23-XI-2008.
This time I unpacked Nina's video camera and decided to make something that we can show at home, so she'd know what we bought. Unfortunately, there's very little visual indication that the camera is on, so about one third of it was shot when I thought the camera was off, dangling upside down in my hand.
Walked all the way down the stream, then back up. We even have a little bridge, where a tree root crossed the creek and it then undermined it and now flows underneath. In another place, the water removed the soil and rotted half the roots under a tree, but it sticks into the slope with the other half and still grows straight up. Further below a grocery cart is caught into roots of a tree. A bed frame leaned against a tree, and the bark surrounded it where it leant, almost completely, just a few millimeters left. A truck tire in the creek, on neighbor's bank. Third house, behind the neighbor, hasn't made much mileage, but it's on its way, its back deck already dangling above the slope, without support.
We almost have power in the house, that is we have the distributor board and fuses, and a pole in the yard, and the cable from the street to the pole, missing just that final piece of cable between the pole and the house. And we should have water, though I'd fully trust the pipes to create a lake if the main valve was opened, they so look like an unfinished job.
By the angle of the sun, this shot should have been made soon after noon. I guess we ate something, and then she had a fit of superskvik. Skvik (squeak) is, in house slang, sometimes a greeting, sometimes the sound a guinea pig makes when someone's at the door, and it assumes/hopes he's bringing her food. It can prop itself on hind paws, like a dog, and squeal. Superskvik is the feeling you get when you see nice grass somewhere and remember that there's a guinea pig at home which would love that grass. So she took a largish bag and plucked some grass to take home. Then we put that in the car and went home.
The next day Nina bought her second car. They sold the essecks nicely, and she took something handier, the Acura coupe, somehow more comfortable inside - I could even sit in the rear without banging my head. When I had the chance to drive it, I enjoyed how the shift stick worked. It somehow knew where to go, I'd just use one finger to nudge it in the general direction of the next gear, and it would slide there by itself. As if pushing a pencil.
The seller was some Vietnamese guy, who bought it as salvage, it having been flooded. Any car which overnights with water in the engine (or engine in the water) is considered totalled and sold as scrap metal. This guy bought it so, redid whatever was needed and sold it at some decent price, with which both sides were satisfied. She drove that for several years more. And she did have respect towards her father, it wasn't gray, but rather a nice blue.
Mentions: Nevena Sredljević (Nina), in serbian
24-V-2023 - 31-X-2025