Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, October 25
As noted after Thursday’s workout, I planned to up the bicep hammer curl weight from 35 on the final set to 40…I was feeling strong this morning but even with that I only got seven-eightish up…I say that because eight wasn’t bad form, but it wasn’t straight out of the Hammer Curl Handbook, either…We’re not ready to toss the eighth rep out with the wash water, tho seven was all I got with proper form.
40’s a lot for a hammer curl…Or maybe it’s only a lot for me…Maybe they’re warming up with 40s at the senior center and I’m the slacker, but I doubt it…I’ve been lifting for many years and and I’ve got some guns and 35 has always been the max weight I’ve been able to lift ten times with good form…Everything else was the recently upped weights, too.
Moderately busy at the Veteran Service Office (VSO) today…First, I started in on a request I actually got Wednesday from a vet who needs help paying his rent…He is behind for October and November is, of course, due next week, when his total bill will be a man-sized $2,400 because it is not cheap to live here in town…It’s even less not cheap when you’re a massage therapist and your living depends on there being tourists in town wanting massages and there aren’t that many right now.
Now, we are not simply going to fork over two grand. First, I verified his ID and that his discharge papers weren’t printed yesterday…Today Stanko came by with some guidelines regarding required documentation…It includes a lease agreement or a rent demand or an order to vacate, so I emailed Josh and asked him to send me his rental agreement…He did, in fairly short order, but he sent back a two-page agreement…My goodness, I’d rented for years before The Wife and I bought The Shire and I’d never seen a rental agreement that short…Even in the adorable Broke Bachelor days when I’d merely rented a room there were more than two pages. In fact, it wasn’t even two full pages because all the second page had was a sentence about the tenant agreeing no more than two people will live there and Josh’s signature…I emailed him back saying we needed something official that detailed the rental amount and how payments are made and he wrote me back acknowledging this but never sent anything else, which is kind of suspicious but whatever…I also called Bob at the Lions Club to see if they’d like to help out, too.
Then I got a couple of calls from vets who had not received the results of exams they’d had over the summer…Christ, that’s a long time even by government standards…I am rather limited because I’m not entitled to receive that information, but I gave them a couple of useful numbers…Or I think, suspect, hope they might be useful…It’s the VA…It’s entirely possible, as we’ve established here in the past, that they’re not in service.
Around 1300 or so I get a call from a kid named Ken…Or he sounded like a kid in his 20’s…Some research showed he’s actually a bit older than that…Anyway, he’s my counterpart at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), their district commander up here, and he said he was calling VSOs in the district and introducing himself…Yes, sir, an appropriate call to make but good gravy, this kid was a firehose of information…There were all sorts of programs he’d taken part in for those with PTSD and he wanted me to know about each of them and there were a dozen other things, so many I stopped taking notes…I ended up emailing him – poor kid has ‘kidney stones’ as part of his email address, thanks he said to his service in the sandbox – so he’s be able to send me the very latest and keep me in the loop.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1900 Thursday until 0300 Friday…This was a lot better than the night before: I slept well and I only had to use the can once, not every two hours like Wednesday night.
I’ve been making a concerted effort to whiz less…I’m taking a lot of supplements: cinnamon, pumpkin seed extract, grape seed extract and the prescription the VA doctor gave me I started the pumpkin and grape seed extract a couple of weeks ago I am noticing results…I am not as thirsty and since I am drinking less I am whizzing less, too, less than when I was just taking the cinnamon and prescription stuff.
The results are mixed when I sleep, tho and are usually dependent on what I ate for my last meal…Thursday night all I had were a can of peas and a banana, two foods recommended in situations like this…When I go to the Mexican joint or eat a couple of sandwiches, I’m using the can every two hours.
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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