Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, June 12
The big fiasco in our small town right now concerns mosquitos…There’s no small number of them, what with the river nearby, not to mention the attendant streams, ditches and irrigated fields you find in farm and ranch areas…To help mitigate matters, our small town has, for years, paid for aerial spraying…That stopped this week because the spraying company backed out of the contract because someone – one person, evidently – called and whined that their pesticide caused cancer.
It’s rumored the young couple in the old Mueller house across from the high school were the ones whining about it, which is easy to believe because they have a sign in one of their front windows more or less declaring that if you favor spraying you are pro-cancer.
I try to ignore stuff like this, but they were duking it out on our small town’s Faceplant page…Most favor the spraying, but a vocal minority was adamantly opposed, citing minor details like the aforementioned cancer risks and other long-term health risks…These people were cordially invited to leave town and one guy thoughtfully provided the number of a moving company…The first spraying missed was this past Wednesday and I wonder if that was the reason The Shire was inundated with them when I did the lawn Thursday…I don’t really know…Regular readers of this crap know I don’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time outside, so this isn’t the most pressing issue personally, but offhand – what the robins in residence and whatnot – I’m thinking the fewer pesticides we’re spraying the better off birds and doggies will be.
At the Veterans Service Office, Larry came by (I met him in the parking lot) to show me the letter the VA sent him denying his hearing disability claim…He was an equipment operator in Vietnam and was subjected to those noises, plus the pesky artillery noises you get in war zones…Typical of the era, hearing protection was neither required nor provided and audiograms back then were virtually unheard of, so we were unable to establish service connection…We did submit audiograms that showed current, demonstrable hearing loss and the thing is we’ve gotten veterans a 10% rating on similar cases in the past, but not on this one…All right, even tho we don’t have any new evidence to offer, we can request the VA review their decision, which is basically hoping someone different might have a different point of view…Which happens, too…The VA is nothing more than a collection of humans and the reviewer we got may have been having a bad day….Who knows???…You’ve got a year to file and I should have it ready to go next week.
The finances continue to be sound, as the checkbook app and the bank statement reconciled this morning, no small matter considering the check for the water bill still hasn’t cleared plus I hadn’t entered the recurring payments in the checkbook register app and the VSO direct deposit was in there a bit earlier than anticipated…Plus, I couldn’t be bothered to enter the purchases from yesterday’s spend fest, either…No matter…I entered everything in the register app and BOOM, the difference between the register app and the online bank statement was the amount of the water bill…I also finally got around to entering the recurring payments in the register app, which I should have done a couple of months ago…There was some modest hilarity when, despite the fact I set the start date for next month, the app automatically deducted the first payments despite the fact I’d already entered the June payments in the app…This caused a small amount of horror when I saw the balance, but it was a simple matter to delete the duplicate payments.
No news to report on the new restaurant they appear to be working on across from the post office…Not only that, nobody has any rumors about it, either…There are some at the county building that live in Hayden, but none of them know anything, either…The local paper has been no help, either, but their busy doing features on their few remaining advertisers that are still in business…Today, when I drove past, there was a ladder visible inside, but nothing appears to be going on outside, which regular readers of this crap know is where the building needs help because the entrance is on the side and the side of the building that faces Main Street is actually the back of the building…The grass is not tended regularly and it looks completely unappealing and I’ve always thought this is why restaurants can’t make a go of it there.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1730 Thursday until 0200 Friday…8.5 hours for the night and 36 hours for the bad, not too bad when you consider Tuesday’s 2.5-hour nonsense.
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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