Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, December 26
The cat wasn’t all over me when I got up this morning…Usually, of course, she can be counted on trot into the bedroom and start meowing the second I start stirring and otherwise show the signs of rising…Not today…I rolled over and whatnot and nothing…I got up to use the can…More nothing…I go to the kitchen to get the coffee going and there’s still no sign of her…I go looking for her and I find her in one of her fave places on the couch, singularly unimpressed with my appearance…Usually, she’s on the kitchen table whining while I’m making coffee but not today.
It’s a leisurely day…I putz around on project work and get some laundry going and then that’s done and I go to the gym…I’m coming up on the 17th anniversary of my first session with Bill the Trainer in Sin City…I lived in an apartment complex that had a world-class gym and Bill worked out a deal where he worked his clients out there…I was tired of being a tubbo and had finally decided to do something about it.
For reasons I am not prepared to explain, I was thinking about that during today’s workout…Despite having eaten like an oink-oink Wednesday, I had good strength, did all the upped weights and really felt good…As usual, I was the only one there and sometimes the mind can wander but not this morning: focus was good the whole way and I was out of there in an hour…Part of me wanted to drop by the week-old convenience store across the street on the way home…Recall last Thursday I was their first customer, waiting at the door right as they turned the key, but it’s a long life and there will be plenty of chances to stop in.
The plan today was to water the plants, shovel the driveway, finish the laundry and go to the next county for lunch at the Mexican joint and to pick up some things at the retailer… In the afternoon…In the morning I was going to read on the couch…But I started thinking that once I got settled in reading I was unlikely to want to get up to shovel snow or do anything else except go to bed…So I did all those things in the morning.
First was shoveling snow…There was about four inches in the driveway, not quite enuff to fire up the snowblower, but it was all snow, no ice, so it was easy…After I removed the two-foot berm the town’s snow plowers had left, of course…Then I watered the plants and did more laundry then I showered and went to the next county.
A quesadilla and a burrito are not classic post-workout nutrition, of course, but what the hell, you have to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves…Before my feast arrived I made a list for the retailer and I didn’t really need as many things as I thought: some post-workout shake drink mix; a phone charger for the new ride; the mouthwash I can’t get in town; a toilet brush.
I had a hell of a time finding the toilet brush…At the retailer in town they’re in two places, hardware and the cleaning aisle, but they’re in neither of those places here and I was reduced to actually asking for help and a nice kid took me to aisle I-24, which is where bathroom supplies, like towels and shower curtains, are.
I got home, cleaned the toilet and the cat box and put the clean laundry on the kitchen table and realized I had nothing left to do today…This was great…1130 and I’m done for the day…A fabulous feeling it is, having nothing to do…I would have to produce an evening meal and boy, this would have been primo small-town diner time but our diner, of course, closed over a year ago…Still, tho, the new convenience store would have a variety of tasty, unhealthy crap available and the local market would have that orange chicken I like that just needs to be heated up…Plus, of course, there’s still half a side of prime rib in the frig.
So the cat and I reported for an afternoon tour of duty on the couch…I got up from time to time, tho…One of the benefits of reading at the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century is being able to immediately find pics of the ancient temples and relics you are reading about…You enter in the name of the temple and BOOM there you are, standing right next to it…Zoom out and you have the big-picture context I like and zoom back in and you’re inside a temple carved into a side of a mountain, a feat I am unable to comprehend.
Talked to The Wife and things are not going as bad as expected…Her sister is responding well to her surgery and she did well in her first physical therapy session…Our oaf brother-in-law is back at work, too, his broken ankle not preventing from pulling a session at his home office, where he’s a bill collector for the VA…The Wife said she may well be gone a month.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 2000 Wednesday until 0130 Thursday…5.5 hours for the night and 29.5 hours for the day…This was a lousy sleep session…I’d eaten so much Christmas Day that I had the trots and was getting up left and right to use the can…Oh well…I brought it on myself.
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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