05-VII-2023.
Hanging the third batch of tobacco in the garage to dry. It's all just the Kentucky sort, the Virginia is eventually* now coming along. The leaves of the latter are huge, that'll be a job. The dried and packed so far weighs 850g, and then 400 more in the third bag.
Lost and found the internet twice that day. Lost it completely around 15:00, along with the signal in the landline. Having learned the drill last month, I dialed their support within a couple of hours, hoping for no fix that day, but just to mark my place in the pipeline. In the morning of 6th it, of course, wasn't fixed, so I called again, juat to escalate and gain priority. Had to tell the chick everything about the case, all the details. She's obviously quite clueless, probably doesn't even know how it all works, but knows the full complements of questions to ask. So I know the answers, of course, and that which LEDs on the modem are lit and which are not is completely irrelevant when there's no signal on the landline... but no, her checklist says to ask about the LEDs.
Then the water heater got stubborn, not working. Having no internet I had to bring down the manual on the phone and read it on the tiny screen. And it says error 05 is either stuck chimney (isn't) or low voltage (shouldn't be, but just found out that the battery in my unimer** died, so what do I know). Called Zdravko, said the pressure in the heating pipes fell, just add. Yup, happened once before, okay. Turned the valve, but it won't budge, okay, see the other valve in the basement. Cleaned the wallnut branches away to gain access, opened it, the manometer stayed at 0,9. Called Zdravko again, and he said he'll come when he finishes the current job.
...and he came. It's not the voltage, we got solid 222V, it's not the pressure - I pushed 2,8 bar (aha, so it's the basement manometer that's stuck at 0,9), so he doesn't know, called the servicer guy, „and don't fuck around, it's our professor“. We'll see.
It's now 22 hours without internet. It came back an hour later. The servicer guy called back, said he'll come in the morning, no way he'd make it the same day.
And really he did come the next morning, just when we were making rakija, and cleaned up the exhaust fan. The same guy who installed its remote thermostat six years ago. I didn't have the heart to tell him that we aren't using the gadget, as it isn't capable of working as slow as the inertia of our system would require. All those feedback loops are designed for processes where the state changes within seconds or minutes, and our heating may be off for a whole day and the house loses just one degree of temperature.
And so we could bathe again :). Didn't get much rakija, 2,5 liter and as much patoka after. The next batch, on ninth, wasn't much better, 4,25 liters both stills together, but at 50%. Two after two, four hundred two.
On fourth we took Dženifer and Amelija to Klincaid. We never saw Amelija afterwards, but Dženifer became a house dog there - waits for us to come, loves us a lot, follows us everywhere, and when we sit she lies behind my chair on the concrete and dozes off, or lies next to our legs and keels over, scratch my belly.
On tenth we finally went to Peskara, first time this season. Picked up, as we said, Vera and her daughter and daughter's new best friend, so we had four adults and six kids in the van. The ride took a bit longer, as the access road from our side was repaved and now the last 50m of it were set to be one way, wrong way, so I had a 3km detour to get to the other side. I brought the tiny camera in the waterproof case and it turned out to be a fuckup, not so waterproof, didn't test that properly, so it lost power. I don't think it lost the magic smoke, that's all low power, no way to burn anything, we'll see. (turned it on the third day, and it worked)
Dragana called on twelfth, said she didn't forget, it's just that it's horribly hot, why now, you boil as soon as you get out the door. What's the problem, the AC in Joda just works, and we don't really have to go in the afternoon, we can do evening, it's actually perfect right now. Ah, you and your greenery, of course it's cool over there, here all this concrete doesn't cool off like that.
We're toning it down with drinks, every other evening is a bit much. And, on the evening of that 12th, (... 33 words...). I finished watching the 2nd season of Expanse and the first two episodes of the third, then went back to playing solitaire (winning some 55-57% of games now that I'm showing the statistics, didn't go over 20% for years), and then remembered to check out the communal wiki of the series, they tend to have nice comments to the episodes, and right then she woke up and came. Two in the morning :). Three and a half shots, went to bed at 4:30. Woke up at ten, wasn't really sleepy all day.
Thirteenth to fifteenth I migrated all the data from Wise Fox, i.e. the app in which I did sGradlj.com, into postgres. Still haven't written a single line in python, that's for the next day.
For the third batch of apricot we let it sit for a day or two longer, and got the lot more - 7,4 liters, same as first two batches together. First batch was a half, though.
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* initially this was „only now“, but later I decided that „tek sad“ can not ever possibly under no circumstances mean „at this time alone and never before and never after“. „Eventually“ covers it better.
** the universal measure (serb. meriti) gauge, brand name Unimer by some domestic enterprise in the seventies or later, became a generic name for the gadget, because it's so exactly that and short on top of it. There's no way that any electronic (majstor or engineer) guy would even know the longer name of it. It's an unimer, period. Trouble is when they speak with foreigners and are shocked that the poor devils don't know what an unimer is.
Mentions: Dragana Vitas (Dragana), Joda, Klincaid, majstor, rakija, sGradlj.com, solitaire, Vera Vraneš, Zdravko Lakatoš, in serbian
17-V-2024 - 25-III-2026