Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, August 4
About 0200 – bar closing time – I get a call from a young lady asking to talk to Mr H…I don’t know what room all our guests are staying in off the top of my head, so I look it up and transfer the call to the room…Based on my not-insignificant amount of experience in the matter, I figure it’s a hooker calling a client to verify his hotel and room number before showing up to ply her trade, fairly standard procedure in the call girl racket…This is hardly a problem up here, but you never know…Like hotel rooms, female bodies are classic supply and demand…Some desk clerks would get their shorts in a knot over this and go tactical stake out the room and whatnot but one, it’s more work than I want to put it and, two, as a classic libertarian, I feel obliged to let the free market run its course.
But it wasn’t that…She called back immediately saying she had been disconnected and it turned out to be the same girl I talked to earlier who had a drunk woman at her bar with a hotel room key…She wasn’t a registered guest, but I told the girl to send her here and we could probably figure it out…She didn’t and now she said Mr H was there with her, so why she called looking for Mr H still is not clear…The girl realized there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, and I reiterated my instructions to send everyone to the hotel so they could get some sleep…I never heard from anyone about this again.
Boy, the retailer was all but deserted when I went to visit The Wife after my shift at the hotel…There were few shoppers and when I snuck my head in the back to see if The Wife was visible it was deserted…I thought, perhaps, they were having a meeting to talk about the two shootings there were at other retailers this week but no, there were only three employees there: The Wife, Alia, who was manning register five, and Assistant Manager Wes…There was nobody at the service desk.
The big news here in our small town is the plant is closing…It’s a long term plan, so we won’t be a ghost town tomorrow – it won’t completely close until 2036 – but as a homeowner who’s settled here, ou find yourself wondering what the deal might be…The plant – it’s on the right a couple of miles out as you head to town and turns coal into electricity – and some ranching is really all there is here and a lot of the 2,000 or people or so that live here work at the plant…Or so I’ve heard…I haven’t polled every resident in town.
Longtime readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that I toured the plant a few years back when I was Legion post commander…They were looking for workers and were hosting assort dignitaries in the hopes we’d spread the word the plant was hiring…In theory, it’s pretty simple: coal is burned and water from the river is boiled and steam is produced and turbines are turned and electricity is produced, most of which, we’re told, is shipped elsewhere…On the day we toured, they weren’t actually producing electricity for some reason, and we were told it costs them $20,000 per day when they need to buy it from the local power company.
Had a really good workout today…With three sleep sessions in the books, all really good, since Friday morning’s session I was really strong…I got the new upped weight on the bench press up nine times and the legs grooved on the 40 squats after each superset…The sleep was important because that is when your muscles recover and grow.
During Sunday Spaghetti Nite (SSN) I tried to convince The Wife to enter the rhubarb that is growing in the back garden in the fair later this week…She doesn’t really want to because she knows squat about rhubarb, but I pointed out we knew squat about turnips and artichokes when we entered them in past years and both won ribbons…We have the fair guide book and I looked it up and rhubarb judging is Wednesday: twelve pieces, in a plastic bag on a paper plate strong enough to hold all twelve pieces…I couldn’t find anything, tho, about when you enter them, tho The Wife’s suggestion that you enter them the day of the judging sounded logical.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Sunday until 1600 Sunday…6.5 hours for the day.
I actually set the alarm because I didn’t want to sleep too late…I don’t usually wake up to an alarm clock, of course, and when it did go off I remember being surprised and thinking the noise was from whatever dream I was having and it took a second to remember I had actually set the alarm.
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.
Let’s be friends. Follow me on Facebook.
