Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, April 18
I was up at my usual Saturday time (see Sleep Log below) when my old buddy Jeffrey messaged me…He saw I was on Faceplant and asked if I was still up and I said hell, Jeffery, I just woke up…Jeffrey is not burdened with having to earn a living – tho he sometimes does some seasonal tax work for personal amusement – and we met around the turn of the century when we both worked for an Internet company in Sin City…I forget what he did and I didn’t do anything…Officially, I was kept on the books as a writer/editor, but everything was chaos and I seldom did anything, tho the foundation for some of my projects was laid there.
This was the first personal call I’d had in years…Like Pa Sparrow, I am not the type people call just to say howdy…Ma Sparrow, a true Mexican, yapped constantly, fielded calls regularly and called her BFF, sisters, anyone with a dial tone, really, left and right…If the phone wasn’t producing chat she’d talk to the furniture.
Anyway, Lord knows I never call anyone just to say hi, but Jeffrey and I talked for a good half-hour…It had been a few years, but he covered both his latest news as well as re-telling his fave stories from the past, which I thought was funny…He’s living up near Lake Tahoe now, renting a three-bedroom house for $1,700 a month even tho he lives alone.
Got the walk in this morning, too…It’s still barely above freezing, but at least it was dry…Just for funsies, I headed towards the post office on North Street instead of Main Street so I passed the new construction house and it is coming along nicely…It’s stone on the lower part, with wood the rest of the way to the roof…I also walked past the property for sale on Main Street, near the post office…I mentioned it before: it has two crappy houses plus a warehouse – that also has an apartment – and has a couple-three acres and they’re asking 550 for it…The house two houses down Main Street from The Shire is still on the market, too, a bit overpriced at 250 if you ask me, but what do I know…And for that matter, the post office itself is for sale, for 500, with the post office still leasing the building for many years.
And the new hall tree is assembled!!!
I am not making that up…Before the walk, I opened the box and got everything staged in the kitchen, on the theory that’s where it’s going to go so you might as well assemble it there…I started in after the walk, as usual staring at the first step pict-o-gram blankly for a few minutes…It called for connecting the back of the bench to the right side which, after staring at it for a while, was rather easy to do…Then you attach the front of the bench to the right side and then you put the top of the bench on…This will surprise you, but I screwed this up, attaching the left side instead of the right side…So I had to disassemble and start over but after that everything but after that everything went pretty well.
I was prepared to wonder if the goddamned instructions had been written on the seventh day while He rested, or to trot out my Joseph and Jesus Carpentry Shop line, but it wasn’t tht difficult and if I can do it, pretty much anyone can…The final four screws were buggers, tho…They were the ones that attached the top part to the bench and they were upside down and tuff to screw in but, in a rare display of fortitude, I persevered and I gotta be honest, I am rather pleased with the result…As a practical matter, it will move the jackets, gloves and watch caps from living room chairs and will give the cabin a homey feel…It will be on the left as you come in thru the kitchen door, off the carport…The first jacket put on the coat hooks was my red-and-black checked Pendleton, which is going 35-years of useful service…
It would not, of course, have been the Upset of the Year to head to the next county to do some shopping and to go to the Mexican joint, but I couldn’t be bothered and I declared a General Holiday instead, spending the afternoon at leisure until I fell asleep before heading into the hotel.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1830 Friday until 0230 Saturday 40
1730 Saturday until 2130 Saturday
12.0 hours for the day and 44 hours for the week, a distressingly low figure.
I think I’ll try to get more sleep Sunday…Recall I’ve been staying up after rising to use the can the past few Sunday mornings and I’ve enjoyed these afternoons, but boy, I am dead tired at both the hotel and the Veterans Service Office (VSO) plus, plainly, the sleep numbers are taking it in the shorts.
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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