Around this time we came to do what we can about the basement (i.e. we two alone). Meanwhile, more rain fell and we had even more soil in the pit. First, the damage was the worst on the side where it was close to the house; the foundation was almost exposed in the middle. We decided to prop it a bit - I dug a space under the middle section, about 50x50 cm square, all the way from the foundation to the level of the basement floor, where I made it wider, perhaps 15 cm each way. Then we braced it with boards and started pouring concrete.
To make concrete we had two choices - to mix it in a wheelbarrow, or to put the mixer on the trailer for the škodilak, and hope that we'll have enough replacement spark plugs; sometimes it would go through six of them in a workday. Loading and unloading the mixer was a trouble in itself but not too bad. Getting the water was kind of better than when we started, as I didn't have to go around, to knock on the door, ask the guy to let me through, then use his hand pump to prepare water (i.e. have our barrel on our side of the fence, then fill it one bucket at a time, then walk whole block around again, then bring that water to the mixer a bucket at a time). The guy has sold third (not half!) of his lot to Faik, who already built some kind of house there, and the pump was now right in front of his house, not behind a fence.
So we poured that somehow. Then I shoveled all that soil from where the walls will be onto one heap in the middle. Then laid the condor tape (i.e. 3mm thick tar paper/plastic strip, somewhat wider than the wall will be), then first layer of brick on it. Then next.
Then, over the following weeks, I'd come and lay about 4-5 rows of bricks for the inner side of the wall; the outer side, facing the soil, was a nylon foil and between the foil and the bricks we'd pour concrete a few days later, when the mortar has set. Then I'd set the next few rows of brick, few days later pour the concrete - but now it was too far away from the soil, as we've reached the height from which the soil fell. So the first order of business was to remove the planks I used for hull, roll the foil inwards, then fill the gap with soil, tamp the soil, roll the foil backwards, lay some more bricks. Took all summer.
One day Todor came to keep me company and help some. I think I was already close to waist level then, and we just removed the boards holding the concrete on the outer side, and tamped soil in the void.
On the job, one of these weeks, Radoja and I were visited by Momir. He got a job as a programmer (or rather and IT guy) in the Employment institute (literal translation - basically where you go to see if there's a job available). Don't know what did they need one for; it was probably the Party directive that at least 10% of the employees should have high education, and the underlying notion that they'd look like idiots for producing the cadre which then sits unemployed. The policy did bring fruit in majority of cases, they did need the guys on the job and just couldn't convince the workers that these more expensive guys won't be eating their common bread, but rather make the loaf bigger. In other cases, this was an empty formality. I don't know what he was doing there, probably trying to build some kind of better filing system.
So he brought us a piece of code, in cobol, printed on roughly three A4 sheets, which means it was something very simple. Cobol is the language of epic poetry, can't do anything serious under six meters. And even so, the code took about two pages, and the rest was the list of compiler errors, gracefully torn off after its first page. The compiler told him exactly what we told him: this would never run. In just sixty lines of procedural code (the rest was the foreplay - declarations and data descriptions) he had about twenty lines which would never run - an unconditional GOTO command with nothing pointing to the next line, and an infinite loop in some other fifteen lines.
Needless to say, his next job was, IIRC, teaching.
7-I-2018 - 25-VI-2026