Read Free Fortnight rolls on.
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, October 15
The big news from the walk this morning was there’s a new house for sale in the neighborhood, two houses up Main Street from The Shire…For those of you keeping score at home, this is on the same side of Main Street as The Shire, so it’s across the street and one house down (or up, depending on how you look at it) from that dump three houses down Main Street that is still for sale…The only problem is ol’ Sparrow couldn’t find a listing for it online anywhere, not even at the listed realtor’s homepage so it’s not clear how much the house is being offered for.
It was below freezing when I set out, a splendid temperature for a walk, presuming the roads are good, which they were…Regular readers of this crap know yours truly generally varies the route but opportunities to take the River Route in the fall only come around in the fall and one of the reasons I moved up here was to experience a proper fall every year so it was the River Route again…Usually, I walk to the river and immediately turn around but today I stood on the bridge and listened to the river for awhile…It was saying the same things rivers have been saying since time immemorial.
More big news is my new PJ bottoms made their debut today…They’d actually arrived Monday or Tuesday but they are really long and needed to be hemmed and, seizing the moment, Ol’ Sparrow decided to hem them himself…I mean, they’re PJs for Pete’s sake, not something for gala night on the cruise.
I have a long history of hemming my stuff, none of it good…This includes hemming pants with an actual needle and thread, some tape you were supposed to iron into the fabric and duct tape…In all cases yours truly ended up looking like a refugee….But I figured they are only going to be worn around the house, so what the heck, I did some wandering around the notions section of the retailer prepared to iron again, put came across a tape that didn’t require ironing…I applied that tape today…In what should not be considered the Upset of the Year, the results were the same.
The hilarity started right off, too…After measuring them against the outgoing PJ bottoms and still right side out, ol’ Sparrow, Master Tailor, folded the cuff up, a tragedy-in-waiting that should be obvious to even the most casual observer…Fortunately, even an idiot like me recognized that if I carried on like this the hem would be visible from the outside, hardly the biggest tragedy when you live alone but something ol’ Sparrow, Master Tailor, would like to avoid.
After pulling them inside out it was a simple matter to screw it up further…I measured carefully – “measure twice, hem once” is my motto – and applied the tape and pressed both sides against each other and voila, they were still too long…At least without slippers…With slippers they’re not too bad and 90 percent of the time I’ll be either lying or sitting down, so what the hell and since ‘not too bad’ and ‘what the hell’ are two of the fundamental tenets of my existence, we’re calling PJ Hemming 2020 a success.
Prices are going up…I went to the retailer in the next county and bought the usual stuff for the next few days with the only bonus item my wash-that-gray-right-out-of-your-hair shampoo ($8) and blew $60…I was expecting $50 or $55 or so, but what do I know.
The big news is there was a new girl working the counter at my fave Mexican joint, a young mija completely indoctrinated about my usual…This could spell disaster – there are a couple of modifications – but fortunately the usual kid who works the counter was pulling a shift at the grill and, of course, he knows and he even ordered for me, all I had to do was offer my debit card.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1800 Wednesday until 0200 Thursday…8.0 hours for the day – a lusty total – and 25.5 hours for week, an utterly anemic figure…Yours truly slept really well, tho and offhand I am crediting my new, daily veggie routine…I did wake up around 2030 or so to use the can but that was it…I was back asleep forthwith, slept deeply and dreamt vividly and woke up feeling wonderful.
I slept so well I had good energy all day…Regular readers of this crap know I usually start nodding off around 1400 (sometimes earlier) on Thursdays, but today I felt great at 1400 and ol’ Sparrow didn’t start yawning until 1600 or so.
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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