Yay for Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, April 2
Last week we chatted about how front desk work lately has been expanding to fill available time and how recently ol’ Sparrow has gotten back from walking the hotel at 0100 regardless of busy he was…Tonite it over-expanded and yours truly wasn’t back from walking the hotel until 0130, which regular readers of this crap know is a lousy time even when you’re sold out, full-tilt boogie, which we weren’t, being barely half full tonite.
The problem was arriving guests…There were three arrivals when yours truly reported for duty and they all showed up within the first hour and none of them had been here before, so they required the entire spiel about our half-off breakfast coupon and the ski shuttle to the mountain and because they were all staying for a few nites, information on the pool and workout room.
Then the two ladies put into 129 called to whine about ants in their room…They said they were near the basin in the bathroom and you don’t want to inconvenience the guests further, so you go and take the keys to their new rooms to them…(117, right up the hall)…You’re also grateful this happens when you have plenty of rooms to put them in.
More time was lost when yours truly had to take a crap and the toilet clogged, obliging yours truly to use the plunger…Then there were phone calls to answer and reservations to confirm and then this and then that and BOOM before you know it it’s 0115 and you’re just starting billing.
There was some dull, rather rare hilarity with the chamber of commerce maps we keep on the front desk…Both involved guests checking in…The first was a couple that’s stayed here before and the guy was looking at the map rather intently and after a few seconds asks where we are and puts a finger several inches off to the right of the end of the map:
Are we here???
I suppose you had to’ve been there because the combination of his tone and the pointing was pretty funny…And as it was, he was pretty accurate because we are off the right side of the map, tho only a smidgen, not nearly as far as he had us.
The second was with a gaggle of Chinese women checking in for some end-of-season skiing…One of the ladies was looking at the map with a forefinger on her chin, plainly getting her bearings…After a minute or so – while I’m processing their check-in – she finds the ski area and downtown but cannot seem to find our hotel so she asks, and she found it moderately funny when ol’ Sparrow pointed to an inch or so off the map.
In yard news, ol’ Sparrow pulled the trigger on a new lawnmower this morning…It was about 0330 and I was farting around the site of the company I’d bought some natural lawn chemicals from…I was in their store when some lawnmowers showed up…They looked really sharp and they had three models for sale: $299, $499, and $599…Regular readers of this crap know the current mower, bought when The Ex and I purchased The Shire in 2014, is currently broke dick with a tangled up pull cord and the mower is starting to show some signs of age besides, tho it should be noted that in the glee of the moment these signs may have been somewhat magnified.
Still tho, mowers do not last forever, and yours truly was already leaning towards paying a professional lawn service good money to do his lawn this season anyway and that ain’t cheap, so all three mowers were inspected…The $299 one was dismissed almost immediately, tho the $499 looked good but in fairly short order the $599 was decided upon…One, it has a bigger mowing area and has generally higher caliber specs, but the deciding factor was self-propelled, no small consideration as ol’ Sparrow enters his dotage.
It was a complete impulse buy…Usually, yours truly can be counted on to consider big-ticket purchases like that but not tonite…What with not having to pay to get the old mower repaired nor paying someone to do it for me, it will pay for itself before summer’s out…It’s an electrical mower, too; it runs on a rechargeable battery and that means no more gasoline usage and that’s a win for the environment.
In other news from the Yard Desk, the robins are making their first appearance in the neighborhood…Longtime readers of this crap know that from time to time they’ll use the top of the electrical meter next to the kitchen door for a nest, but they didn’t last year and they don’t appear to be all that interested in doing so this year, either, perhaps because the old nest from two years ago is still up and I seem to recall hearing they don’t like to reuse nests.
It’s OK if they don’t because they are a modest pain in the neck to host, especially once the eggs hatch and they go kamikaze on you if you get within ten feet of their nest…This means the front door has to be used and nobody likes that.
The tulips are starting to make their presence known, too, the first green shoots or stems or whatever they’re called starting to stick their noses out…
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…12.5 hours for the day and 50.5 hours for the week.
Ol’ Sparrow did wake up at 2030 and thought that might be it, but a patented Sparrow Roll Over (SRO) yielded yet another hour of sleep.
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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.
Gaylon’s books can also be found at The Reading Salon.
