It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, July 20
The big news is we got the ear wax out of our left ear…I am not making that up…After spending a half-hour or so farting around and deciding whether or not to use the kit we bought we decided to give it a try…Because there really weren’t a lot of immediate options…We could have gone to the urgent care in the next county because the VA will pay for that but, hell, we really didn’t want to do that…After a while, we hit upon our real motivation – taking the unused kit back to the drugstore to get our $50 back – and we decided this was no time to go cheap and we got to work.
It wasn’t too complicated: you put some drops in your ear, wait ten minutes, blow it out with some very warm water you put into the accompanying squirt bottle, and then rinse the ear out with the enclosed solution.
It worked!!!…I am not making that up…It took a couple of minutes of squirting, but eventually, some red stuff came out of the ear, along with a small blob and the difference was immediate: it was the difference between listening to a song on one of those old transistor radios and a nice stereo.
This was the high point of the stay in Casinoville…Everything else was convoluted because getting the left ear cleaned out turned out to be a classic Yay/Boo situation (CYBS)…Yay for being able to hear normally out of the left ear again, but boo because hearing in the left ear was plainly better than the hearing in the right ear…The kit is good for three applications (why, when us humans have two ears wasn’t immediately clear) so we repeated the procedure with the right ear…Nothing, however, came out, so either whatever gunk was in there was being stubborn or we’re going deaf in the right ear.
Like the first time stayed here a few weeks ago, we really didn’t have any plans for the day…The last time that was good because we were starting a new project and the day was well spent…That project, however, is proceeding apace and we tend to take Thursdays off from projects like that and we couldn’t otherwise come up with a reason to stay…Making the decision easier was the fact we’d forgotten to clean the cat’s litter box and if we stayed we wouldn’t be home until Friday afternoon after the veterans service office (VSO), by which time the cat may have revolted and burned the cabin down.
Before heading out tho, we went to breakfast at the 24/7 restaurant in the casino across the street, where the convolutedness continued…It was 0500 and we were seated and we told the waiter we wanted hotcakes and sausage…Recall we’d had that last time and it was Hotcakes and Sausage of the Year.
– I’ll see if we’re serving breakfast, sir.
What???…It’s 0500…What restaurant – open for business and seating customers – is not serving breakfast at 0500???
Well, it turns out this one isn’t…Why not???…Well, they’re cleaning, and the dimwit, whose attitude took the whole matter as a matter of course and why am I whining about this, went on to detail every part of the kitchen being cleaned and anything anyone could possibly want for breakfast was unavailable.
– Well, what can I have, then???
He pointed to a couple of items on the menu: nachos and chicken wings appeared to be it…Oh boy, I was peeved…I offer 5-star service and do not suffer substandard service well at all…And this was substandard; there should’ve been a sign up, or at least an explanation prior to being seated.
– That’s it???
The waiter nodded, as if this were a perfectly acceptable alternative…It wasn’t.
– Who the hell wants nachos or wings at five in the morning???
We exited the booth.
– This is hard…It’s the only place in town to eat right now and I’m hungry.
Checking out of the hotel, a day early, was convoluted, too, because their front desk isn’t manned overnite…There is, however, a kiosk where you can do things like this, so we tried it out…We inserted our ID and the screen found our account and addressed us by name but when we hit the Check Out button it hemmed and hawed for a minute before instructing us to see a Lobbt Attendant to complete the transaction.
Well, if there was a goddamned Lobby Attendant we wouldn’t have been there in the first place…So we go to the house phone at the front desk and dial 0…We did this the last time we were here, from our room, and got the front desk at the adjacent sister hotel…This time, tho, nothing…So we dialed the 4-digit extension noted on a sign and got more nothing…By this time we’re past peeved and are ready to take hostages…So we go back up to our room, dial zero again, and this time get someone…She further annoys us by interrupting, but in time she said the kiosk had not checked us out, but she could take care of that for us, and when we hung up were checked out and ready to head home.
Further convolutedness awaited us…We head down to the interstate – a 15-minute or so drive – and we’re still hungry, so we stop at this gas station in the hopes of finding something edible…We do, and the goodies are big enuff so that we don’t want to drive while eating them, so we dine in the parking lot…In fact, they’re big enuff that we can’t finish the second one, so we throw it away…Also thrown away was the lower part of the falsies, which we had taken out before starting in on them.
We discovered this on the freeway when we went to put them back in…Terror didn’t set in because immediately we knew what happened and there was only one place they could be, but heading back we were in violation of assorted state laws vis-a-vis motor vehicle conduct on the public roads…The falsies were right there where they’d been tossed.
That ended the convulutedness for the day…We returned to The Shire at 0900 or so, unpacked, got some laundry going, dumped the cat box and put fresh litter in, declared a General Holiday, and reported to bed for reading duty by 0930 and, on balance, had a very pleasant day.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1800 Wednesday until 0130 Thursday. 7.5 hours for the nite and 31.0 hours for the week, both fairly standard totals.
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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!