07-X-2011.
A longish chat in Firriver. I fiddled with upFeds, about when to call Vault and when not, and to not send a string full of tabs to a routine which doesn't lke that.
Hana complains how it's cold in Atlanta, so I asked her where was it that she was born... Suez mislaid his Blackberry, so [he]'ll be partly incommunicado until [he] buys another [one]. And that clinic from none but Atlanta seems to have come onboard. Fuckit, we're simmering them for five years now. Old hen, good soup. I wonder whether the sweet chubby girl is still there, were she half of her she'd be a chick and a half... I photoed her up back then in 2007 at asrm, and still find it incredible that one can be so fat while keeping the beauty. I announced leaving work a tad earlier (yup, as early as 16:23), my wardrobe is running on empty, got to go buy some.
A heap of code for export into Belrap (the like of CAAR et al). They also have their own nebulous stuff, specially about value lists (which happens everywhere), so where we may have eight of something they may have fifteen or vice versa, which then have to be matched... Fortunately, they have fewer fields to export. I see lots of september dates in the code, when I did most of it.
For shooting I'm using the small Fujica, because Lena still uses the big one. Johana has eight kittens, two black, two light gray, two mid gray and two dark gray, none in color. The plan is to let them grow a bit and then expedite them to Zeki, just like we did with the three from the first litter.
Went downtown, I see I made a few shots in Svetosavska, where the wind strewn the trash from the dumpsters, some largish pieces of plastic foil on the sidewalk. I guess we visited them clothes stores, there's a piece of street there where there are four of them lined up next to each other. The next shot is at Oma's, lines of those painted jars (... 27 words...), and then we went to Klincaid.
The plan for today was to distill a goldenrod hydrosol, because it's a medicinal plant and I don't know what it's very good for. And it looks nice and smells fine. The process is this: the kettle is filled with twentysome liters of water. Something is to hold the plants above it, some kind of grid or grille. The plants should be mostly flowers, leaves and stalks can be left out. And then it is supposed the boil, the steam should dissolve whatever it should from the blossoms, and the vapors should pass through the condenser aka tabarka, and condensate should drip into a vessel.
I didn't realize we had that much of the plant. I was seeing it here and there around the garden, but she found all of it, two hefty armfulls of it.
Instead of a grille we took the lower bell, it has enough holes to let the steam pass through it. We raised by putting one upended shallow pot and a salad mug on top of it on the bottom of the kettle, and another on top of it, then the bell came at about 25cm height.
This was the last shot from the Fujica, then the battery went empty, so henceforth it's from nokla.
The trouble was that we didn't know the speed of evaporation, and thus didn't know when to stop. The other problem was that it worked both ways - true, a part of the dissolved essential oils did go through the pipe and condense there, but the other part percolates in the kettle and sticks to everything it reaches. When the water evaporated, it all began to evaporate from the walls and exit through the tabarka in heavy smoke state. Never saw a thing like that, a smoke heavier than air. I thought one needed a special contraption like those for rock concerts.
When we opened the still we scratched our heads. Burnt, black, sticky, stinks of rubber. The pot and the other vessel's bottoms were welded glued to each other, we couldn't separate them at all. We threw them on the heap behind the shed, and only in the spring, some tenth rain as rinsed them enough to separate.
And what we though was an illusion of rubber stink, specifically the hot bottle type, wasn't baseless. Searching the web later, she found that it was Benjamin Franklin back then who tried to make rubber from exactly this plant. And he made it, it's that the probess was too expensive for the little amount produced. So we turned out to be finders, not inventors...
I guess we did get the hydrosol, maybe less than expected amount, but even that little we never used for anything.
This being a friday, and we started rather late with the whole story, we didn't go home to sleep, but rather stoked the smederevac and slept in the kitchen. There was enough of old man's rakija, and we didn't need much of it, we fell asleep nicely. We boiled one kettle of water in the morning, to was the stuff away. Which seems to have worked, never had any rakija with rubber stench.
The pot and mug were firmly affixed to each other, we couldn't separate them, no matter what we tried. Left them outside, and by springtime the rains, snow and freeze managed to tear them apart.
From the blogue on 17th:
Life with a car
First I wrote about life without one. Meanwhile, bought a piece of land nearby, to grow tomatoes - 11 years in the US makes you a man of love, sorrow and remembrance - you learn to love tomatoes, are sad you can't get any decent ones, and fondly remember how they used to be back home.
I should be able to buy them, but that's capitalism: there is no market for real ones; sufficient number of people go for the US-style plastic pink crap.
Um, yes, the car. First, I never really bought a car here before. I drove a lot, but it was either my parents' car, or company cars. So I don't remember exactly what the paperwork was, I only know you had to wait in at least six queues, at three or four places. Luckily, this is a small town so these weren't too far apart.
This time, it was very simple. The agency took care of everything, except that the seller and I had to go to the city hall in person to register the contract (and he went to pay something - not necessarily in a post office or sdk, but any bank, and there are banks like mud)(crappy english... "there are as many banks as there is mud", OK?). I only had to take the ready paperwork to the cops, and after about 20 minutes' wait I got my tags. Insurance, inspection, tax etc, all taken care of, for just 6€ extra. That's progress.
After the matrix I drove there, this saxo is rather small - 1.1l engine instead of 1.8, some 85HP instead of 180, weaker sound system, no AC, no electric windows nor mirrors... but who cares. It still has 5 doors (so I don't have to do acrobatics loading tools and crates), makes about 45-47MPG (and matrix was good with 26), and given the distances, it consumes one tank a month of about 11 gallons - pretty much the same size as matrix had... but that one had to be filled about thee times a month.
Because I don't do groceries with this car, and don't just drive around. Sure, it gets around town - when it has to carry anything that's too large, bulky or fragile for the bicycle, or when I'm in a real hurry (not often nowadays, good :)). So I didn't even bother to fit it with a gas (propane!) tank, like many do. Sure, propane is about half cheaper, so the rig pays off in a year, but even at 1.28€ per liter (that's close to $7 per gallon), what this toy consumes is no worry.
They also got me scared with the new traffic laws... except that I don't see cops ambushing every curve. Maybe I'm not hitting the fast roads, or getting seen to leave from a bar with the key in my hand. Whatever it is, in these four months I wasn't even greeted by a cop.
Do I miss the AC? Well, a bit. It's still hot, the summer is extended deep into september, ninth week without rain, but I manage. It's dry heat, and the distances are short. Even if I had AC, by the time it would cool the cabin, we'd be halfway there. Not worth the bother.
Conclusion? I hope my washing the car (finally!) will cause some rain. It's long overdue.
Just two things wrong here. Later, when we had AC, it would begin cooling the cabin before we left the street, much faster than what I described here. And the 6€ for the agency increased steadily.
Mentions: asrm, Belrap, blogue, CAAR, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Fujica, Hana Burberry, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, Jovan Dimijan (Zeki), Klincaid, nokla, Oma, rakija, saxo, sdk, Suez Lima, upFeds, in serbian
11-IV-2024 - 5-VII-2026