Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, May 24
Had a sundry stand sale this morning…It was cash, too, the first cash I’ve been obliged to drop in ages…About 2330 a woman comes down, properly masked, and goes and looks at the freezer offerings which now consists of ice cream, Oreo Klondikes, Choco-Tacos, breakfast burritos, Hot Pockets and that iced lemon bread no one ever buys.
The problem tho, was she forgot her glasses and couldn’t tell what she was reading, so I amble out and ask if she wants anything specific and she says ice cream, but without chocolate.
Oooh, that’s tuff: all our ice cream features chocolate, especially the chocolate fudge stuff…The cookie dough stuff has chocolate chips and the cherry stuff, while mostly vanilla, has chocolate shavings, too, and the Choco-Taco is so named for obvious reasons…So I take an Oreo Klondike out, which I strongly suspect has some chocolate in it, and showed it to here like a jeweler displaying wares…She regards it without much enthusiasm, asks what “are those red things” and when I tell her Hot Pockets, two flavors, ham and cheese and pizza, she waves a hand as I’d said cement and dead bird and takes the Oreo Klondike…I told her $2, she gave me a five and later when I rang it up it showed the price as actually $2.50, so I canceled that and rang it up as a $2 sundry purchase.
It wasn’t unusual to see downtown deserted on the drive in…It’s been deserted at night for two months, but it was eerie seeing it deserted on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend because boy, it’s weekends like this in tourist destination where you make your money…I hear restaurants might be opening up for dine-in service here soon, and we can start taking leisure bookings again on the 1st, but who knows if those bans will actually be allowed to expire of if they will be extended.
There were 19 rooms occupied at the hotel when I reported for duty, not too bad for the Virus Era, but 98 less than capacity…Instead of having some late arrivals and guests bustling around the lobby till 0100 or so, I saw no one and was done delivering folios to departing rooms by 0100 only because I ate and did some other farting around.
It might be somewhat busier over the summer, but most everything’s been canceled…The local music hall has canceled their summer music series and the rodeo’s been canceled, too…It runs, ran, Friday and Saturday nights and while I’m hardly Mr Rodeo, it was generally good to go an watch every other year or so.
It’s kind of tuff going and sitting in the stands, tho…Years ago, when I plied the newspaper reporter’s trade at a small newspaper, I was sent to cover a rodeo and saw everything up close, including the horror in a young cowboy’s eyes as he mounted his bronc to see how long he could ride it…I was literally a few feet away, sitting at the base of a billboard that was right next to a bucking shoot because there wasn’t a press suite, with corresponding food service, at the rodeo grounds, a shocking oversight…You see things like that up close, it’s tuff to go back and sit with the masses.
In what must be considered a mild upset, I got the lawn done today…Yours truly investigated every possible reason for putting it off, but I couldn’t justify any of them, and I tried really hard, too…Tomorrow’s out, and while Tuesday was a possibility, the lawn was really looking ugly…The actual lawn – still an eclectic blend of grasses, weeds and whole grains – wasn’t too bad, but those dandelion stems were really sticking out, even tho Cody had come by and done the lawn on Tuesday.
It felt good the whole way, too…It’s always satisfying to mow down really tall dandelion stems and it was satisfying surveying The Shire afterward. Ma Robin, presiding over matters from her nest next to the kitchen door, graciously allowed me to retrieve the mower and put gas in it without attacking me.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Sunday until 1300 Sunday…4.0 hours for the day and the week…I don’t know what the hell’s going on on Sundays…There was that 9.0-hour session a couple of weeks ago, but other than that it’s been 4-6 hours on Sundays for the past couple of months…I was tired when I got home and even took a shot of Zzzz-Sleep and that helped me get right to sleep and sleep well, but once I was rolled over and was awake, that was it.
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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