Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, May 18
The new pants made their debut in the next county today, as their World Tour ’18 continued with lunch at the Mexican joint…Some minor hilarity ensued when it came time to pay…I got the same stuff I always get, a chorizo burrito and a quesadilla, but when Victor hit the Total button it came out to $25 and change.
Victor, que pasa???…Even I don’t eat that much.
Que pasa is Spanish for what in the living hell is going on here…Victor laughed and showed me a palm which in this circumstance meant for me to pipe down…He pressed some buttons and eventually the usual price came up and I suspect – but will never know for sure – that Victor inadvertently tacked on the take-out order he was taking simultaneously, but all I heard over the squawk box was an order for some tacos, so who knows???
After lunch, I went and wandered around the farm and ranch store for a while…Well, ostensibly I went there to wander around but I ended pricing those gas-powered weed whackers…The one we bought at the retailer turned out to be a piece of crap and for the past couple of summers ol’ Sparrow has been trimming the grass along the fences and the side of the house with clippers, something ol’ Sparrow is getting pretty tired of…The really good ones at the ranch store are, and I am not making this up, about three times as much as the ones at the retailer and they’ll probably last 20 times as long, and I will report my findings to The Wife when she gets home next week.
Devon, the kid who bought the abandoned coffee shop next door, appears to be making big changes…The building came complete with a windmill on top of the main building (in fact some of us in town refer to it as the abandoned windmill) but there have been workers up there the past couple of days dismantling it…The roof has been removed so all there is there now is the frame, and most of the outside of the windmill has been removed, too…I can see Devon doing this because I don’t think anyone other than the Dutch really want to live in a windmill, though if he would have left it up that would have been all right with me, too.
The workers, of course, were wearing safety harnesses, but the one on one guy really high up appeared to be secured to something on the ground which, if he fell, would probably end up doing him some zero good…This brought back a funny safety line memory from the old diesel submarine days.
I was pretty junior and had to go over the side for some reason, I think to touch up some paint or something…Anyway, proper safety procedures dictated a life jacket, safety harness and safety line but Joe Balcher, a senior electrician’s mate who was pretty funny, waved a hand, noted the job would take less than a minute, and clamped the safety line to a belt loop on my dungaree pants…Joe couldn’t be bothered to bend over to put the other end in the safety track that ran the length of the boat, so he held the other end in his hand, which put him in some danger, too…As I recall, no one fall into the water and no one got in trouble, either.
While Devon certainly has things moving next door, it would be nice if he mowed his sizeable lawn…It has yet to be mowed this season and, of course, I already have two mowings in…Actually, driving around town the past couple of days a lot of people need to get on the stick and mow their lawns…What is almost interesting is the number of houses that both are for sale and need their lawns mowed…I counted three the past couple of days, including the one across the street.
I don’t understand this…I check the for sale listings in our small town regularly, just for funsies, and they are asking premium prices for these homes, well more than they were asking when The Wife and I bought The Shire four years ago…I gotta be honest, if I’m a buyer driving up to your for sale house and your lawn is five inches high and dandelion ridden besides, I probably am not going to go inside because if you don’t care about the outside, what condition is the inside going to be in?
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0100 Friday morning until 0730 Friday morning…Wore the original brick red house shirt, too…This time I didn’t even bother keeping the windows open because I didn’t want a repeat of Wednesday when I woke up cold and was obliged to shut them.
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
