It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, April 23 & Wednesday, April 24
Greetings from Pullman, Washington…I am not making that up.
We pulled out of Her Majesty’s (HM) house this morning after a wonderful reunion that met my expectations and exceeded hers…It was as if we had seen each other last month…HM said she was nervous because she’d gained weight after giving birth and was also nervous about Baby Freya, noting that some people don’t like kids.
Women…What nonsense, useless worry on both counts…Our bond is too strong and good gravy, Baby Freya was love at first sight and the big news is we noticed changes…One, she started using utensils instead of eating with her hands…Well, not using them, but picking them and having mixed results putting food on them…This started Sunday and they have a spoon-type deal that looks like a pacifier and she definitely ate with that…Also, she no longer gets stuck trying to crawl out the doggie window…Early in the week, she couldn’t make it and ended up teeter-tottering on her stomach until someone came and got her…Monday, tho, she was an old pro, going thru it as if she herself was a dog.
We were about a half-hour out of Missoula when we saw a large billboard for a used bookstore in the upcoming town of Alberton…The sign said they had 100,000 books so, out of habit, the new ride veered off the road…The sign also said they opened at 0900 every day of the year…When we get there, tho, the door is locked, and no one is inside…We stare at the door crossly with our hands on our hips for a while and are about to call the number on the door when the owner, an older lady named Karen, drives up.
This store is a treasure…It used to be a general mercantile store when it opened 110 years ago and while we didn’t do a complete audit, there is no reason to doubt the 100,000 book figure…We ended up with ten or so books and spent about $60…We stayed over an hour, too, because Karen and I spent some time chatting, mostly about the gray parrot she kept in the back…You could hear it yapping left and right at the register and Karen actually allowed me into the inner sanctum that is the back area, tho we were too ‘fraidy cat to get too close.
The bookstore.
GPS went whack on us twice…We were about 40 minutes away from Hwy 95 when the GPS Gal told us to get off at Idaho Hwy 3…This didn’t seem right at all because we scoped out the route beforehand and didn’t recall seeing Hwy 3 on it…It was I-90 to US 95, so we pulled over and looked at the app and while GPS had our location, there wasn’t any service, so we couldn’t see where this exciting new route proposed to take us…The map, tho, is still visible – and we’re map geeks and know our way around one – and it is plain this is not the way we want to go, so we turn around and get back on I-90.
Then we’re on US 95 south and are getting close and it tells us to turn on a small county road…All right…We do and within 90 seconds it’s a dirt road…Fuck this noise, as we used to say in the Nav, and again we turned around.
We’re in Pullman because our favorite college team is here…We’ve never been here, either, having seen play often enuff in LA growing up to become a fan…This was because Pa Sparrow had no trouble getting tickets to sporting events at work, but he was never very high on the totem pole, so all we saw were lousy teams…Anyway, the baseball team was in town and while they lost a close one it was fun being there.
We were out the door at 0700 or so (Pacific Time) and we were unclear if we would make it home to The Shire or not…It’s a 16-hour drive and, offhand, we thought not, but we’re pretty strong and longtime readers of this crap know we have significant experience being up for very long periods (46 hours is our PB), including driving five hours without yawning after having been up for 31 hours…So we pulled out with an open mind.
It wasn’t to be, tho…The drive from Pullman to Boise was long…It’s all US and state highways and there were a couple-three construction delays and no shortage of slow mountain and small-town driving and we didn’t even get to a freeway until 1330…A couple of hours later, the first yawn came and while we weren’t ready to throw in the towel then just yet, we did a couple of hours of later…We were at a rest area north of Ogden, Utah to use the can and we we made an employee rate reservation and ten minutes later, we were in a nice room at the express version of the hotel.
The big news is we got to spend a couple of hours with Jerry and his oldies show on KBAR…This was a treat, exactly what small-town radio should be…Now, Jer wasn’t the most technically proficient DJ in radio history, but he was friendly and gave the years and chart positions of the songs he played, which I’ve always enjoyed and even did myself when I plied the radio announcer trade another life ago…We got two hours out of him, too, before he started fading out.
Even more big news was there was a sign on US Hwy 95 marking the 45th parallel – halfway between the North Pole and the Equator…Recall we absolutely adore civil lines of demarcation and there wasn’t one on I-15 on the drive north…And we are pleased – tho not particularly surprised – to report that it happened more or less when we thought it would…We were stopped a bit north and we checked our latitude and it was about 45 degrees, 41 minutes north and any idiot knows there are 60 minutes in a degree of latitude so if you’re at 41 minutes north the degrees are getting smaller, so you’re 41 nautical miles from the 45th parallel and you’ll be going 65 mph or so and it’s more or less a straight, level shot, so a little figuring led us to reckon we’d pass the parallel around 1030 and we actually passed it at 1036.
32.397 MPG.
This isn’t too bad, actually, considering speed limits are 80 on the interstate up here.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
2100 Monday until 0500 Tuesday
2300 Tuesday until 0600 Wednesday
15.0 hours total and 24.0 hours for the week.
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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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
