Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, May 24
Good gravy today was a mess…At first, my goal was to have the lawn done by noon (1200)…Then the goal was to start it by noon, then it was merely to get the lawn done before I had to leave for Memorial Day ceremony rehearsal.
I never did finish it…The lawn is only partly done…I am not making that up.
Before I even got to the lawn I had to tear the shed apart to find the clippers so I could get some of the more obnoxious weeds against the fences, in back of the shed and around the fire pit…Plus whatever other weeds annoyed me…Despite the fact I was almost stepping on top of them, I couldn’t find them the first three times I looked in the shed, which is not a bulletin with ol’ Sparrow…I also checked the carport, but The Wife cleaned out the carport so unless she hid them someplace they had to be in the shed…This took 30 minutes…Then I got to mowing.
After a couple of passes on Quadrant A I decided to try and reattach the side discharge blocker that came off last year because I was getting hit with whatever sticks and rocks it shot out…So I go to the new hardware store here in our small town and get some tie wraps…That’s what we called them in the Navy…Up here they call them cable ties…They also call shopping carts buggies…I get home and use them to attach the flap the to the thingy they originally attached to…Then I get to mowing, continuing with Quadrant A, which fronts Maple Street and is right outside the seldom-used front door…After a couple of trips up and down it is plain the flap will stay attached, but the flap continues to flap, with grass still coming out the side instead of going into the rear catcher…I do some inspecting and there is a square hole about two-thirds of the way up the flap…I could get a tie wrap and put it thru the whole, wrap it around the bottom and then connect it…Not too bad an idea – positively brilliant for me – except for the fact the tie wraps I got aren’t long enough and I am not bright enough to connect them.
Back to the hardware store for longer tie wraps…I make this repair and get back to mowing and in short order the tie wrap comes off…The two original tie wraps, however, are still going strong.
I was making good progress in Quadrant B when I decide to take the flap off…It is doing more harm than good…Some grass is being directed to the catcher in the back but mostly it builds up at the side flap before it drops to the lawn…So I remove it, restart the mower and it conks out on me a minute or so later…When I try to restart the engine produces little popping sounds so I stop trying to restart it because if it explodes then we’ve really got problems.
Later The Wife and I discuss repairing it versus getting a new one…The Wife favors repairing it while I ran getting a new one up the flagpole…In the end we compromised…She authorized the purchase of a new one, but only after I took it to a repair shop to get it looked at…All right…I scoped out a repair shop in the next county and will take it in first thing in the morning.
We had a very good turnout this evening for rehearsal for our Memorial Day ceremony…|Not everyone was there, of course, but most were…Bob and I will be the sentries in the changing of the guard ceremony, like we were last year…Bob’s been doing this for years, but this will only be my second time doing it but it went very well last year and I didn’t screw too much up in rehearsal and we should look rather smart Monday.
In addition to the usual color guard, flag detail and rifle squad, we will have the riderless horse again this year and we will be honoring the local men who died in World War I, plus sending to post everlasting the local veterans who died this past year…The horse was even at the rehearsal and it didn’t go completely banshee when we did the three-volley rifle salute, tho it did crap at the base of the flagpole.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1800 Wednesday until 0700 Thursday…Actually, it’s a bit more than that because of my tendency to round up or down, but 13-and-a-half hours is close enough, a great equalizer…The weekly total should be pretty good.
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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.
Read Gaylon’s latest: We The People: Making America America Again at www.GaylonKent.com
