25-VIII-2024.
Trip to Belgrade to see Tanja for the third time. Everything the same as last time, except this time we got beans in a jar, freshly cooked and still warm, and all of sixty eggs. She's nicely rounded and filled, gonna be a chick and a half. And the way she looks at you, just so...
Lena finally remembered to ask me whether I was born blonde. Sure I was, just like you, and likewise changed my mind on the subject at the same age, and didn't cross to the brown camp completely, here my mustache is still bright, and eyebrows, and the hairs on my hands come brighter than the skin every summer.
Milan got into cleaning stuff around the house, starting with rumba (aka roomba, the low robot which scuttles around and cleans, bos. rum, ba), and the drain in the shower cabin, with a steamer, and his old typing chair, which Stojan came to pick later. And one can see that he's doing it volunarily and thoroughly, and with a lot of skill, just as he mastered the diaper change.
We haven't seen Stojan since their wedding. A happy grandfather, as seen. He also doesn't dare take Tanja into his hands yet, as it's been many years since Milan was a baby. I said my reason is different, I do have the habit and skills, after daughters and other grandchildren, this is my tenth baby to have in my hands sooner or later, but I've adjusted to them being larger, the last ten years they come when they're already a few months old, my reflexes are adjusted to that much weight, so I'll wait until she grows a bit more.
Driving back I asked her to take a few shots of the corn, to have this sorrow on record... because it's such a draught that it's dry already. The picking time used to be in september-october, and if there was too much mud, it would be left to november. And what we see as harvested already, that's chopped for silage, as there's no use to extract ears or take grains off them, there's no corn this year. Like lots of other crops.
Dropped by Mere again, and shopped... for less than 3000 dinars. Because we still have unused stuff from before. When we got home, I spotted the neighbor girl (well, also a grandmother), just when I meant to grab hold of her and ask about the pears. Said tough job, very little fruit this year, they picked just one ton the other day, when they used to pick ten in previous years. And the little they have, is already sold, and they aren't sure they'll have enough to deliver what's ordered.
Then in the evening we tried to remember when was it when we last talked with Go, was it the last or forelast sunday, and just when I looked into the Telegram to check, as each such chatterbox remembers the dates, she called. Again we didn't see Neša, but we saw Anita, merry and playful, what with her upper right ace still dangling. She possibly hit it once when she fell, couple of years ago, and the body reacted by reinforcing it, and now it holds. And she's not avoiding the extraction, she does try to take it out.
They'll have to move within the next ten months, as the old lady decided to build something instead of the garage and to move into the house with her new husband, and to rent her current place out. Though, as it were, they're almost ten years there, and haven't seen her much, just sent her the checks and kept reporting the expenses when they fixed something themselves. Now there's a place of one of Stanley's customers in sight, though still unclear whether the guy would sell it. The rent would be a tad higher than now, but then it'd be at spitting distance from that Hungarian guy where he works. And at work there's chaos already, the other day some guys broke into a drugstore with a pickup, tied the safe with a chain and dragged it out. The chain broke and hit a few parked cars, the safe stayed and they got nothing, just did damage. And he says the favorite target are the marijuana sellers, because they are legal by state law but not federal, so then they can't have bank accounts as it's drug money and banking that is a federal felony, so they do it in cash. A friend of his said he has as much as 40000$ in the house at times, luckily nobody knows that.
We finished the talk around one, and then we weren't sleepy yet, so we poured some tutifruti... until half four. I got up at one... The beans was just as excellent as yesterday, outside it was the same soup of a weather as yesterday, nothing going. Found a series to watch, „Extinct“, not badly done for the budget, barely ten actors, but the fuckup is that it was written and produced by Orson Scott Card, who may be a good and successfull writer, and I loved to read him until I noticed in his „Homecoming“ series I gathered that he always writes the same way, has a group of characters of which each gets his turn, one per chapter, to get into a situation where he has to come up with a difficult moral decision, and win or fail at that, with consequences in both cases, and the consequences decide the rest of the plot, until the last chapter. Watched the half of it. Well, not bad at all. Of course, the things I pick to watch are usually original enough to never make it to second season, they get canceled, not selling too well.
Finally prepared the nanovo for the little parastos. Needs to do just two things - play the music and roll the photos. The music is no problem, I've added sixtysome titles which I gathered during the year as suitable for any frendz parti, I see to it that it be the same music from the same period. With the spinner there's a different problem, I don't mean to rework the fes to use EskewLite, too lazy to bother with that, but rather installed Impressive and found the exact parameters to use it as a screensavior, as early as for the parastos of 2019, but that couldn't work because theater's projector accepted only veedgyeye cable, so then I carried the nanovo and ran the shots on a windowses screensavior. For this year's i prepared it again, with the then fund of photos (ergo all three gimnazija etc), and now I've given it a different set, with our class pictures from the period and the shots from various gatherings of 2007 and later. Except I couldn't repeat the winning combination of parameters that I had this winter. Installed this or that and made it work from its preview, i.e. manually, but not automatically. Then in some corner of someone's answer on some forum I found that the default screensaving mechanism has a point where you can submit your own executable instead of the default one... just need to install the submitter, i.e. dconf-editor. Installed, submitted, works. Simple as beans. Started going a bit earlier, did the homework.
Now I should, as an old proponent of open code, go out and offer this solution in the places where I was finding partial and wrong answers, but nope. They all want you to be a member, to leave your email, to pass this or that check, a bit of data harvesting or whatever. So I gave up on it.
On twonyayth we all congratulated Neša on his birthday. On his part, he learned to tie a tie, so his pants arent falling off anymore. We saw the girls briefly, just like on twonysixth. There'll be pancakes soon, the hens started laying, we alredy saw shots of two eggs. Raja finally understands multiplication... a couple of months ago. I let on that next he needs to understand that division is actually multiplication with a fraction, so he should look up fractions in his book... and divulged the secret that I'm actually a math pro. So if mom doesn't have the time, he may ask me.
Elektrovojvodina has outzorsed power meter readouts to some firm. Again the same cuntery, just like they had with water bills in A-burg - something they did quite well for decades they suddenly don't know how to do so they hand it down to some private firm, and nobody knows how much will that cost us, but even less is known about who will have his palm greased. The end result is that we got the june bill, near the end of july, at zero kilowatthours. We paid, eyeballingly, 7000, just in case (Justin Case is my friend). Even the local portals record this, there's lots of complaints from people, they get the corrected bill, they go and pay that, check online and see they now owe more than before. I heard this firm is paid two dinars per meter... at that rate it's a miracle anything gets done. We think they'll do the expected trick, to stuff all the consumption into july, so the quota of cheaper power would not be carried over from june, and then we'd pay more for exceeding it, with probably some in the highest grade. Which we didn't get ever since we replaced the water heater with the gas one, we barely ever get into the medium zone. Only this july, when the airconditioning worked incessantly, we managed to go above six hundred kilowatthours.
Mentions: Anita Jennifer Berger (Anita), Annenburg (A-burg), fes, frendz parti, gimnazija, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), maturski parastos (parastos), Milan Nastić, nanovo, Nenad Berger (Neša), Ryu (Raja), Stanley Berger, Stojan Nastić, Tanja Nastić, tutifruti, in serbian
27-VIII-2024 - 23-XII-2025