Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, June 1
The lawn mower is back!!!
I am not making that up…I was farting around the house this afternoon about 1530 or so, getting ready to head into town before my shift at the retailer to use a gift certificate to a restaurant we got at Hotel B…My phone rings when I am using the can and I come back and there is a message from the lady at the shop saying my mower is ready…I call her back and she said the total was $126…I said I was on my way.
The repair guy said the clanking sound was from some small thingy, no bigger than a small fingernail, that was stuck in the flywheel…Or something like that…Regular readers of this crap know that the fact I can’t remember is hardly the Upset of the Year…But he started it up and it was purring like a kitten…The side flap was screwed up shut, too, so there won’t be any twigs and/or rocks flying out and hitting ol’ Sparrow anymore…The only downside is I wasn’t able to do the lawn today, but it will still be there tomorrow…It really needs it, and the mower is back just in time to show Kid Devon next door that the lawn wars are on.
With The Wife still off at the retailer in the big city, I have settled into a routine…The cat gets her canned yummies in the morning, either when I get home from work or when I get up, depending…The birds get their premium bird seed then, too…I fill up a fair size bowl from the kitchen, which fills their feeder up about three-quarters of the way…It will last them until late afternoon, but I’m not running a buffet for Pete’s sake, and if they eat it all that is all there is until morning…Besides, I don’t think they eat that much after dark, anyway.
There’s a laundry routine, too…Our washer and dryer are in the kitchen, which is really convenient…After clothes are taken out of the dryer I fold them and put them on the kitchen table, where the cat lays down on them and she seems to prefer my new pants, frankly…She never sits on my shirts or underwear…Dishes are used, put in the sink, eventually washed and put in the rack, ready for further duty…Nothing is ever put away…I don’t see the point.
Crap, we were busy at the retailer tonight…From start to finish there was seldom a time I wasn’t doing something…There were a lot of checks to cash and, of course, Latin America was getting their usual infusion of cash…Mostly to Mexico, but also to Honduras and Nicaragua and even Texas got some, too…When there wasn’t that there were other things, like the guy who wanted to exchange two propane tanks…He pays me for them and I get the key from Maria and go out and open the locker and haul one down and he tries to take it from me and I pull up on the tank and say I’d be happy to set it on the ground for him…We actually went through this again…Once wasn’t enough and this time he asked me why I insisted on setting on the ground.
Well, so you don’t knock me in the goddamn knee with it is what I was thinking, but I merely told him I’ve found it works best if I set it on the ground…Fortunately, he had the good sense to know when it was OK to argue with ol’ Sparrow and when it was not OK to argue with ol’ Sparrow and that was the end of that.
Then we had a sugar spill at the service desk…What happened was Jacki had brought a sack of sugar to the desk from her register because it had a hole in it…She put the sack in a plastic bag and tied it up and put a slip on it so the back room will know to write it off…This is known as sending it to claims at the retailer…Anyway, I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention because I was swamped…Later, when I went to take it and some other claims stuff to the back the plastic bag it was put in turned out to have a hole in it…Me being me I was oblivious to this until no small amount of sugar – which can be hilariously slippery to walk on – was on the floor…Me trying to take the sugar sack out of the plastic bag also resulted in further sugar being sent to the floor…Finally, I took everything to a trash can and emptied everything in there…Then I put the claims slip on the empty sugar sack, which wasn’t completely empty of sugar, of course, so I left in the trash and got a hermetically sealed vacuum bag from Housewares to put it in for the remainder of its voyage to the back.
Busy and shorthanded – I was the only one at the service desk after 2000 – meant not all of the go-backs were done when I left at 2230…This will get someone a talking to, though it really shouldn’t.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0130 Friday until 0730 Saturday…The cat woke me up of all things but this is more or less when I get up on Friday mornings, so maybe I had stirred and she had sensed that and decided to come visit like she usually does…I don’t think the weekly total is going to be all that great.
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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.
Read Gaylon’s latest: We The People: Making America America Again at www.GaylonKent.com
