Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, May 22
The heater is back on here at The Shire…It’s been below freezing or so the past couple of nights and when you’re up at oh-dark-thirty (see Sleep Log below) it’s can be chilly inside, so I turned it back on…Heaven forbid either yours truly or the cat feel any discomfort at any time.
I woke to find the Internet off…This doesn’t happen all that often but I like to whine about it anyway because it could cause havoc with morning project work…It was curious because outages generally only happen when it’s raining or windy and it wasn’t either today…So I called, and while their offices were closed because it was after normal business hours, I was able to work the prompt to find out they were doing maintenance which was expected to be done by 0700…I shrugged and figured this was probably code for next Tuesday, but it was actually back up before 0600.
I was productive anyway…First I trimmed my beard…9 mm is the new standard…Recall last time I took it down to 6 mm, but that was shorter than I liked and 9 mm looks pretty good…Long enuff to have some substance, yet short enuff to look like it’s cared for…Then I took care of the mail which, frankly, I’d let accumulate all week and I wrote a couple of checks: one for the credit card I am putting the home improvements on and another for the Internet bill, a tad ironic because the Internet I was paying for was not working right then…The actual Internet is $45 a month, but I inspected the bill, for once, and I saw there is another regular charge of $15 on there…I am not entirely sure what it is and I put the bill aside where I would see it later, so I could call about it.
Also in the mail was a code from Faceplant…It’s for Sparrow For US Senate because before my Faceplant page can boost individual posts or run ads they have to verify I’m me and not some Ruskie and part of that is sending me a code via the mail so they can verify my address…This was a pain in the neck, not because my address is the Kremlin but because the post office doesn’t deliver to The Shire, they give us all PO boxes here in or small town…But for my address I put The Shire’s street address plus the # sign and then my box number figuring it would make its way to the PO Box and it did…There were also a couple of credit card offers that I set aside, pretending to be interested altho I will eventually toss them.
Still slow at the Veterans Service Office (VSO)…There was a useful email from Brian at the VA regional office at the hospital south of here that had attachments that included a checklist for filing claims and a new Battle Book, which it the VSO term for a book that outlines procedures for filing assorted claims…I was so moved I emailed Brian thanking him for this, that it would prove useful and Brain immediately wrote back, probably in sheer glee at having heard from me because I tend to lay low.
Later, Jim from Facilities emailed me asking if I could get an American flag retired…They had changed the flag on some county property somewhere and usually a buddy at the county took care of burning flags but he’s retired now and while Facilities Jim didn’t know exactly what to do, he had the good sense not to merely toss it in the trash…United States Code is very clear on the matter, stating the only appropriate way to dispose of the national colors is to burn it…Well, I wrote Jim back immediately, saying I ‘d be happy to take of an Old Glory that had seen the end of her days and in a few minutes BOOM there he was knocking on my door.
I went and bought some stamps after that…I was of a mind to get a coil and one of those stamp dispenser deals…We had a nice wood one at The Shire, but The Ex made off with it and I had one years ago when I actually sent a lot of mail and I can recall paying perhaps a buck or two for one…It was made of plastic and I can’t immediately recall what happened to it. So I go into the post office here in town and they do have a stamp dispenser, but they now appear to be made of kryptonite and look like something out of a goth nightmare…They’re also $15 now…Crap, with a coil of 55-cent stamps that’s almost $70…I said no…I only send a couple of things a month and I’ll probably die before the coil runs out and I don’t want to be obliged to dispense with them in my will, so I only bought a sheet of 20 stamps.
Later, Thorman called, something we had actually arranged on Wednesday…We filed a claim recently and he had a couple of letters from the VA which needed decoding, a task which regular readers of this crap know is no small part of VSO’s job. As we’ve noted here, the VA does not write in Sanskrit, but official VA correspondence causes fright in some people…The first letter was routine, the VA merely acknowledging receipt of Thorman’s claim…The second tho, crap, it said we’d sent in the power of attorney form without signatures…That is completely my fault and I went and generated a new form, made sure both of us signed it, and faxed it in…(By the by, the county building is still closed to the public, so I met Thorman in the parking lot.
The checkbook reconciled again…Hardly a bulletin, of course, and it was a snap, too, even with two outstanding checks and the latest direct deposit from the hotel…The figure in the register app was lower than the bank statement, of course, but I subtracted the outstanding checks and everything was squared away.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1800 Wednesday until 0130 Thursday…7.5 hours for the night and 25.5 hours for the week, tied for the lowest Thursday total of the month.
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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