On seventh we stuffed ourselves into the van and hit the road straight to Novi Beograd, Pitch, quite possibly for the last time, but not fully sure of it, because as the majstors progress with their apartment, they may not move until august. And it already costs a devil and a half, because of whoever imposed sanctions to whom, and which lines of supply were disrupted, the materials are getting expensive. Just for the woodwork the offer was 30 or 38 K€... Fuckit, you can buy a house here for that amount.
I managed to get Lena on the phone just when they got out, right on time, and asked are you walking or getting the car, said walking but Milan has the keys. Get the car, then, the birthday present is sort of heavy. So he parked next to our van, and I just happened to be there, because I forgot the eos70 in the van and was fetching it, so we transferred the whole gift right on the spot. Which was a whole slab of bacon, vacuumized in pieces, and 120 eggs.
The lunch was standardly good, these guys can't fail. Even the kids had a solid appetite - Raja ate seven ćevapčići, Violet six.
Then we went to the chinese quarter, aka blok 70, because she wanted to buy a kilo of dry shiitake (four years passed... like this), but it was 16:30 already and they were all shutting their shops. They even locked the staircase whereby she climbed up, so couldn't get down, was buzzing around with the girls until someone showed her the way out. She was seriously pissed off. Almost found the footwear for the older two, but what they had was either wrong color or wrong size.
Went to Delta siti then, and finally had some benefit from the end-of-hours on a friday, found a place to park outside, without driving up the garage and maneuvering in there. Nina knows there's a Crocs shop so we went straight there, and finally Raja got a pair at full price (about 5000), each previous pair was at some discount at home. Which means the ones he's ditching were three years old, at least. His heels were sticking out already.
And then a catastrophic error, some Dexyco, expensive toy shop, and Sanda and specially Linda still fall for ads in disguise - some kid in a yoochoob video unpacking a toy and playing with it and extolling its virtues and cuteness and whatnot, doing the same thing over and over with a different new toy every week or two. It doesn't matter whether the toys are supplied by the manufacturers or the parents simply invest in them and then sell their kid's joy for hits and advertising revenue, there's no way to explain to the kids that the video is a lie. Linda played a convincing crying scene, with the full weight of the „but I want it!“ argument, but the thing was just too expensive - ended up with some other toy, half the price.
On ninth the frendz parti was at Borče's. Dragana's leg is fucking her so bad that her radius is reduced to the building and vicinity, and the 500m to his place is already too far, so he drove her, and on the way back we called the cab from 25. maj and dropped her at Lesnina. The food and drinks were all standard, and we didn't even get into any hot dispute. First she recounted the recent medical story of her leg - on the exray they found she's got about 3mm of cartilage left in the joint - 20mm is normal - so it's far less mobile and is getting stuck. She's lucky that the fix lasted these fourtysome years, and the screw in the joint is still in place. Borče told of how they almost built a house - by 1990 it reached missing just the inside installations and surfaces, so it had roof doors windows, but then the next ten years he didn't get anything done on it, so they sold it as it was and bought an apartment, which they then rented until they needed it themselves. He managed to mention his wife a few times, as how she agreed, or didn't, with this or that, but we still don't even know her name.
This week I finished translating Byo and started patching the code, mostly in fox version - dropped the chains table, which served to provide arbitrary linking of articles in zod into a hierarchy - but here I provide hierarchy on the fly, and then don't change it nor make new one, so I had a considerable codectomy (to borrow George's favorite expression), so the whole first page of the main form is now gone... cleaned out really a lot, and I could have done more. In python version not as much, I suffered over a bug in the cases when an article has links to a dead article, i.e. one which has an asterisk in the key, which should get deleted from the links but doesn't. Didn't solve it, just deleted the dead articles from the database.
And I'm getting ready to publish this somewhere on the web. To create a completely new website... is a bit cumbersome, so I'll rather insert this as yet another branch of sGradlj.com, may only need to pay extra to increase the quota (nope, checked now, I'll need about 0,5G with photos included... once I reduce the photos' size, and I still have about 1,9G of unused space there). Which will be one big „putuj, dupe, za kašiku supe“ (travel, ass, for a spoonful of soup), i.e. lot of futile work, because the Gugao has changed rules once more, so the traffic was reduced to about 2200 (visits a month) in october, 1800 in march, 1400 in april, and the estimate for may is about 1050. So this would be an excellent place to publish this surreptitiously :).
There was also a problem of the photo directory being a common directory for both language versions, but a subfolder to each, which I locally did as a linked folder (the original is under the fox version). There's no way it could work that way on the web server, so I moved the photo directory one level up, so all the links to photos are now ../img/etcetc.jpg and doing that turned out quite simple.
In Klincaid our hand pump for water still doesn't work, and the hidrofor is not even worth trying until it does, because its pump is centrifugal, so it needs to have water first, can't pull the water from the deep on its own. So I scheduled with Zdravko for tuesday to check up. But I screwed up, with phone first. Last night I barely had power in it to call the cab, and then didn't notice that the phone had shut off. So I charged it in the morning, and it stayed shut off until late in the afternoon, when I noticed and turned it on. Saw that he called, so I called him and he said let's go now, we still have enough daylight. The second screwup was that I took the wrong set of keys - which I clearly remember as my keys, which they were, but to the old house, not Klincaid. So we met there and he had to jump the gate. Took a look at the pump, checked a few things, remembered what he did last time, and we scheduled for thursday.
On wednesday it aligned so that I went out thrice on my bike. First to the Srbijagas, across Lidl, which is actually quite an interesting building, perhaps the swan song of natur concrete and itison*, I somehow felt at home there, even though I've never been in there (that I remember). They make new contracts because of company change or whatever. It seemed like yet another scheme to invent some formal reason to harvest data to sell, add small print to the contrace (which nobody ever reads, the old one wasn't mentioned at all during the last 25 years). We were already ready to turn off the gas and mount an electric water heater, burn wood for heating (lots of free wood in Klincaid), in case this gets nasty or invasion of privacy or just too costly. But no, zero cost, no hassle at all. Did for both houses in twenty minutes. For our house I just said „no change at all“, and for the old one I explained that I inherited it, and don't really need the gas there. Well was it written into books of land? I suppose it should be, the notary said, at inheritance hearing, they automatically notify them... so she checked and voila, got the document from the cadaster, saying the house was on me. Printed that and attached to the contract, done. Wow, didn't expect that to be possible, not to mention so fast. Would have taken me a couple of hours (to get to city hall, wait my turn...).
The second ride was to Žitni trg, for the meeting of org committee (on the terrace of the Moskva tavern) for the 47,5th parastos, rounded to 48th by vis maior. The same gang as previously (except one guy died) and of course the First outnubered them all - and Borče and me apart, the IV4 was overrepresented - Gavra, Ildika, Žuca, Jozda and even Vlada dropped by. The term we were aiming for, 28th of may (which I miscalculated as 30th somewhere, luckily that didn't get far) is out of the question, it's been two years with restrictions, and now everyone is celebrating something, clearing that backlog, so no weekends until mid summer. But from the three fridays offered, the nearest one is on 3rd. Then we negotiated it from noonish to late lunch - so not 14 not 15 but 16:00. „Dunno whether you noticed, but three years ago about 23:00 half the folks were already gone, not to mention that half of those out of towners will drive and half of them don't dare drive at night“. „Well then 16:00 is excellent, this time of year it gives us 4-5 hours of sitting in daylight, by 20:30 it's still day this close to solstice“. And best of all, no band will play.
Even Momir dropped by, said he can't make it that day, he's got class until 20:00, final written test, can't leave them and this late in the year can't even reschedule, fuckit. But who's making you work, aren't we all retired now? The rascals talked me into it...
And Žuca said there was a murder in my street, a junkie wife stabbed her husband in sleep, it's all over the news. Wow, look at that, my street and I heard nothing. But checked when I went home - first, not my street but 2nd down, second, it doesn't mention that she's a junkie (which may mean she wasn't on drugs but rather on meds, same difference), but does mention that she finished him up with a chainsaw.
The third errand was grocery, which didn't go down so famously - the butkice in gut, i.e. in aspic i.e. the glorified švargla they weren't getting for two weeks now, and the other thing, the similarly packed pečenica, I couldn't remember. At least I took four burgers (actually pljeskavice - same shape but there's chopped onion in the recipe), which she roasts on the small electric sandwich maker, Raja is regularly ravaging them. Though there's times when he doesn't manage and the last two get close to best-by date, which then she re-kneads with „griz i jaja“** into excellent dumplings for the soup.
Thursday mid-morning Zdravko calls, can we do now? Sure, why not, I need that water now, not even any rainwater left, see you there. I went first, right keys this time, and managed to mow some bits before he came. He just appeared in my view and waited for me to notice him - experienced guy, knows not to disturb anyone operating power equipment. So he went to work. Tried ten combinations - gasket upside down, check this, check that... all tricks and everything's right except it doesn't pull water. Even unscrewed the pipe below, all the way to the one-way valve he put there last time, nope, everything correct. Could it be getting air from the exhaust valve? He tried it and it had water there... hm, wait a minute, we had water below that one-way valve all the time? So then let's try the hidrofor. Wait, it's working on empty, needs 1,5l of water into the pump. He opened the screw to pour water and got a spurt of water almost in his face. Screwed it back quickly and, well, let's turn this thing on. And it built pressure in just a couple of minutes. Okay, we got water...
So we rolled up the tent and split. Got home in time for lunch.
Meanwhile, tuesday-wednesday she had this light flu. Then there was a cease on tuesday, hers was gone and mine didn't start until evening. I more or less slept through friday and saturday, we went nowhere, I had cramps and muscle pain in weird places, in the middle back (which were strained previously, still need to adjust balance and angles of the new švorceniger), over the ribs (!), right calf, feet bottoms, cramps not lasting more than a couple of seconds but feeling bad when they sting.
There, it's a saturday (14th), I'm zombified, running the pictures for Byo antipedagogically (from larger to smaller) to just reduce the size to 1800 pixels longer side, and jpeg compression to 66%. The folder went from 870M to 377, took me all day. Meanwhile, Raja slept through friday and half saturday and come out in jolly good moods; Linda and Sanda slept through saturday. Nina slept along with them, then puked in the evening (nobody else did). Violet didn't have any symptoms until sunday, then just went to sleep a lot. On sunday I was like new, except that weird feeling of my chest hair hurting as if it was pressed the wrong way - the feeling I had over various places in the area, starting from my shoulders, shoulder blades, upper arms. Skipped armpits, luckily.
Now she has a classic flu, with slime that's hard to fathom and cough out; started coming out easily on monday. Of course, the frendz parti is postponed.
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* the felt-like synthetic rug, made to be glued straight on the concrete, which was the halmark of tourist agencies, hotel lobbies and our kitchen back in the old house - we even put it on some walls, and it's still like new, after 40 years.
** farina and eggs, the quotation marks is for the old army joke, „grizi jaja“ - chew [yer] balls
16-V-2022 - 25-III-2026