Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, December 7
Had a very pleasant day with The Wife…We went to a small town on the way to the big city for their annual Holiday Fest because The Wife and I were both in the mood to get out of town…The weather was clear and the roads were good and we were out the door, in my new ride, a bit before 0600 and we did not make good time…It was foggy for the first couple of hours, locally heavy at times, and it was slow going and it took about 45 minutes longer to get there than I had reckoned…No matter.
First, tho, we stopped at a large home store in a town near on the Interstate for a pickax, mainly for chopping thru ice in the driveway, but The Wife also said it would provide years of honorable service in the gardens, too…I also bought first-class snow brushes/scrapers for our cars, something I had been unable to find in town for some reason…She also bought one tile, a sample to see if it would work in our shower, which needs new tile…As it turned out, the tile was too small.
Once we got to the small town, our first stop was the railroad there that runs in a small loop to see if there were tickets available…There weren’t, they’re sold online and sell out quickly, but The Wife did get a close up look at the choo-choo and we made mental notes to plan ahead next time.
We’ve been to this town before and it was as charming as we remembered it…Mountain mine town charming, not New England hamlet charming…Main Street was blocked off and there was Christmas music, both sacred and secular, playing and even tho it was clear and 40ish, it was windy, so you had to stay bundled up…I was wearing my old red-and-black plaid wool coat my folks got for me when I was 20 or so and it fit right in here.
I bought a book, too…A couple-three years ago The Wife bought an old set of the two-volume Lincoln biography The Prairie Years for me…Well, we’re in this first-class old bookstore and I see a four-volume set of the follow-up: The War Years…$185 for the set…All right, we’re not broke, and some quick smartphone research shows this is the high-end of fair and I’m prepared to buy it…However, as I’m wandering around really enjoying myself I see an illustrated volume of the entire series…It’s from a company that is famous for their condensed books, so I give it a pretty good going over and I don’t see anywhere where it’s condensed…I take it to a woman behind a counter who turns out to be the owner and she confirms it…$45 for the volume…That’s a pretty good price and I end up buying it.
We did some walking, too…The old schoolhouse has been remodeled, as has the old hotel, which plainly was very nice in its time, and we took a pleasant ride in a horse-drawn wagon, $4 each, not too bad…The only downside was The Wife failed in her stated goal of finding an old honey pot…Now, it wasn’t because there weren’t any…An old town like this has no shortage of stores that have them, but either she didn’t like them or they were more than she thought they were worth.
You might be tempted to think we enjoyed lunch in town, but by the time lunch rolled around every place was either too crowded or did not really interest us, so we ended up heading down the highway 15 minutes or so to a fast-food chain The Wife really likes and that ol’ Sparrow enjoys, too…This place never fails to disappoint…As usual, my order was screwed up…I’d ordered a double burger and got a single and, as it turned out, the extra patty was put on The Wife’s burger…I took mine back and, per protocol there, all the burgers were crushed, but we declined to whine about this.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1630 Friday until 0130 Saturday
1800 Saturday until 2130 Saturday
12.5 hours for the day and 48 hours for the week, a heck of a start to the sleep month.
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.
Let’s be friends. Follow me on Facebook.
