Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, February 5
Like yesterday, I had a plan for today…Unlike yesterday, which went off without a hitch, this one worked out not at all…At first, it did…It was later that didn’t work out.
I was in the gym at 0620, about usual for Friday, and I got a good workout in…35 lbs on the final hammer curl set again, leg work was strong and so was everything else, tho some loser was monopolizing the Smith machine so ol’ Sparrow was obliged to use the cable chest machine.
There was another yapper in the heart spring…This guy was a Classic Yapper…This is different than the Sunday Yapper – who merely blabs whatever happens to be resting on the top of his head, and he certainly isn’t Mongolia Mike (the one who got gout in Mongolia) who’s actually fairly interesting…The Classic Yapper is such because it is genuinely important to him that he tells you every goddamn thing associated with his life, his only regret being there is not enuff time to do this.
Good gravy…He was talking movies with this hapless dude when I got there and it turned out he grew up with some guy named Trey who appeared in some movies years ago so that rolled right into his brief acting career in a school play where he could remember neither cues nor lines and then he wanted to be on the ski team but his folks were broke so he had to get a job as a preschool janitor and his skiing career was neither long nor successful because he kept banging his head against things and there were probably other things I missed because I kept ducking my head underwater as often as possible.
Horror struck, tho, when the hapless dude got up and left…That left me and three older ladies on the heart spring and I was afraid I was going to have to flee because I did NOT want his complete and undivided attention – he was just about to start in on The College Years, he wanted to go to Dartmouth – when the guy returns…It turned out he just wanted to get his water bottle, probably for a mid-yap replenishment.
At the Veterans Service Office (VSO) Mr B sent me the letter he’d received from the VA advising they wanted to cut his prostate cancer rating…He sent me the letter as pics attached to an email, obliging me to read them sideways and it was true, they wanted to reduce from 100% down to 40% because his prostate cancer had the nerve to get better…This is both good and bad…Yay for getting better, but boo because the reduction will cost him $2,500 a month which, of course, is nothing to sneeze at.
You really only have two options when the VA sends you a letter proposing to reduce your rating: accept it, or get your doctor – civilian or VA, it doesn’t matter – to give medical evidence as to why they should not do this…To be helpful, I sent him a link to the Code of Federal Regulations that covers prostate cancer ratings – they’re rather specific, with certain conditions calling for a specific rating – and told him to see his doctor and to print out the page and take it with him.
I got home and there was almost six inches of snow in the driveway, about five more than when I’d left at 0530, which means it is really coming down…I got the snowblower out and cleared it because the snow ain’t supposed to stop until midday Saturday and if you leave it you’ve got to move 12 inches instead of six, which we’ve learned over the years here is a pain in the arse, even with a snowblower.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1630 Thursday until 0100 Friday
1730 Friday until 2130 Friday
12.5 hours for the day and 43.0 hours for the week, a marvelous total heading into Saturday’s final sleep session of the week.
And let me tell you something, Thursday nite was some of the best sleep ever…Exhausted after doing nothing all day Thursday, I took a shot of Zzz-Sleep just to make sure and except for the usual waking up to use the can once, slept straight thru.
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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