Read Free Week (RFW) continues at The Diary. It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Monday, December 25
The AGM said I could be late tonite…Everybody was working shorter shifts today and while it wasn’t particularly practical to let ol’ Sparrow come in whenever the hell he wanted, last nite the AGM said I could come in at half-past if I wanted to…Well, that wasn’t particularly practical either…Ol’ Sparrow likes his routine and it wasn’t as if the extra half-hour would’ve done any good…Besides, it would’ve just thrown me a half-hour my usual schedule.
However, while were there at a quarter till – a bit earlier than our usual ten till – we told the AGM that we would be in no particular rush to assume the deck and the conn, as officers of the deck say in the Navy…We were going to get some coffee going, then get some water, then put that cream on our elbow, and maybe fart around even more before clocking in, something he understood completely and in the holiday spirit we ended up relieving the AGM a little after the top of the hour.
The big news is we are still drinking ice water…I am not making that up…Usually when the Changing of the Pants occurs in September, when we go from regular pants to winter pants, we go from ice water to non-iced water…For reasons that History may never divulge, tho, we have yet to stop drinking ice water this season.
The hotel is still slow…Despite some decent snow the past couple of days, nobody is coming up to ski and a check of the forecast doesn’t show occupancy above two-thirds until the first weekend of the New Year.
You know, for a heathen whose home looks about as inviting as a gulag, this wasn’t too bad a holiday…Cousin Danny sent me some souvenirs of my favorite baseball team and I made a video of me opening the present – it was pretty funny and Danny would’ve liked it – but it ended up being too long to text, so we merely made one thanking him and his wife Barbara and at under a minute it was short enuff to send.
The prime rib ended up really good…We say ended up because it didn’t start out ending up really good…Following specific, supposedly expert directions, we put it in the oven for 42 minutes at 500° and then shut the oven off and left it in for two hours…This produced a prime rib that was so rare it all but mooed when we stuck a knife in it…Good gravy…We suppose it was edible if you enjoyed chatting with your hunk of meat while eating it, but we don’t…And we weren’t particularly in the mood to wait while it cooked some more, so we cut off a nice hunk and got the frying pan out, turned the oven back up to 375° and put the biscuits and prime rib in…The rib eye steak turned out pretty good and an hour later when the prime was was cooked medium well we took it out and cut off our favorite parts and that was really good, so while Christmas dinner cannot be judged a rousing success, it was satisfactory.
We’ve certainly had worst Christmas dinners…Ages ago we were alone and figured someplace would be open and this turned out to be false and Christmas dinner ended up being Church’s fried chicken, which sucked and one year The Ex made a tofurkey which had an outer layer that looked and tasted like vinyl siding…And 40 years ago today we had Christmas dinner in the chow hall at Recruit Training Command, Naval Training Center, Orlando…We had reported for duty in the Navy five days earlier and our company commanders – Chief Grant and Senior Chief Forts – had vanished for the holiday, leaving five-day-old recruits responsible for wiping their own asses and marching themselves to the chow hall on their own.
What we really remember about boot camp was getting there…Our recruiter picked us up at 0530 and Uncle Rudy was there and it took us a full 24 hours for the Navy to deliver the Los Angeles Recruit Detail (LARD) to Orlando…Looking back, it was probably intentional…The real function of boot camp was to get you accustomed to operating while tired, and none of us had slept and we weren’t accustomed to long periods awake like we are now and that whole first day sucked…We were tired and behind schedule to boot, because Recruit Sparrow could not produce a urine sample when required…The weather was bad during the dead of winter in Orlando and we didn’t get all of our PT in so for the final run ol’ Sparrow was really hurting…In fact, the weather sucked for this, too, and everything was done indoors and for the run you had to run around the gym 20 or 25 times and the pace was set by the most recent Olympic marathon champion carrying a flag – known as a guidon in the Navy – and the deal was if the guidon passed you, you failed the run…Well, missing outdoor running time took its toll and we were struggling…Seaman Recruit Culley, who could’ve lapped the guidon, wouldn’t let me fail and ran with me providing inspiration while keeping his eye on the guidon to make sure he didn’t pass us…We puked afterward, but we made it.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1530 Monday until 2130 Monday…6.0 hours for the week and 16.5 hours for the week, an excellent total…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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
