23-X-2021.
Since 21st the visit rate at sGradlj.com has gone down. On 20th it had 297, now only 138, and varies between 86 and 182 since. The estimate by statcounter.prg for the month was 5800-6000 until then, and now it looks it will be about 5100. The gugao (Gugao) has messed with the algorithm again.
On twentysecond some boring drizzle, true november, and since the girls completely freak out if they didn't go anywhere during the day, we took them for a tour - the butcher at ruža, then Ž., the other butcher, because he's got the ham salami and the burper salami, then the vegetable shop by the rail crossing. Now we have bacon, smoked shoulder, apples and tangerines for the whole winter. Almost.
The garage has the quince fragrance. They are ripening.
On 23rd we prepared them for fermentation, which wasn't easy. We counted on having to try a few tricks before we see which one will work. Tried with processor first, i.e. electric slicer/shredder - the word processor is quite silly here. And that goes, it works. True, it leaves the last 4mm unshredded, for that's the distance between the cover and the knives, but then that's already small enough. Unfortunately, it's a this century's gadget, so the motor strength is, as per EU regulations, the smallest possible, and it heats up. No damage, it has thermal protection and it simply stops, and when you try again a few minutes later it works again. For a couple of seconds, then stops again. If you want to do something serious, put the blade on the drill, or buy something of industrial strength, which would have cost three times more just because it would have a normal motor. Well fuck that.
Tried to do it by hand, on a walnut grinder, cylinder with larger holes. It works, but very slowly, and it also has some distance between the blades and the pushing block, leaves an unground slice of aboutt 2mm. I waste more energy on pushing it down than on cranking.
Eventually she boiled the quartered fruit and I ran it through a manual meat mincer. Quartering is not easy at all, the quince is hard. For a while all three of us were chopping them, even put into use the third big knife, allegedly german, but chinese junk all the same - after just a dozen its blade bent by some 5°. she then took her small knife (she allways has one) and took out the seeds. We heard that leaving the seeds in may give some petrochemical taste to the rakija. The cleaned quarters she dumped into a big pot (12l? 15l?) to boil, then passed to me to mince them.
The whole parade was done by 23:00 and we didn't make too much of a pigsty of the kitchen. The barrel is indoors, by the terrace door, because they say quince takes three weeks to ferment. Must be because of the temperature, in august any fruit completes fermentation in six to eight days, but now we've already turned the heating on. She stirs the mush every other day, and spreads the heavenly fragrance around the house.
On 25th she finally caught up with the neighbor who fells trees around the street and the yards. There's another guy, closer to us, some Bandi (typical nickname for Ándrás, ahn-drahsh), but he operates mostly on the ground, has a transportable circular saw and makes house calls. This fellow is the feller. And he does everything with handsaw. Says he can't make it on tuesday, will come on wednesday. Our big wallnut is kaputt, under any stronger wind it's rocking in its roots. The lower five meters of its bark is cracked, there's a lot of dead tissue left from the big branch which broke four years ago, and it has barely a quarter of what leaves it used to have. Stiil it's not quite dry, so it probably still has the mass and may cause damage if it falls. So better to do fell it piecemeal and under control.
In the evening, at Dragana's, the 58th frendz parti. I packed everything - most of the previous day I was shoveling, at random, music onto that old SSD, even remembered to bring Foobar player (so she doesn't accidentally run any of the music through that Player of Windows Media or Winamp), and of course them boxes. It was kind of silly when I said happy birthday - hers was in june - but, c'mon, we put up the laptop (a solid Toshiba from 2008-11) on the sewing machine cabinet in the lobby, next to the bathroom door, unplugged the washer plugged laptop in, put the boxes behind the screen, I neatly copied everything and we finally had music. Until around the third rakija I accidenttally turned the laptop off when I wanted to turn on the bathroom light, hitting the washer switch (these bathrooms from the seventies had outside switches for almost everything - water heater, area heater, washer, light - as it was expectted that the bathrooms will be humid, and they were then; when in unknown place you go to toilet you don't ask which door - it's the one with three switches, or one triple, and both of them have these triples). The laptop died on the spot, which means battery was long gone. Never mind, rebooted, went through unregistered Windowses 7 dialogs, reimported the folder with music into Foobar, closed Foobar to force save of playlist, ran it again. Not bad for around third rakija (some quince, good but somewhat weaker, goes nicely, and with her shot glasses of 0,1l you never know how much you pour), I was all composed and fully aware as it went, didn't forget any detail, not even a misclick, everything like an old majstor.
And then Borče insisted on playing Buco i Srđan over the phone. Well fuckit, the main reason I performed the whole sound equipping here was exactly that, to stop listening the screeching, distorsion and earpearcing from those tiny tinny speakers. And I added both albums by exactly these two guys, because we mentioned them while returning from Gudurica. But no, he don't poke (as she'd say), he went for a full spiel of six songs, as if taking no notice of our grumbling, which included even „we whitewashed in vain*“, he grinds on and nibbles around some theory about contratenors. Well I don't give a fuck how they are called, all those names are mostly pointless. What does alto** mean? High.
The food was good, I don't know how she managed to make boiled (or whatever she did to them) potatoes look so shiny that we all thought they were bell peppers. And the roast with some vegetables, just like she makes often (though she does ony potatoes and carrots, which is excellent and I even feel the taste of carrot from obdanište, but this time it suits me and back then it was a nightmare).
Split around half two. Vlaja came on time. Says he'll be away next monday, someone else will take over.
On twentysixth we drove the girls for shopping, Lidl and Roda only this time. The time turned nicer, so let's do it while we can, let them be outside.
Of course, while she is in Roda, I'm with Sanda and Linda on the sidewalk. It just so happened that I parked the Joda next to a saxo again, and couldn't resist pulling out the nokla and taking a shot. The difference in size surprises me each time.
In the evening I hooked on the big flash and made a farewell five-part autopatch shot of the old wallnut, such as it was at the time.
On twentyeighth the weather was still nice - it seems the third miholjsko summer is treading deep into november - so we took Sanda and Linda on the second traditional cemetery tour. Went to the new cemetery first, where Arpi and Silvija lie. The tombstone is done nicely, probably the same stonecutter we took. It's a bit silly, her stone is larger and heart shaped, within 20m around there are at least four of the kind. It's hard to be original, one simply picks from what's on offer, and no stonecutter can have more than 4-5 models any year. But it's well done, color photos. While his is well picked, hers is... well typical - all made up, spit and polish, hard to recognize. In that manner it is her likeness, she loved to look like that.
Then to the catholic, there we have two graves - Oma and Opa in one (should add her name to the tombstone, but we don't know who has the authority to sign the request for permission to do the work until the inheritance legal stuff clears, and when it will, we know not)(yup it got complicated), and tanti some 100m further on. The catholics, theatrical as they are prone to be, have some artificial hill, more brick than stone, which they call Kalvarija, which is kind of resembling the path to Golgota or whichever names they operate with in that narrative. The girls were glad to have the chance to climb, they went up and down three times. We made progress in persuading them to stop climbing on others' graves, and to do so only on those of the family. Family is fine - when we reached Tomaševačko cemetery, we let them come up to the tombstone, point at names, and read the names and years dozen times over, so they'd know who's granma, who's little granma, who is grandpa. (well, add one more grand- in front for them)
On twentyninth we drove to town - the weather may be nice but the day was windy, no good for bike. We first visited a couple of shops (... 12 words...), and I went to that stonecutter, where his son holds a car parts shop, bought a new handle for the gear shift in the van. The cap is falling off the old one, which wouldn't be a problem if the metal inside wouldn't become blazingly hot in the summer. And it seems there's a mass of metal inside, looks like half a kilo heavy.
Had a coffee at Prleski, girls had the usual snikers (sneekers? sneakers? snichers? sniquers? who cares) cake, and we bought eight more to take home.
On thirtieth I stayed home while they went for a walk, I got finally stubborn on doing the alert.prg again, this time in Python/Dabo. And I'm doing fine. I did some two days ago, and now it already draws a modal form, with the arbitrary set of buttons, finely chops the prompt text into lines, respecting existing line breaks in it, and lines up the buttons horizontally if there are up to four of them, otherwise vertically... now if only I managed to have the form large enough to show the whole buttons when horizontal. And to add some spacing... This goes quite fast, though I still have to read a lot, on both Dabo, weeex (the graphic widget library) and Python itself.
At the time, she took the girls for a walk, under a pretense that they will go buy more toys, eventually. She threaded through backstreets, with less traffic. She didn't mind them making many stops, let them take all the time they want. They actually went all the way to Žitni trg, about 3km, and there at the Chineses' they spent a whole hour picking toys, buying something small but interesting in the end, some tiny dolls in barrels. Returned by cab.
Raja's sleep is disturbed again. He was taking down some 200GB game, and went to sleep earlier - 23:00 or thereabouts - to sleep over the wait. Didn't work, he got up after three hours, waited until seven until the download completed, installed it and then played all day. Towards the evening he finally threw the towel into the ring, after being up for almost 20 hours, with very little sleep before that, and fell asleep. But stayed active, in his sleep. He'd get up, get into a dispute with someone, bring his (luckily bluetooth) keyboard to the kitchen table, visit the bathroom, all without waking up. Eyes open, not hitting furniture, but still asleep. Well, we have a moonwalker. Nina says it's not uncommon with children, many have such periods, it comes and then gradually stops. (next month he likewise got up, went to the kitchen, took one of ćufte from the plate, put it under his pillow and slept on, clueless)
These days it once crossed her mind that my nokla should have quite a sound. Ummm... why not, haven't tried yet, didn't find the time, it's only ten years old... okay, I packed some Čorba, some King of Čačak, Pelageya, Otava Yo, even a Panta („Critique of a minefield“) and let some of it play. Wow, this is five times better than Borče's Samsung or what he may have. Okaaaay, ammunition is ready.
(... 81 word...)
----
* the famous graffitto, first one on the freshly whitewashed wall
** on serbian wikipedia the definition covers the lower female voice; try to read the english linked article, it says contralto. Go figure.
Mentions: alert.prg, Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), ćufte, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), frendz parti, Gugao, Joda, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), majstor, Mališa Borkovski (Borče), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nokla, obdanište, Oma, Panta, Prleski, rakija, ruža, Ryu (Raja), Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), saxo, sGradlj.com, Silvija Umljanić, statcounter.prg, tanti, Žitni, in serbian
21-XI-2021 - 25-III-2026