Nature is funny that way…I mean, we don’t do anything to the tulips and they show up every spring for a few weeks…In fact, they’re all over the place now…Last week they debuted in the garden just to the side of the front door and now they’re in the front garden and the heart garden that fronts Main Street as you head into town…All are yellow, too, tho I’ll swear we’ll get some other colors as well.

For the record, The Wife has already identified a nice rhubarb that is growing immediately behind where the artichokes grew as what we are going to enter in the fair this year.

Woke up this afternoon to potential disaster…Before going to sleep this morning (see Sparrow’s Sleep Log below) I put some clothes in the wash, including the pants I’d worn to work…I was taking them out of the washer after getting the coffee on when I noticed both my rollerball and ballpoint pens at the bottom of the washer.

Crap…This could be bad…The ballpoint had been in the pants while the rollerball – a first-class instrument I’ve had for years – had been clipped just beneath the buttons on the polo shirt I’d worn…I would like to say this was a first but that, of course, would be untrue…Ol’ Sparrow is good for washing the ballpoint more or less quarterly and the rollerball every couple of years…The roller ball always survives, tho sometimes the ballpoint is ruined…Sometimes not, tho…It depends and I am not sure on what because Lord knows the washing conditions don’t change…I got lucky this time, tho, as the ballpoint came thru intact and the rollerball didn’t spill any ink, either and both should be good for further duty as is.

Then, horror set it as I sat down at my desk: where was my chapstick???!!!…Because it is kept in the same front pocket as the ballpoint and if the ballpoint went thru the wash then there was the highest level of possibility the chapstick did too because not even I’m stupid enough to take one thing out of a pocket and not the other.

And I had just put the clothes in the dryer!!!…I rushed to the kitchen because chapstick in the dryer can cause real problems…It was still in the pants’ pocket, too, and it hadn’t been in long enough to do any real damage so ol’ Sparrow got off lucky.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 8:30am Sunday morning to 3pm Sunday afternoon…6.5 hours…We are starting to spot a trend here, namely 6-7 hours of sleep on Sundays.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Saturday, April 28
Well, ol’ Sparrow will be presiding over at least two more meetings American Legion District 14…I was unable to rustle up anyone else to run for commander and after a couple of tries I lost interest, so not only am I commander for another term, I may well be in the mood to consolidate power for a while.

The meeting was in town, so I moseyed over right after work…I was dozing off in my post commander’s office when I heard Bob, the district adjutant, trying to get in the front door…I go and let him, the door closes behind me and we are locked out…It didn’t occur to me to bring the key…Our office and meeting room are actually at the community center, so it wasn’t as if I could break the door down and jimmy a window, either, so Bob and I were stuck outside until Stanko, my post adjutant, showed up.

Bob and I are almost neighbors in our small town…He lives down Maple Street, then make a right on Washington Street and go down a couple of houses…I asked if he’d heard any gossip about what’s going on at the abandoned coffee shop next door to The Shire…He said he heard it might be an office for the company putting in some micro-houses somewhere in town but don’t quote him on that and he couldn’t impeach my theory that a car rental place will be opening there. 

District 14 is sending a resolution to the state convention…It’s the same resolution we’ve sent the past two years – it has to do with paying expense money to the district’s representative to state executive committee, who just happens to be Stanko – and we’re not sending it a third time because it’s been approved…The state has frowned on this from the start, but maybe we’ve jumped through enough hurdles this time to get it thru.

Membership is not as strong as it was this time last year…Both the post and district I command are at 88 percent of the goal set by the state and I think last year we were already at 100 percent or close to it…Stanko and I both blame last year’s successes because the state set our goals for this membership year impossibly high – Stanko can really get worked up over this, too – and while I don’t get worked up over them they will be tuff to meet.

The robins are back in residence!!!…This was obvious Friday when I did the lawn because when I opened the kitchen door one immediately scooted out of the nest… It appears they are pleased with the nest, too…Not only did they not tear down and replace the nest they built last year, it appears they only made minor changes to it, too…We’ve made two alterations to our lives to accommodate the robins…One, The Wife has turned off the kitchen porch light, so our robins can sleep in the dark…We used to keep it on all the time…Second, I left the house by the front door before going to work tonight…This is the only time during the year the front door is used on a regular basis…We leave this porch light on all the time, too.

The bad news at Hotel A is Nicole quit…I have no idea why…I thought she liked it here…Officially, I am “Sad” but not distraught…I am strong, and Mr Sun continues to rise in the east every morning.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log:  3:30pm Saturday afternoon until 8:30pm Saturday night…This is odd even for me…Five hours, after 30 hours up…Running the numbers, the totals are 44 hours of sleep for the week, with an average of 44.8 hours per week for the month..Not too bad.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Friday, April 27
The orange breakfast blend coffee is back!!!…I am not making that up!!!

Recall I had been drinking the retailer’s house brand blue packaged donut shop knock off coffee for a while now…Happily, because it’s really good, but I also like their orange breakfast blend, but our retailer is too small to carry too large a variety of coffee and they stopped carrying it after the initial roll out…However, Thursday we were at the retailer on our day trip to get The Wife a swimsuit for the hot springs and I decided to check the coffee aisle just for funsies when voila, the orange package was staring at me!!!…We needed coffee because the blue donut shop knockoff was running low, so I got a package of the orange and it tasted really good this morning.

I couldn’t spend all morning farting around fawning over my morning coffee, though, because I had a shift at the retailer, so I only farted around a little bit before diving in on the yard…There were some delays because one, I couldn’t find the mower…It wasn’t immediately visible in the carport, so I went and checked the shed and it wasn’t there…There weren’t any other places it could be, so I went back to the carport and found under a tarp, which had been under a rake and some bottles of washer fluid…It took a few pulls of the cord to get it started, but after that it ran great.

The mower needs some attention, tho…The rubber thingy that fit over the side discharge chute broke and now all the mowed grass goes out the side chute instead of into the back where the bag is…The Wife would like to get the blades sharpened this season, too, and do some maintenance on the engine.

Before I got mowing tho, I had to clean the yard…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall a couple of weeks ago I had raked the twigs and branches on the lawn into piles but Sparrow being Sparrow, I had never bothered to pick them up…I picked some of them and put them in the trash, but I did not have unlimited time so some got raked into the empty flower bed that is against the house.

The actual mowing was more work the usual, too, because we’ve had no shortage of snow and rain this month and it was several inches high, and there were a couple of places where it was thick enough the mower protested and threatened to shut down…The grass, I am pleased to report, remains its usual eclectic mix of grasses, weeds and whole grains and now that it is cut looks pretty sharp…There is still a lot of work to do, tho.

Again I found myself speaking Spanish to a Senegalese man today…I had just reported for duty at the retailer when I realized I’d forgotten my vest, which I took home to wash…I saw Mousa upstairs near the lockers and I asked him if he had an extra vest, explaining I’d left mine at home after I’d washed it…I might as well have recited the opening lines Onward Christian Soldiers for all he understood, so I tugged at the vest he was wearing a little and said tienes otro???…This is, more or less, Spanish for do you have another of these damn things???…Turns out he did, and he goes to his locker and gets it for me…Look, when you speak as much Spanish as I do, sometimes you throw it out at odd times, even when speaking to men from Senegal. 

Had a customer do a nice job of getting snitty with me today…This guy comes to the service desk looking have one the security band removed from the headset he had just bought…I do that and he mentions it rang up at $89 but the label on the shelf said $77…You gotta check these out personally because people try to scam savings like this from time to time…It’s a pain in the arse, but sometimes the customer is right, in which case we’ll charge him the lower price…So I go and, of course, the headsets are on the bottom shelf, necessitating ol’ Sparrow almost lie down and it turns out the price he was charged was correct…The headset he’d bought had gotten switched with the product next to it, which happens from time to time…I told him he was charged the correct price…He was not amused with my decision and said this was all f*cked up and I said sometimes products get moved like this and then he asked me if I was accusing him of moving them, which was pretty much an admission of guilt on his part, and I said no, of course not, but I still had to charge him the correct price, after which he walked out in a huff.

I will be presiding over the Legion District 14 meeting tomorrow morning…It will probably be my last one as commander after serving a couple of terms…Between working a lot and writing projects and whatnot I have completely derelict in my post and district commander duties and I have already announced I will not be running for another term as post commander…We’ll see if anyone wants the district commander job, tho…There might not be any takers because it is always tuff to rustle up a slate of district officers so they may well be content with my uninspired leadership, tho I hope not.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 11:30pm Thursday night to 7:30 Friday morning…A solid eight hours after the day trip with The Wife…I needed every one of them because I won’t get to sleep again until 1pm or so Saturday afternoon.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Thursday, April 26
A good day with The Wife.

I’ve adjusted my schedule at the retailer…I had been opened for pretty much anything on Thursdays because I do not have either hotel on Wednesdays and Thursdays but I told them I am no longer available on Thursdays, a day The Wife generally has off, too.

So we went to a town a couple of hours south of here because The Wife was in the mood for some adventure…First stop was an amusement park located at the top of a mountain…It had some caves The Wife wanted to see…The staff had the good sense to provide a gondola to take you to the top instead of making you hike and The Wife and I reported to the ticket window in good spirits.

We’re here for adventure, dammit, I announced to the hapless clerk.

I’ll tell you something, there are circumstances where I do not handle heights well…This is close to being one of them…I can generally handle gondola rides if I look straight ahead…When I look down or back I tend to get a bit woozy and if I look up at that goddamn razor-thin wire that is the only thing between me and death I do get woozy so I don’t do those things.

There are two caves to tour there…Our guide was rather knowledgeable but blabbed and told lame jokes and it was fun pretending I was a character in that Jules Verne novel where they try to go to the center of the earth…The only bad part to the first cave tour was we went thru a passage that opened up on a cliff…It was railed and whatnot but this another height instance I do not handle well, and I bravely stayed in the cave.

We had some time to kill between caves so I rode the roller coaster…I had noticed this on the ride up, roller coaster track on the side of the mountain, which you don’t see every day…I love roller coasters…Well, love is a strong word and I do not approve of tossing it around willy-nilly so let’s say I like roller coasters a lot…It cost $12 for one ride, which seemed like a lot, so for $13 I exchanged my cave tours ticket for an all-day pass, which meant unlimited rides on the roller coaster.

It was a pretty good ride and for maximum value I got three of them in before the second cave tour…I even closed my eyes for the second one, an old roller coaster riders trick…The Wife does not like roller coasters, tho, so she took a pass.

I was not really looking forward to the second cave tour…I mean, caves are caves, but shows what I know because the King’s Room 150 feet below ground put on as splendid a show as I have seen Mother Nature put on…Stalagmites, stalactites, they even had some fancy lighting that brilliantly accented it.

After that, it was late afternoon and we went to the hot springs…This spa has been around for ages…The original building is still there and the two pools are out of sepia-toned 19th-century postcards that show people in pools longer than football fields…Well, one pool is 400 feet long…The 104-degree pool is smaller…The Wife and I even dove off the diving board a couple of times and I nailed a really good cannonball.

Let me tell you something, I am not small, but size has very little to do with a good cannonball…Form is everything…You wanna hit the water with the small of your back and it takes practice – the kind of practice I’ve put in over the years – to get it right…You don’t move enough and you’re leading with your legs…You move too much and you land flat on your back which not only makes you look like an oaf but hurts besides….You know – know! – when you’ve nailed the perfect cannonball, too…You can feel it…Call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must, but you know.

After that, we headed out…The road is undergoing some chaotic reorganization and – in what is hardly the Upset of the Year – ol’ Sparrow found himself going the wrong way and we ended up in a rather pleasant residential area, replete with old homes with gracious porches and whatnot…So we drove around a bit and we were about to turn right when we saw a sign for Doc Holliday’s burial site…We followed the sign to a trailhead for the hike…The sign advertised a “moderately strenuous” hike of about a half-mile, all of which appeared to be uphill.

Officially, my interest level in this was “LOW” but The Wife loves nonsense like this so I headed up with her…At the top was very old cemetery that needed attention…The lawn needed to be mowed and the trees trimmed but that was not without its charms…As it was, there was a memorial to Doc Holliday but not an actual grave because no one seems to know where in the hell he had been buried…All the records had been lost…He had died broke and the county had buried him at their expense and evidently the old wooden marker, if there had even been that, had deteriorated.

I know it will be tuff to believe, but there was even more splendor to come!!!…We were headed home by an alternate route (they’re identical timewise) and had just headed north towards home…We were on the road out of town when The Wife reaches into the back seat for some trail mix we had purchased early on for thru-the-day snacking when a sandwich shop comes into view and we decide to stop…We turn in and it turns out the Mexican joint in the next county had opened a branch office!!!…I am not making that up!!!….We were hungry, only about a quarter of the way into our long journey home and our fave Mexican joint appears!!!…The Wife noted it seemed cleaner than the one in the next county, and I had to agree…It did not appear they had to bribe the county to pass their health inspection.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 3:30am Thursday morning to 7am Thursday morning…A nice follow-up to the eight hours I got that had ended just after midnight…The weekly numbers should be strong.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Wednesday, April 25
The first flower of the spring has appeared at The Shire…As usual, it’s a tulip in the bed just to the right as you face the front door…A yellow one has bloomed first, tho there will other colors, too, if I recall correctly, which I may not…I do remember tho, that the tulips don’t last all summer, they tend to call it a day in late spring for some reason…The Wife explained why this was to me once, but the lesson is long forgotten.

I’m hoping to get the lawn mowed in the next couple of days, too…The Wife and I have a day off together Thursday and we are taking a day trip, but Friday morning should be good, we’ve haven’t rain or snow for a couple of days and it should stay dry.

Mic was babbling, as usual, at the retailer today…Recall he’s from Senegal and speaks several languages, most of them better than English and he can be difficult to understand which means you can ignore him…This morning at the service desk, though, he cornered me and for reasons I am still not entirely sure of, Mic starts talking about bidets…It’s funny because not only did he not know what they are called he also seems to be under the impression they are a relatively new invention.

Again, I don’t know what brought this up!!!…But here I am having a conversation – and a rather one-sided one at that – about exciting new bidet technology and Mic is going into some detail about how they work…He is motioning with his hands, apparently demonstrating the taking of a crap…I don’t know…Maybe they were hand motions consistent with that in Senegal, but for an American like me he looked like he was having a seizure…First, he started with a rather technical briefing on enjoying a constitutional – this was where the hand motions got confusing – and after a while I showed Mic a palm and advised him I was familiar with the procedure having enjoyed one as recently as that morning, which made him laugh…It didn’t stop him tho…He announced he wanted to find out more about these things and was determined enough to consult the Internet on it…He seemed surprised when I told him they were called bidets and that bidets have been around for centuries…Then I got out my phone, tapped a few buttons and in fairly short order was able to present him with the sum of human knowledge on bidets…After some research Mic said he could get one for a couple hundred dollars…Mic works 80 hours a week, making me look like a slacker, and has two kids so you would think bidet acquisition wouldn’t be all that high on the to-do list, but he seems determined…I did not tell him to keep me posted.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 4pm Wednesday afternoon until 12:30am Thursday morning…I don’t know what in the hell is going on here.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Tuesday, April 24
All right, the robins have been paying some attention to their nest just outside the kitchen door…I noticed it when I got home from Hotel B this morning…Recall I had noted a long twig with some grass was hanging from the nest and the porch is being used as a staging area for other twigs, grasses and whatnot…I’m surprised they haven’t commandeered the wheelbarrow from the shed.

Anyway, the long twig/grass deal has been moved, shoved to the side so it drapes over the electric meter the nest is built above…I still haven’t seen blueprints or schematics or anything, so I am not entirely sure what their ultimate plans are, but it looks like the robins will be back for another season of reproductions.

A month or so ago I bought a new shirt for wearing around the house…It’s a little brick red, crew neck number with small white dots I picked up at the retailer…It was love at first sight, as it often is for ol’ Sparrow in matters like this…I mean, I knew – knew! – it would be comfy and be great for the spring/summer farting around the house season…And I was right, too, naturally…Of course, it’s a six dollar retailer shirt so I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it outside, well, maybe under the overalls for a quick trip to the diner, but otherwise no, it’s for around the house.

I check regularly and the retailer does not appear to be moving too many of these, frankly, tho I did see a guy wearing one at the service desk tonight…It was too tight for him, but maybe he preferred that because he had to have known we would have exchanged it for him…Heck, I personally would have supervised his exchange, but he was merely transferring some money, not exchanging his shirt.

Later, this guy comes up with a pair of work boots…It led to a pretty funny line from ol’ Sparrow…Maybe not a Line of the Year candidate, but still a pretty line…He puts the boots on the counter and announces they are actually two shoes for the left foot…I pick them up and look at them…Indeed they are…They don’t even match…One is a slightly darker color than the other…The line from ol’ Sparrow:

And???…

Of course, this indicated I was wondering what the problem was…He laughed…As he should have…It was a pretty good line.

Took the annual company survey today, too…They say it’s anonymous but I don’t see how: you log into a company computer under your company-assigned log-in so if they don’t know who’s taking their survey their IT department is manned by dolts because I think my cat could probably figure it out…They’re all multiple choice questions so you can’t make too many waves, but I found myself not Completely Disagreeing with anything, though I only Completely Agreed with the question about the store doing a good job of working the schedule so you have a satisfactory work/life balance…It should be noted I only give them availability for certain times and they only schedule me during those times, but still, I do get the 20-25 hours I want every week, so I can’t complain.

Media companies are starting to contact Sparrow For Congress…I am still getting more information from both of them, though both appear to be trying to sell me video services to reach voters…Well, I have $150 in contributions so far and I can’t really do too much with that, but I’ll see what they’re about…You never know, any spoke might lead to the hub.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 9am Tuesday until just before 3pm Tuesday…Six hours…More or less…The start time is reckoned…I started reading about 8:15 or so then started nodding off a bit later, then read again because I needed more entertainment before shutting it down…The only problem is I am not entirely certain what shutdown time was so we are going to call it 9am because I like round numbers…I know you do, too.

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.

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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…

Monday, April 23
There doesn’t seem to have been much movement on the robin’s nest front the past day or so…There are still twigs and stuff being staged on the side porch, and there is a long twig/grass thingy now hanging down from last year’s nest, but not much else and certainly not a robin sighting…Well, we see them flying around, of course, but we haven’t seen one fly out of the nest when we open the kitchen door…Maybe they’re consulting with a designer and still deciding whether to tear down the old nest and rebuild or remodel the current nest.

The lights were on in the abandoned coffee shop next door!!!…I am not making that up!!!

I saw them when I pulled out for work tonight and it is plain there is something going on inside…We’re not entirely certain what it is…Car Rental Place – based on the Dollar Rent-A-Car sign we saw in the back of a truck last week – remains the best guess, of course, and it is logical, based on the fact the airport is nearby…There wasn’t any actual work going on, of course, but the lights on means someone cared enough to turn the power on and they don’t want anyone snooping around inside after dark.

There are signs things are changing, too…The extended covered parking shelter is coming down and moderately interesting is what their plans are for the abandoned house on the property because I saw its front door open a couple of days ago…I suppose I could go hang out with Ken at the post office or make a pest of myself at the diner and find out, but I can’t be bothered to do that…Besides, it’s more fun to piece it together this way.

We were about one-third full at Hotel B last night and I didn’t see a guest from the time I arrived till the first couple of folks started trickling in for breakfast just after 6am…Please note there is no danger of me spilling scrambled eggs at Hotel B like I did at Hotel A Sunday morning because I don’t actually cook anything at Hotel B…At 5am I start setting up for breakfast, but I just put the bagels and muffins and whatnot out, plus dig the cereal dispenser out of the closet and make sure the waffle irons are turned on…In the winter, when we’re packed and people are tracking their muck everywhere, I’ll mop the hallway and breakfast room, too.

Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 8:30am Monday to 3:30pm Monday…Seven hours…Thought it might be more because with all-you-can-get sleep today I took a PM tablet, which can usually be counted on to keep me from having to get up and use the can after four hours…What’s almost interesting is I woke up feeling really good thinking it had to be mid-afternoon or, at least, early afternoon or maybe even early-mid afternoon – certainly not late afternoon, though – but I rolled over to look at the clock and it wasn’t even 10:30am yet!!!…I am not making that up!!!

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.

The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.

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