04-XI-2021.
We were supposed to sit at Borče's on 1st, but his dentist took the morning, so he was indisposed. It's an extraction, and I remember how well the anaesthesia and alcohol go together, thanks no. Delayed.
For milk we switched from 12 liters a week to 10 - three liters on monday and wednesday, four on friday. Maybe it's the pancakes that are presently less popular, who knows, we just noticed that we don't open the new bottle until the afternoon, sometimes even next day.
(... 39 words...)
On third we distilled the quince. Luckily a mild day came up, even sunny at times but above all without wind. We had enough mush for almost three batches, and the first took a long time to start, because the lousy gas bottle (brand new paint from seventies, the valve leaks like new) barely had any in it, so it took some time until I got another (at 2300 now, last one was 2000, the one before 1950, then the two previous years it was 1800, and before that I used to get it for dad at 1600). We produced eight liters round, at 50% and concluded the year with 104 liters.
Just when I began emptying the last batch, rain started. It kept on the next day, which was her birthday, so instead of going downtown with the girls, I went to Prleski alone to get the cake. The girls there know us already, at least the one whom I promised fresh sweet cherries this spring. We are both a bit snotty, it got me after lunch and her around evening. I sneeze like crazy, but this time I'm lacking even more of the true flu's symptoms - temperature low, not sweating, not sleepy, no ache in muscles or joints (some sense was there, but too weak to call pain, lasted five minutes), didn't drop me into bed, nothing. As per my own prognosis, it lasted two days, hers three.
On friday it was time to procure tobacco. We stick with the same dealer for at least seven years now, don't know his name nor address, just the face and mobile number, it's all prletihi* conspiracy, I just make a call and we set the time. He was caught a year-two ago, so now his wife and son drive, though the time before the last it was him in person. I take three kilos each time (the price stands at 2000 din/kg since the beginning) and we're good for a couple of months. This time I just wanted to take a few shots, as it was still all wet from the rain, and Joda provides good view, specially since I made my own windshield washer liquid, from methanol.
On sunday evening even her flu was mostly over, completely done by monday, so we called Borče on sunday evening to cancel, this time on our account. It's not that we wouldn't be able to drink, but it would be somewhat uncool for her to sit next to a pile of paper handkerchiefs. Well it turned out that we actually could, we were completely fit by monday evening, but he was not, dentist again. The week before he didn't actually have an extraction, the guy managed to save the tooth. But perhaps he got an anaesthetic all the same - I had one last time.
While dealing with the bits of hangover from last night, wrote this on UA
Remember Panoramio? It was a cool idea and I loved the site, I contributed about 800 photos with locations (found them all manually!). When the Gugao bought it, I stayed through several changes of rules, even through the rough contradiction of not really owning the copyright and seeing how photos I made are used for house sellers' advertising (not only for free, but without much notification - had I not checked where my pics were linked from, I wouldn't have known). When they changed the rules the fourth time, I just had enough, and decided to write off my investment of time and effort, by adding two more hours of it - I removed all my pictures, one by one (they didn't have an option to do more at a time). This was in july 2012 (precisely 21-VII-2013.).
Didn't have any such thing with m$, though, because about them I knew they couldn't be trusted (since 1987!). Unfortunately, I still live with Skype, because it's not only my investment of time and effort, it's dozen other people with whom I want to stay in touch. So I had to go, over the last 14 years, through dozens of versions, where each major upgrade _removed_ something that existed previously. From a simple and very versatile p2p communication app, m$ turned it into complicated internally but simplified to imbecility (gui-wise) client-server based thing.
Memory sometimes fails to serve me, so even now as I write this, it turns out that I wrote down things which I still can't remember later - I literally read what I wrote five or twelve years ago, just to remember. And even then I don't memorize it well - here, I sent a happy birthday to Melanija, and I got the day right, except it's december, not november. She's didn't reply to the last message, since july, just reacted quickly to this error. So I still don't know who invented the expression „blues of the hair“.
On ninth, mid-lunch, Dragana called just to check on us, to see if it isn't anything serious. We're fine, nothing wrong. Though, she remained snotty til the end of the week, nothing serious but doesn't stop either. She guesses this is her reaction to the whole quince rakija matter, she took it too seriously and is now coughing it out (literally), and so it should stop on tenth day (how long the fermentation took). Well, it didn't, it was probably something else.
On tenth a better weather shown up - I even rode my bike to bring pljeske for Raja and Violet, and in the afternoon we somehow managed to pick everyone up into the van (Gudurica was the last time we did that) and go downtown to shoe the kids for the winter. We found everything except rubber boots for Violet. Froze our noses nicely, it was just +9, though, but some nasty breeze kept on, our hooves fell off. Of course, dropped by Prleski and got ten slices of the k... sniquers cake. Everybody fine and happy. Met nobody we knew except in the end, on the bridge, the student of mine who made our smoke tube for the boiler in 2011. He's also gotten old, his son is by a head taller than he.
On eleventh watched „Killers and witnesses“ (aka „Parallax view“), and on 12th... well so I wrote next day on burundi
Ronin.
Watched that on a DVD in the there, while there was a video club in the Kroger supermarket. They had about ten disks (when we started they had five), and this one got into that batch. Good action, good chases, very interestingly done story, because it is all about grabbing the suitcase, but what initially looks like a retell of „Magnificent seven“ or „League of gentlemen“ - gathering the team, planning the action, action itself, split with the loot - ends in 51st minute (of 120). The remaining hour the action zigzags, who has the suitcase, who betrayed whom, alternating between times of wait, scouing, chase.
All the time the relationships within the team swing from professional (we're all in for the cash) to suspicion, you never know who's in cahoots with whom and who'll spill whose brains.
Out of all that Žan Reno and Robert de Niro exit as hardened war pals.
Additional positive scoring for the technical impression - the package from aunt, at 720px, on a ten inch monitor, looks waaay better than DVD looked on an 19". Because one frame on a dvd was just about 52k then, they couldn't do better. The sound, however, was done for 5.1, so on plain stereo the dialogs are quieter than the surrounding noise, and chasing a remixer for a dozen movies a year, well fuck the futile job. I just mixed a few hints which would have helped to understand some sleeves of the plot, well who gives a fuck, for as much I also didn't memorize a few faces with their names, so anyway I wouldn't know who was the guy who just entered.
On twelfth we went to Springfield with the girls, made a bunch of shots with nokla.
Marinko is pestering me with his electronic invoicing again... he knows a lot of stuff, but you never know if he's lacking some bit which I solved long ago. On thirteenth (a saturday!) I sent him the contraption for calling external executables, written back in the ancient 1998 by the late Jo. Because sending those invoices (in jaysn or exemell or whichever format) doesn't work for him from fox, but does from a few other apps, including a python script generated by some app which turns a curl command line into python code. Well call that external script in python, who fucks its mother that it's roundaout, if it works. But how do I... well, this is how.
Reducing the milk delivery from 12 to 10 liters a week - 3+3+4, so we'd have just enough for the weekend and wouldn't have too much for the cats on workdays. It still costs 70 dinars a liter.
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* Prle and Tihi were the main charecters of the „Written off“ WWII series, of SKOJ (UCYY - union of communist youth of Yugoslavia) operatives in occupied Belgrade. Quite popular back then in the seventies. BTW, the word „conspiracy“ doesn't mean a plot here, it's denotes the set of rules for undercover operation
Mentions: 21-VII-2013., burundi, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), fox, Gugao, Joda, Jo Wolk, Majkrosoft (m$), Mališa Borkovski (Borče), Marinko Protić, Melanija Tisarević, nokla, pljeska, Prleski, rakija, Ryu (Raja), Springfield, UbiquAgora (UA), Violet, in serbian
21-XI-2021 - 17-IV-2026