Yay for Read Free Fortnight (RFF) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, June 10
Busy day…Yours truly was on the go from 0230 (see Sleep Log below) until it was time to go beddy-bye.
Today was the first morning routine at home in a couple of weeks…Recall last week yours truly was in the big city…Now, I didn’t really mind morning routine in a hotel because I like hotels…I like staying in them and I’d really better like them because I’ve spent no small part of my working life in them…But you can’t beat morning routine in your own home.
(Boy, last Thursday will always be a great memory…Recall I was under delusions about Bridget 2, tho ultimately ol’ Sparrow came to his senses…Exhausted from the ballgame, he preferred to stay at the hotel and read, which more or less ensures the long-term failure of any relationship because preferring to stay home and read instead of going out is about as desirable a trait in a mate as a case of the clap.)
The house got a really solid Level II cleaning today…Regular readers of this crap know it’s needed one for a while and today it got it and not just because the appraiser was coming by this afternoon…Dishes were washed and the kitchen floor swept and the kitchen rug and runner and the living room AND the bedroom were vacuumed and to emphasize the general cleanliness vibe some of that fragrancy carpet powder was thrown down, too…The cat box was cleaned and the sole surviving plant watered and the lawn was watered all day, starting at 0300 or so…The whole thing got a good soaking.
There was good strength in the gym, too, the best in a while…Of course, yours truly was rested and stoned on the pre-workout supplement, which didn’t hurt at all.
I tried a new route on the walk, too…Recall the past few times I’ve crossed the street and taken the core trail to the botanical gardens and back but for some reason ol’ Sparrow was in the mood to mix it up a bit, so I headed down Main Street to the library, the turned left and head down a block to River Road, took that to 5th Street, turned right and went to the Rodeo Grounds and took the core trail to where it forks near the motel across the street from the gym.
This is a new route and my guts – call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must – said this was about two miles and I checked it later on that website that tracks distances down to the inch and sure enuff it was…A bit more actually.
The appraiser was here right at noon…He said The Shire looked familiar and asked if he’d been here before and I said yeah, we’d gone thru this for Refi 2020, tho I wasn’t here when he came by last year…It took him all of ten minutes and hopefully, we’ll be able to close well before the Legion state convention in a couple of weeks.
In grooming news, I shaved the dome for the first time since last Thursday, too…This was because I wanted to give a really good slicing I gave it a couple of weeks ago a chance to heal because if you keep shaving it it’ll keep bleeding and never heal… Let me tell you something, shaving the dome is as much a spiritual act as it is a look designed to attract young lead singers for progressive rock bands and now that the cut has more or less healed it will be nice to be able to shave the dome whenever I shower.
The big news is I umpired tonight for the first time in a couple of years…Only the longest-term readers will recall I used to do this fairly regularly up here – and even had a high school basketball state championship game years ago – but I sort of lost both time and interest but I’m not ready to call it a career yet…So I email my buddy Gary and asked if he had anything on Thursdays and he said sure.
The game was a game only in the most technical sense…Baseball is the 23rd most popular sport up here behind Nordic cribbage and this was the first game for virtually all of the players…You could tell this because batters were scared and didn’t really want to get in the batter’s box and pitchers took forever to deliver the ball…Fielders tended to stand on their bases, too, the whole time, probably because the coach said they were the first, second or third baseman and there’s their base, so they’d better stand guard over it.
In fact, they didn’t even keep score…Still tho, it was good to be calling balls and strikes again and I bought some stuff at the retailer after workout in preparation, stuff like shoe cleaner and polish and a squirt bottle to spray dirt off of shoes and shin guards after the game…My gear, uniforms and one-gallon canteen were right where I’d left them a couple of years ago and all in all it was as if I’d last officiated last week.
The shoe cleaner was funny…It sprayed out not as a liquid foam, but almost as a solid life form, so solid, in fact, it blew off my shoe and onto the sidewalk and wouldn’t budge and yours truly still doesn’t know if it blew away somewhere or melted in the heat.
My partner was a 15-year-old named Dylan…Gary said he’s actually been umpiring for a couple-three years now and he wasn’t too bad…One of the dad coaches, tho, was a dolt…A new pitcher was warming up and he came to ask if he was coming set…This was the stupidest question in the history of officiating and yours truly was so stunned I actually asked who???…I advised Mr Baseball the rules pertaining to balks were not in force while a pitcher was warming up, that they could do whatever he wanted…I wanted to smack the guy…This was not a bright question.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1800 Wednesday until 0230 Thursday…8.5 hours for the nite and 29.5 hours for the week.
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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