01-IV-2005.
(one of those lazy articles, mostly just copied from my emails to dad... At least no historical distance and reminiscing. Still had to translate it, though.)
Overyester we went scouting and assembled a list of things we'll need. Finally bought and brought everything home. The tab was about 2100$, but a few things we left for later, mostly small stuff which can be brought by car (tile glue, grout, bathroom furniture).
We dug a bit deeper for the bathtub - we found a quite decent one at 135$, but then later we saw we have power very near the place where it'd be needed, changed our minds and took a tub with jet nozzles, the type that massages your legs and back.
We also bought a new stove, the glass top type. The old one wasn't bad, specially the oven worked quite nicely, but those spirals were always slanted, and the big one croaked a few months ago, and while it's true that a replacement costs just 30$ and I could do it in five minutes, the decision boiled to the question of „if this one just croaked, when's the next one“. This new one has a glass door, digital thermometer, just missing rinse and tumble dry. The model, of course, the cheapest among the glass tops.
Tiles, white and some with a nice decorative ones we mean to insert here and there. For the floor, dark gray (pulling some toward blue and green). The lavabo a bit wider, with a pedestal - cost the same as with the cabinet, but they don't suffer humidity. The crapper and vukašin (v. house dictionary) we took new. The old were maybe alright, but dripped somewhere all the time, and was also in some krmkasta (ditto) color. I can't escape the impression that they don't even try to make anything in a proper white color, they're okay with whatever shade it turns, and then some advertising majstor will invent names like „seagull white“, „icy polar“ „arctic white“ and such. I leaned a piece of paper on each, and the paper was whiter than any of them. And the seagulls here are gunship gray.
We also got new front and rear doors, somewhat glassed, steel sheet plated, so at night there's some light in the corner below the staircase, and domr in the backroom. The old doors leaked air everywhere; we managed to fix the threshholds, but the sides still whistled. We mended that to an extent, using sponge tapes, but not good enough. The frame already had so many holes, added to adjust the tongue of the latch, that it couldn't be made anymore to close tight. The front door also had a crack in the middle.
We rented a little truck from the shop, had some help loading the merchandise, and took it all home and unloaded within an hour. Now we have a krtlog in the front room again :).
Need to do some things for Gary, for zod, about that export of data with memo fields included, in text format. It's an eternal problem, when you export text into text, you need to set delimiters somehow such as can't be found inside the fields, or else on subsequent import you find delimiters where you didn't put them, and get technicolor shit. Solved it by having delimiters for memo fields takin up a whole line, before and after the field value, with some insane prefix which can't possibly be found in any text. It worked excellently, eventually, and he knew to stick to the instruction to never touch those delimiting lines when editing the text.
Then lunch (first time something chinese from a wok after many months - it needed the big hot plate), and then to lean on the bathroom floor. First I need to replace the piece of plywood (half inch thick) around the vukašin, it's not a good to serve there, it's thinner and of flimsier composition, then to start laying cement boards all over the floor.
We visited the children this sunday (and had a bath :). The day was nice but windy, it only calmed by the evening*. When we arrived home, the fence door was agape - the wire „latch“ that I improvised unravelled. We got in and saw that the fence to the neighbor just toppled. The ends of the upper traverse slat dried out and it fell of its nails. I was rather amazed that it held so far. Hammered three bigger nails and it will hold now. There's a nice iron fence to buy at just 12 dollars a yard (91cm), but about that after that (literal translation of „o tom potom“).
Later we heard that the wind in the area reached up to 80 kmh. Didn't look so during the drive, coming from ahead of us.
The front door could possibly be fixed, but it would be a long term mess (the crack would need to be filled with putty, perhaps replace the edge wood in the frame, sand and repaint everything) and who knows whether it would fit snugly in the end. When you close it, you hear it touched firmly - and it still blows on its sides.
The rear is a throwaway - the previous tennants had a mongrel, so that door was, except the upper quarter, scratched a lot. She painted them white just to cover that, but the door is no better than our bathroom's. The sizes are standard - all doors have the same height (eghty and a half inches), and widths are 32, 34, 36 and 38 inches.
The new doors come already mounted on their frames, steel plated on both sides, these will last. The one we took for the front side were dented a bit, so we took them back and took another, 59 bucks more expensive - more glass - and that one we took from the shelf ourselves. The light being diffuse there in the hangar, we didn't notice the dent until unloading it. Once repainted, nobody will notice.
The stove. The hotwires are couple of centimeters under the plate, and the plate is fireproof glass, which lets through only the infrared (I guess - can't see a thing until turned on, and then you see the red hot filament). The temperature for the oven is set digitally. Each plate has its own thermostat, and there's a decent oven light. The oven has six storeys, i.e. six positions for the grating (of which there are three, plus there's a plek for barbecueing below the top heater, with its own grille - the plek is there to catch the grease). Qute smart for the money, can even adjust how far to allow the thermostat to cheat, up to plus-minus 20 degrees (ie 35 Fahrenheits).
Took the toyota for just an oil change last year, so said let's do one regular tuning this time, as I promised to myself last time. The guy just replaced spark plugs, checked a few minor items and recommended to replace the distributor and cables, because they're still the original [ones], and the manufacturer says they should be replaced each 30 thousand miles. The counter saying it's 117 thousand, it's time for roughly the third change. Estimate - petty price** of about 300 dollars altogether.
(ended up with me buying the distributor and cables, finding the two page instruction, with pictures, on the web, printing it out and then doing it on my own. Big deal - two screws, yank the old ones out, jack the new in, cost twenty dollars)
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* "smirilo se tek uveče“ - usually translates as „it calmed only in the evening“, which implies that it did it that one time and never again and never before. The Gugao suggests „it only calmed in the evening“, which is just as bad, implies that it calmed and did absolutely nothing else. The „tek“ means „as late as“, „not until“.
** originally, „cijena - sitnica“, in croatian, from Alan Ford
Mentions: Alan Ford, Gary Brandywine, Gugao, house dictionary, majstor, plek, zod, in serbian
10-IX-2024 - 14-V-2026