10-IX-2019.
Raja has an eyesight problem, he's quite shortsighted, so we went downtown in the afternoon, all of us in the van, and came by the hole under the bridge (the shop next to DBA), to the neighbor optician lady, to get him spectacles. It takes about an hour and a half, so we, of course, sat at Prleski, the works. The neigbor was quite surprised with the seven of us storming her shop. With the glasses we also got two pairs of headsets for Raja and Violet (which lasted a number of months until the cables disconnected).
The girls are quite at home in Lidl, they run, scream and use any free space on the lowest shelf as their castle.
Having time on my hands, I did what I periodically do every year or two, a sizable panoramix with the current state of the room and kitchen, just to keep track of how it was.
This was actually shot in the morning, it's just that it's always dark here, except maybe on winter mornings, when sun shines on snow and it reflects.
All the way to the left is my computing lair, where I worked last nine years. The right monitor was upright even before that. The farther part of the room is rarely lit, because neither she nor I have a habit of sitting on the couch, feels uncomfortable. Give me a chair or that swedish armchair, something ergonomic, be it a car seat. The yellow mug on the table has some crunchy blob flop, some blown up cereals with cocoa, in milk. For two or three days I made shots of a milk puddle next to that mug, to show to Violet that she should look into her spoon too, not just the tablet. As it is, she's just staring at the screen and beating around with the spoon by dead reckoning. Didn't have to show her the shots, she corrected herself over the next few weeks, on her own.
In the kitchen we finally have the light over the sink, something 5mm thick, all LED, from Lidl. After everything else we tried - neon this, neon that - this just works. For the last years we have a few lights which are always on when we have kids in the house, and this one is now added to the list. The light above my desk has the longest staž; the next is on the staircase (just 5W, the oldest LED in the house, suffices). The light above the bathroom mirror joined the club when the other bulb was replaced (right one white, left yellow, interesting effect but cheats the eye when washing small laundry, so since 2021 they're both white). And now this.
The ketrec* we bought second hand in 2017 when we needed it for Anita, then was borrowed out to Silvija, now on third duty, just brought it down from upstairs.
The little italian wheeled shelf by the freezer is one of, I'd say, three that we bought back in 1990 to keep cassettes and whatnots, as back then we didn't have space for anything larger in that tiny kitchen. This one holds the twins' shoes, and the other one is in the bathroom, holds clean towels and reserve of soaps. There's one more in the garage.
On thirteenth we tried and it worked: we got the twins on the bicycles and drove straight to kaštel. That's seven and a half kilometers. We screwed up by picking a side route straight to the old Belgrade road, where the bike path is, because this shortcut passes by the cafeteria**. The kafilerija was supposed to process the bones and offal from the slaughterhouse, jost 300m away, but it often happened to serve the whole province, as most of the other such plants claimed that their grinding wheel broke or whatever, so all of their material came here. (... 14 words...) it was all ship shape. And really, for decades it never stank. The husband of Stana worked there for a while, and said it was a big problem to get enough workers, and those they'd managed to catch were mostly Gypsies, whom they were happy to see at work about two or three days a week.
Well now it stinks, since Matijević bought it. And this shortcut goes straight by their gate. Riding a bike past it you breathe at least seven times, and each time it's a different stink. Richness. On our way back we just built up speed and filled our lungs before passing that spot.
Go bought a 3d printer. More miracles will come later.
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* cage, in hungarian; in serbian it denotes this kind of playpen
** kafilerija, i.e. plant processing animal bones and innards into glue and cattle fodder; the word is kafilerija. This pretend confusion is an old in-joke.
Mentions: Anita Jennifer Berger (Anita), DBA, Gorana Sredljević (Go), kaštel, Prleski, Ryu (Raja), Silvija Umljanić, Stana Čopanja, staž, Violet, in serbian
4-X-2021 - 16-V-2026