02-IV-1991.
On 30th I finished the 6th of my SF stories, well, the serbian version of it was transported into ventura by something I wrote in fox.
Wrote some routines for herspecialist paper. (... 192 words...)
The report listed the min-max ranges and averages for lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic in nine groups of samples. The rest of the week I continued with more code to generate nicely formatted files for ventura, which was easy if you knew how to generate text and knew the syntax of the tags Ventura used. It was all pure ASCII text inside. Luckily DBA bought proper Bitstream fonts early on, for our DTP endeavours.
Finally made a permanent username and password on sezam (sGradlj), and stuck to it through the next four years, then switched to the new sezam, while keeping the old user/pass. I know I tried it out a few times, but we'd usually keep the modems very shortly at the office, they'd get sold really fast. The exact date is 8th, checked it out some thirty years later, when the archives were published. But seeing how I knew where to buy those Bitstream fonts in the fall of 1989, I was familiar with it already. This is why I say 'permanent'.
Heard more stories about national poking, by parties. DZVM (democratic community of Hungarians of Vojvodina), if I'm not mistaken, came to agitate in Čurda. Andraš Agošton (Agoston Ándrás) at some point said that the guys who married serbian women should shoo them away. They shooed him away, „who are we gonna fuck then, you?“.
What's not so obvious on this picture: the furniture was reconfigured. We moved the things around, so the desk was now next to the door, beneath the clock. The bunk bed was to the right of it, that's where girls slept. Go had the upper bunk, she'd now climb into it in three moves - right foot on lower bed's frame, left on the desk, right knee over her bed's frame. Some time after midnight she'd usually go for a pee break, which was a bit complicated, has to pass three doors and walk around me, I was usually still at the kitchen table, reading sometihing or messing with stuff on the atarist. She'd even talk with me, just a few words, and in the morning she'd have no recollection of it at all.
On this picture, Nina is under the knitting machine's desk, Go against the door. the clock was a wedding gift from Teja and it lasted about seven years. Then even changing the battery wouldn't help - the plastic gears were worn out.
The big old couch is now in the nearest corner - I was actually standing on it when I took this shot. The bridge which used to connect furniture above the couch is now on the ground, beneath the curtains on the picture. IOW, we made do what we could with what space we had.
We had two hedgehogs in the yard. We caught one on the placić (from german Platz - place - to mean the [building] lot; -ić is here a diminutive suffix), as the girls called the construction site, the other one in dad's vineyard. One just rolled up on the spot, the other one I threw my jacket on. They lived in the nooks in the yard in the day, and were dežurni at the gate, so if any frogs would come under it they would eat them. They left a dark trace on the concrete along the gate. In winter they'd sleep under the freezer in the garage, the warmest place. They couldn't run away, walls everywhere and only 3cm under the gate.
We fed them leftovers. One was specially hungry and greedy. He'd sit upon a platefull of mashed potatoes and wouldn't let the other one come close.
I perfected my technique for handling hedgehogs, how to hold it in your hand without being pierced, long ago, I think still in Gorica (1987), and it's the same as the even older one to walk barefoot over bits of glass (summer 1972). Simply put, one's skin has to be limp and the pressure has to be spread over a larger surface. So not with one finger but with the whole palm, without pressing anywhere.
The kids got the technique too, specially Nina. When a hedgehog's belly is tickled, it rolls up around your palm and can hang on it like that, but that's on the next shot, which I didn't find (this is scanned paper, no negative). The white stuff in the torn bag is perlit, left over from the attempt, of almost ten years ago, to insulate the kitchen's ceiling plate.
Nina bothered the hedgehogs so much that finally one lost its cool and bit her middle finger. Then two days later again, same finger. This was getting serious, the hedgehogs are the dirtiest animals we know of - there's no way to clean between these spikes and they don't even try to, that we know of. Who knows what's in there, so we took her to zzzzz to get shots. The director himself (yup, her junior year roommate's husband) saw us, and was utterly bewildered. The hedgehogs are the most frightened animals known - you just show up and they curl into a ball... a hedgehog biting is unheard of, and twice is hard to imagine. Well, if you tease it long enough, anything's possible.
Mentions: june 1992., atariST, Čurda, DBA, dežurni, fox, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), sezam, SF stories, sGradlj, Ventura, Vesela Senić (Teja), zzzzz, in serbian
13-VI-2014 - 2-IV-2026