18-III-2021.
Went to see Lena again. A bit of rain and a bit of not. Nina went to her dentist, says there's no point trying to push the teeth to avoid gaps, they keep moving left and right and narrow one hole to enlarge the other and then next time the opposite. She'll have two implants instead of one to fill the space and that's it.
While she was in the shop (and we did get there a bit too early, the good old saxo was flying at a decent clip), Lena and I had a coffee, and I get to the terrace to have a smoke (just one step behind the chair where I sat), light it up... ow fuck it what a snow. Tiny and thick and the lawn edges are already white. When Nina came and had her tea, it not only stopped, it thawed completely. At home there was no snow at all.
The next morning an even worse blizzard. This time the flakes were large, as if pigeon feathers, within the hour or two it gathered a couple of centimeters, we're getting snowed in. And then it abruptly stopped and it all thawed in an hour.
On UA, B.F. quoted my latest brain... product:
>> Maybe I should just look at the(1+rmometer).
I hope that someone is saving these.
There's a book here.
And then there's my tagline: "data is not. data are. Media are. A medium is."
After lunch we went to Lidl, then Roda. Bought the groceries, including water (as we still don't trust the tap water, and we'll need mineral too). On the way back, near the customs office, the engine stops, lamps light up. I restart it by inertia, it goes perhaps five more seconds and dies again. Just enough to slide past the narrow part near the end of the customs fence, park it on the shoulder. Had to push it just two meters to get the rear wheel off the pavement. It has electricity, the gasoline pump is heard, the starter works but the bendix isn't catching... ooookay, can't do a thing myself here. We took the groceries (except water) and went home. The "went" took half an hour, because Sanda and Linda had to visit every puddle, inspect every detail along those 300m. One roadkill frog is there for weeks now, completely pressed, and they stand there and ooh and aah and she says not to worry, she positively knows that that one was not a prince. Ah, alright, we got a stereo sigh of relief.
Called the repair shop, tell them the symptoms, they send the tow truck. I explain to the guy how to find me - but it turns out he doesn't know exactly where the customs is, so he passed me for a corner's length, then drove back. The guy was I.P. from my old street, son of one of the gang from 60 years ago.
Thirty minutes later they call and say the synchro belt broke, the valves are all bent (usually it's seven out of eight, they say) and that just the valve change would be 400€, and then we need to see what else was fucked up below the head. The value of the car being presently below 1000€ (probably far less), it's just not worth fixing. It served for ten years. Here, I'm reading the ads for second evening in a row.
Of course, I discussed the matter with oldwave gang, specially knowing that Kunta has a saxo (albeit a cheaper model - no color, just gray, and they forgot to deliver two doors). So he was interested, and called the next morning (20th), but being still under heavy fatigue - recovering from corona - he sounded like almost fainting in the last minute of the talk (he got revaccinated recently, with the chinese, a bit late it seems - but then he's among the 5-6 such cases we know, including the actor Vlasta Velisavljević of 96 years and singer/actor Zafir Hadžimanov of about 80). He offered 200€ max. Okay... I'll see what I get. Along the way (we exchanged about 120 messages in the group, talking about several things at once, over the weekend, to differ to the usual ten days of nothing between such waves) I got a recommendation from Stinge to get the C4 Picasso with automatic shift - which is the special Citroën shift, without oil pans, but rather with the classic dry clutch and a bit of a robot which operates it. And I checked - I'm officially the oldest in the oldwave group, for the last dozen years at least. I guess we didn't have any new older members as fresh blood meanwhile... Or as M.D. says, "I have one who's 20 years younger than me even though he's born only 8 years after me - got stuck at 43 and won't budge".
Morning of 20th, light frost. Most of the open blossom on apricots got frostburned, which we saw by dusk; still, most of the flowers are still closed or just cracked open, so if they stay so for three more days (as they announce the frost to last), there's a chance... Fingers crossed (i.e. thumbs held, in serbian).
Still chatting with Lajna, she's inviting us all to come visit anytime... though, the van isn't drivable either, one wheel leaks air through the metal, there's a crack near the surface or on it, just when we were about to get that fixed. Well, it just gained urgency. And even if it were whole, our passports expired in september, her ID expired five years ago, Violet's passport is several months out, and Nina's will be soon too.
Among the candidate cars are the citroen c3 and c4, plain or picasso version, and peugeot 207 or 208. There's also a couple of renault modus (modi?) in the area here, but I remember that these were a maintenance nightmare, where you need to take off the transmission to change the oil filter.
The saxo was supposed to be returned on monday, but it seems they didn't need the tow truck so it stayed on it. They returned it the next morning. The younger truck operator asked what would I do with the car, I said I have a guy who offered 200€. He offered 220 on behalf of his colleague. I said okay, I wouldn't want to yank the guy out of bed at the moment anyway, he's recovering from corona, won't be up and about for a couple more weeks. Okay, they lowered the car on the neighbor's lawn, and left. The guy called within the hour, and I offered summer tires for extra 30€, okay that too. Will pick it the next day. I reported this to oldwave, and Kunta called right away, though he wasn't interested for himself, it's rather he promised someone, if he finds... well never mind. I let these guys in the shop have a bit of profit on me, they are Stanley's colleagues. I could have made perhaps twice the money, had I sacrificed two weeks at a couple of random hours every day... nah, let them have some income from their knowledge.
In the afternoon I removed all the junk from the car. Some of it will be needed for the next car, some of it went into trash, some I left. Put those spare tires into the trunk, took out my dirty jackets which I kept there just in case I get caught somewhere and it gets cold.
So on 24th the temperature definitely went into plus. She was stoking the fire in the boiler in the basement the day before - it was so cold and there was a shaving breeze - the lilac branches I cut during the previous winter were burning like crazy. And we may yet have more frost, they announced -3 for thursday (didn't happen, luckily). The girls got the old decomp to play with - it's in perfect working order, it's its charger that died. So they now have a real laptop, of appropriate size, just without power.
That day the whole car dance was completed. About half an hour before the lunch the guy came with the cash and a friend who had a proper tow trailer to his car, and they took the saxo. Bye, bye. Gave them a bottle of tutifruti, a treat. During lunch phone rings - the wheels for the van arrived. After lunch I went to pump up that wheel which now loses air in two days (last december it would keep it for at least a week), and also installed the charger, the battery was empty. Spread the cable to recharge it, but the charger won't recognize it. While I was fiddling with that, Faik's older son comes to greet me, it seems his temporary papers for Germany have expired again (as they did for younger brother last year, and for Aleksa two or three years ago), so he has to sit here a while until the next set of papers is made. This is the guy whose sneaker prints we found in the garage when the hand drill and bicycle vanished in the nineties. Says his uncle died, going off to see what's up. And really, three houses away, I saw people gathering - a few cars, several on foot. Next day, she saw them go off to the funeral, and men only. Women stayed at home. Muslim thing.
Well, the battery in the van turned out to be dead, something discharged it completely to the point where it can't be recharged. I call the shop to send a new battery, and guess who comes - the new owner of the saxo. Installs the battery, I pump up the wheel just enough to bear the weight for those three kilometers, and off we go to the shop to have the wheels replaced. Then took the old wheels to a pick-n-pull junkyard on the road to Vršac, where the guy said 80 dinars per wheel. But when he saw they were aluminium, he sad it goes for 90 RSD per kilogram - and I got 3200 RSD or thereabouts. The seller of the new wheels said they were freshly imported from Switzerland, which is probably true, but I doubt anyone would go for the paperwork for just wheels alone. More likely he got a whole car, then replaced cheaper wheels and sold these separately, better to profit.
On 25th noticed three bees working on the apricot. Thumbs held.
Trying to set up a mayday uranak (early rise) with the gang from burundi, just like we had on 01-V-2011. in Džakarta. Exchanged a few private messages with Vasa (and the good captain is the only other person who was there and then and is a member here and now). He replied with enthusiasm... last message on 20th and then nothing. As she said, it's pointless to make an uranak in a year when the orthodox easter is on the same day. (p.s. nothing came of it, Vasa never replied... and with the anti-antivax hysteria on burundi, it's better that we did nothing)
Speaking of the forum, over the last six weeks I was not writing anything there. Just posted appropriate pictures, where I found them. And I completely stopped writing on the SF topic. By this time I long ago finished the Dozois anthologies, went over the opus of Strugackis, took a break from SF while reading Krleža, came back to write about Banks's Culture and stopped after two books and the „State of the art“ novella. Take it or leave it, it's bundled - if you guys don't like some aspects of my writing, okay, I'll write less, and if that includes the stuff you liked (I was even getting praise for that), too bad.
Mentions: 01-V-2011., Aleksa Pajkov, burundi, decomp, Dragojlo Kuntić (Kunta), Džakarta, Faik Rizvani, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Melanija Merćep (Lajna), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oldwave, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), saxo, Stanley Berger, Stinge, tutifruti, UbiquAgora (UA), Violet, in serbian
19-XI-2021 - 5-VII-2026