It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, April 8
It was a strong troika in the gym this morning, the first decent troika in a while…Recall last Friday’s workout was half-assed and yesterday’s was blown off completely because ol’ Sparrow couldn’t be bothered to drive into town and it felt good to get solid weights, good cardio and a proper soak in.
Today was the third anniversary of yours truly taking over at the veterans service office (VSO)…I can still remember Stanko and Rick corralling after a Legion post meeting and them telling me Natalie is leaving and they’d like me to put in for her job…I thought they meant post commander – which longtime readers know was a position I’d previously held – but they said no, she’s leaving town and will be resigning as VSO and they demanded I put in for it…Well, that’s not completely accurate but, on the other hand, it wasn’t completely false, either: there was Stanko holding the national colors in one hand and the POW flag in the other while Rick hummed The Battle Hymn of the Republic and ol’ Sparrow, still married at the time, knew an order when he heard one.
Good thing they brought it up because otherwise ol’ Sparrow would not have even considered it…I am not making that up: yours truly thought the job would be entirely too tuff for him, one long ordeal of government BS…Ha!!!…Shows what I know, and hardly for the first time, either…Regular readers of this crap know this isn’t the busiest job in the history of labor and, of course, it is supremely rewarding being of service to veterans and their widows.
It was a fiasco at first, tho, because the county couldn’t even post the opening until after Natalie had quit (mid-February, if I recall correctly) so there was no training, no hanging out to see what the job entailed and when ol’ Sparrow opened the office door that first day he literally did not know what he was doing…And because it’s a one-person office there was nobody in the Human Services Department to provide any guidance, either…All they had for me were the phone messages that had stacked up in the interregnum between Natalie’s last day and my first.
So ol’ Sparrow had to rustle up his own training, which he did, spending a couple of weeks in Denver…After a while, tho, you realize that while you do need to know things, this is really a paper-pushing job, knowing which form to fill out and how to fill it out correctly, and once you know that it’s easier to be of service.
Anyway, it’s worked out pretty well for a job Stanko and Rick forced me to take…Not only is it worthwhile but, frankly, it’s been a boon financially, too, paying way more than a similar number of hours at the retailer.
Yours truly was obliged to sit thru a department video conference this morning…I regularly blow these off, but checked in today because, my nominal boss, shamed me into it…I had emailed her Monday to half-jokingly ask when we were going to have our department holiday party, which was postponed twice because of COVID…She said if I’d’ve bothered to come to the Friday meetings I’d know they were planning something this summer, so I checked in today.
It was time I’ll never get back…I was the only guy there, so there was the usual amount of female blabbing you’d expect: has anyone seen the high school play, my daughter’s in it…What’s up with the old newspaper building; there’s a fence around and bulldozers on the property…I made my kid go to school today, tho he stayed home yesterday; does this make me a bad mommy???…Good gravy…Eventually, yours truly noted his third anniversary here, which provided temporary relief and avoided an all-out stroke and left after a half-hour or so, lying and saying he had an appointment.
Ol’ Sparrow did some grocery shopping before heading home – all three stores, the health food store, the retailer, and the grocery store – and at the grocery was hoodwinked into donating to a charity that hopes to stop bullying in school…There were no options…The girl was a professional fundraiser up from the big city and had me completely in her spell from the start…She was as good a salesperson as I’d ever seen.
It wasn’t even wanting to take her out, either because even tho she’s gorgeous and well within current Alejandra/Liz age models, yours truly does not get on well with Type A, saleswomen…It is simply complete admiration for someone doing something well…Hell, she was so good at her work yours truly would’ve funded the entire program if he’d’ve had the money…Hell, she could’ve sold me into slavery and I would have gone willingly:
Look, Sparrow, it’s room and board and six days a week of honest work in fresh air…Plus the week between Christmas and New Year’s??…One long drunk….Seven days of pure hooch…
The big news is the new lawnmower and the fertilizers I’d bought were waiting for me on the side porch when yours truly returned to The Shire…I am not making that up…This, despite the fact the latest word was they’d both be here Monday…There is really no reason to deal with this right now, so I put a tarp over the mower box and left everything in the carport…We’ll get to it Thursday.
After a fortnite or so of solid gains, The Portfolio took it in the shorts this week, down a few bucks.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1600 Thursday until 0030 Friday
1730 Friday until 2130 Friday
12.5 hours for the day and 43.5 hours for the week, a fabulous total heading into the finale, the Saturday Sleep Session (SSS)…Only the longest of longtime readers out there will recall the days when 43 hours was considered a pretty good week…God bless all of you.
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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.
