Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, March 13
Thursday we had dropped The Wife’s car off at the Sububu dealer in town for some routine maintenance, so I dropped her off at the retailer at 0700 this morning and with some time to kill before reporting for the day’s duties at the Veterans Service Office (VSO), I went in and bought some stuff.
First, I bought a couple of packages of my fave veggie sausage grillers for the hotel…And some veggie burger patties for the VSO…Well, not in the VSO…They’re kept in the freezer in the Building Department next door because my office was wedged into an old broom closet and barely has room for a desk and a couple of chairs…Both are pretty tasty and can be microwaved, key for workplace dining…I also completely lost my mind and bought, for the first time ever, some of that flavored water powder…I still have some zero clue why…I do drink an awful lot of water and perhaps I wanted to break up the water monotony…I don’t know…As noted, I may well have lost my mind for a few seconds, tho I did spend a minute or so considering flavors, ultimately rolling with orange…I mixed it in with some water at the VSO and it tasted pretty good, but I only used it once and now I have a 30-day load out of the stuff sitting in a drawer that I will probably forget about.
I bought some air freshener, too…Mr H is scheduled to come in and regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – remember that he has BO and no small amount of it…I wanted to be prepared…The first time I deodorized with some industrial-strength cleaner from the janitor’s closet, which you could smell in the Ag Extension office downstairs, and last time he didn’t stay too long so I didn’t bother…He stayed long enough for me to use it this time…Recall Wednesday he had called and said he had a letter from the VA saying his claim was denied because he was still in the service…Well, it turns out he misread the letter…It was a routine letter acknowledging receipt of the claim we’d sent in last month, tho it did advise that if he was still in the service to do this or that, but it did state he was still in the service and it certainly wasn’t denying his claim.
A guy named Liam dropped by, too…He said he had an other than honorable (OTH) discharge but he’d heard on NPR that OTHs now qualified for some benefits…I looked it up and it appears to be on a case-by-case basis…I asked if he had his DD-214 and he said no, could he get a copy and I said sure and we filled out the DD-214 request form…This will help determine exactly what his discharge was because – shocker – sometimes vets misread things, tho it is pretty tuff to screw up the discharge you get.
I also got the lowdown on why he got an OTH…Seems he went AWOL after something involving an affair his wife was having…I’m not entirely certain of the other details because they weren’t relevant and they went in one ear and out the other.
Mr S came by, too…He’s the one who was all but on top of ground zero for a nuclear test in Nevada in 1955…For the longest time he wasn’t allowed to talk about it but then the government loosened up a little bit, but the VA is still making atomic vets, as they’re known, fight tooth and nail for everything…We had some doctor’s reports, tho, from his most recent examinations, so maybe we’ll have better luck.
About 1400 there was a county email saying the first C-virus cases were discovered in town…They were two visitors and it was reported they had done some skiing and grocery shopping…The report said it was a man in his 50s and a woman in her 20s, probably father/daughter tho I’ve knocked around hotel front desks long enuff to know the possibility of man and mistress cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The snow is starting to melt in the front yard and the bare spots are getting bigger and I’d say maybe a fifth of the yard is bare now…Recall last fall we didn’t get the leaves up in time, so they’ve been sitting all winter and while we did by the leaf blower, I think I will dive in and start raking the bare spots…There is still a while before it all melts and we do not want to have to do the whole yard all at once, so maybe The Wife and I will a little bit at a time.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1830 Thursday until 0030 Friday
1730 Friday until 2130 Friday
10.0 hours for the night and a paltry 31.0 hours for the week, a total so low I think there have been weeks in years past when I’ve gotten more sleep at work.
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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