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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, November 3
Very dead slow at Hotel B this morning…From the time Nicole left until the time Arnold wandered at 0530 the only person I saw was the lone remaining check-in, about 2330 or so…And the phone didn’t ring, either, key because I couldn’t find it anyway.
Arnold is the temporary GM as Puja and Dustin are off somewhere…He’s a tidy Asian gentleman and he was up at 0530 to make sure his zany part-time night auditor had shown up, or if he’d have to rustle up breakfast himself…
Arnold is getting things done, too…There was a new monitor at the front desk, key because the old was, well, old, and was usually blurry and tuff to read…Plus, he produced a key for the breakfast room door, so now we can access it without having to go into the manager’s apartment AND there are some two-way radios, in chargers, at the front desk…Now, there’s nobody for me to radio at zero-dark-thirty, but it was nice to know they were there, tho I suppose I could radio myself I suppose:
Sparrow…
Go!
Yeah, you wanna go with bacon or sausage for breakfast this morning???…
There was no shift at the retailer today and as I was up early so I did some work in the yard…The leaves are all off the trees and they really should be picked up before the snow sticks, altho we neglected to do this last year and the lawn was not noticeably worse off because of that.
I fought it too, because I really wanted to fart around on some projects and, oh yeah, I’m running for Congress, too, but call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must, something told me to get out there because, look, when you’ve been working the land as long as I have, your instincts tell you these things…The plan was to mow the grass, thereby giving the grass one last trim before the snow sticks and also getting up most of the leaves…You’re never going to get all of them up.
It was a lousy plan, poorly executed.
First, there were entirely too many leaves to be picked up by a lawnmower and when the mower stalled within the first few minutes, obliging me to rake up the deepest spots, I said screw it and put the mower away and commenced raking.
I hate raking.
I plugged away at it, tho, and ended up getting the area in front of the front door and the sector facing Main Street – Quadrants A and B – done…The only problem was I have so little aptitude for this I neglected to plan for what I was going to do with the more than a dozen piles of leaves I’d produced…I left them…First off, light was fading, second off I was hungry and had plans to go to the diner and third off I was losing interest…This is one of the reasons you get married…The Wife is off at a conference this weekend with of one of her volunteer groups and had she been here we would have had the entire lawn mowed and the leaves burned in one afternoon…By myself, I waited until mid-afternoon for the inspiration to hit, then spent an hour resisting that inspiration, before finally waddling outside and half-assing a mostly unsatisfactory session in the yard.
Those of you keeping score at home might have reckoned this was the first yard session without all of my real teeth and you are right…The falsies stayed inside too, because there was no reason to wear them…If I ran into neighbor Jerry, and I didn’t, I’d say I got new teeth, but wasn’t wearing them right now…He’s a neighbor…He’d understand
Dinner the local diner was a triumph…Had my usual Stromboli and it was about as good as I’ve had there, which is saying a lot because they are always really good.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Saturday until 1230 Saturday…Damn, this is low even for the usually-low Saturday Sleep Session (SSS)…Generally, you wake up after four hours you can get back to sleep but not today…I knew as soon as I woke up after whatever the current dream was ended that that was all there was, 17 hours of sleep the past two sessions, not to mention Wednesday’s nap, finally extracting its price…It wasn’t a bulletin, either, I really wasn’t all that tired when I laid down to read, tho I did fall asleep soon enough.
The big news is we barely missed out on the vaunted 50-hour mark, the weekly total coming in at – and this can either be heartbreaking or exciting – a man-sized 49.5 hours…Unfortunately, with the non-usual hours I worked most of October, there isn’t a monthly total, but since this week ends in November, this will be the Anchor Week (AW) for November’s total.
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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