The first and second we spent in... mostly the holiday lull, idling. She kept knitting (another sweater for me), and I remembered that, if I was considered a rocker, at least in the memory of many, then I should have articles here about the bands which meant something to me, so I created a category (in the database itself, I won't write a form for a table with just a key and description), so I lined up Korni, Omege, Omega and Pa. This is already routine, I have a pretty reliable method to insert links into texts written long ago. First I find where the name appears, by a suitable database search (which was tough in the last case, as their name is three short and common words, and I don't index words shorter than three characters), and then go through the text of each of the articles found. There I also need to find where in it the name appears, and again the latter were not easy to spot until I remembered I kept them in serbian in the english text, so 'šta' was the word to search for, and then it was easy. I was done in one afternoon and morning.
On third we went downtown, I to get the ticket for the filharmonija tonight, she to see about buying some silver, because it's overly undervalued worldwide, the ratio went from the traditional 14g of silver for 1g of gold to 50:1, which won't stand forever, specially if they start making silver batteries for electrical vehicles, the price will go up... But the price of a 20g silver coin came at 12000 dinars, which is 600din/g, about five times the market price of silver. Thanks a bundle.
At least I got the tickets, and she bought some cloth for the coat (what she tailored from the first cut turned out to be technicolor shit, and the cloth which she used was suspect, already attacked by moths in some places, dropped that) and the small stuff - buttons etc. I didn't bring my winter jacket, it not being cold enough, but there was some breeze, just for chills and freezing fingertips. I stood in the lee of a small billboard by Šeherezada, at least some shelter from the wind, lit one and waited for her to appear. I saw her, she didn't me, I hid well. In the glasshouse at the serekeš five are waiting outside, wassup now, well never you mind, there's another inside and few know about it. Wrong on that account, seven waited there. Ah yes, the retirements were doled out today, what posessed them to do that so early, it was always on ninth, can't be that the state is pampering the retirees, as the whole country is becoming disobedient, everyone's dick is full already.
Jan finally reappeaared on UA, after I was helping Alphonse a few weeks ago, sending him fresh screenshots as he'd fix things with the new look, and mentioned that he should be reinstated. He was banned for nothing, in my opinion, both times - first for the harsh dispute with Trish, who was a slime de la slime, and second because of one such with the shitty programmer Mike Yearwood, who insulted practically anyone he ran into, and Jan just couldn't keep his keyboard shut so they were pedaled out together. Mike was on specially bad terms with George, who then shut down his wiki, which was the trove of knowledge on all things fox, until Mike shuts up or gets at least banned from various places. Checked now, the last message on the wiki is a SMS exchange between Mike and George in september of 2022. All other content is invisible.
Took four kilos of tobacco in the evening. We both know the drill, no ungainly words are mentioned on the phone as we arrange the meeting, just „can do eight bags?“, „okay see you“, even the location is not mentioned. The rules of non-engagement...
On fourth I finally went down to the basement to saw the slats which were taken off the roof of the old house when it was renewed. The wood is almost hundred years old, and the slats are mostly like new. We spoke with Lena too in the evening. Tanja was asleep so we didn't see her, except on a video as she ate some banana. She's getting used to try this and try that. Stojan was, of course, horrified, isn't it a tad early for solid food. Owch, we started each of ours at three months, and this one is over five already. She liked the banana, and baked apple, turkey not so much, mostly because it requires chewing and she's still without teeth.
Spoke with Nina too today, early in the evening. Everything okay, we watched her cooking. The twins still eat no meat, while Raja and Violet do, but they're picky about sidedishes, so she's prepares meat separately and of the rest they pick what they want. The heavy storm which was announced shouldn't quite reach the coast, but icy rain is possible. She was intent to go to work next morning, they have a big gathering where they're supposed to open the year and be physically present for it.
And then the time was up for that new year's concert of city filharmonija, to which we left as late as 19:30, picked Dragana, parked in front of the Court[house] (paid parking now, but it's the yellow zone so can stay longer, and a sunday so it's free), and then kissed the door - the concert was posponed for the tenth, today is a day of mourning for the Cetinje mass killing. Which made us wander a bit, that's not in Serbia, Montenegro is an abroad now and they're also not pleased with any expressions of brotherly appropriation, but I guess they didn't mind this one. So I drove us back, looking how they've inserted fresh novogradnja wherever they could - here the whole big yard of once NuProm is now four or five storeys tall, and we counted at least fifteen such places more than we could [count] fifteen years ago. And this is just one long street that we passed.
Then we spoke with Go and Stanley, they're doing fine. The new end is a bit weird, affluent with high rents, and just a block away there are junkies, dealers and petty criminals. Go just realized how little space they had in the yellow house, how she had to keep her stuff in various corners and had to think up logistics for each project first, to drag the required stuff into one place, how they didn't have a proper dining table because the one they had was Anita's playground. Now they have room for everything. Waiting for spring to start the garden.
We hit the hay around half three, tutifruti 21.2, good [one]. And we didn't do much, she said „Borče licks that much up before supper“.
On sixth, a tour to Mere, to restock - flour, cranberries, peanuts, sardines (for cats, but we also eat some), kvass, some butter (but in a plastic can, had some like that already, but it was mixed up with tiny droplets of water to be easier to spread, but then didn't taste the same, didn't like it). No cheese, except ripe young or boxed young. What looks like cheese in bars and wheels is all fake, the declaration label begins with „product made of“, fuck that, I read no further.
She went to bed before midnight, while I was finishing Star wars V, the one from 1980, when the canonade outside began. Well may your krishchenity and your yule fuck you and all those desert sects. And I've seen them build a huge pyre on the corner, which must have endangered the optical cable above. Well, not our line... And this won't go away just like that, the sales of fireworks, firecrackers and other explosive are legal, there's a shop in Pašićeva, this is just the beginning of the shootout. This much woke her up, as they kept firing them along the whole street, I saw the colored bits of paper from crackers on each lawn the next morning (on bike, nice weather) when I went to visit the serekeš and buy the cigarette peper (the kiosk works, screw the holiday, it's the MatEA, not Mateja, the j is somehow not kosher anymore). So sleepless, we hit the tutifruti again until the canonade subsides.
There was a shootout on seventh too. On eighth we saw Lena. Tanja knows how to sit. To be sitting, that is, can't sit up by herself. And for crawling, she's almost there, and gets just properly annoyed with the failure, as it goes in that phase. And she's become visibly chubbier in these ten days, there are no wrinkles on her trouser legs.
Switched to sawing the old roof slats with a taller saw, the carpenter's, which I used when I made the grooves for the bottom of the stairs. It went a bit hard the first day, until I taught it to work on its own. I've finished cutting one bundle, five more to go, and then I'll finally have the room to drag the outside heap in. The weather is perfect, it's gone a bit southly, the temperature is around 14 (and they forecast 18 for the ninth), a beauty, and when it freezes on the weekend it won't be as pretty.
On ninth and tenth fiddled with mrz pludger, how to add fresh music. True, I didn't even try to make it accept files dropped by mouse into its window, I rather took to selecting a list of files in double commander, ctrl+c to put it on stevka, switch to mrz pludger and there ctrl+v to paste it from the stevka and... it all works now. Not all of it - to normalize it I still have to pass the same list to a script to run the mp3 gain analysis on them, because I'm too lazy to get it all done from the pludger. At least I'm converting the tags on files I downloaded from Lajso in the last few years, as he keeps them in codepage 1250, into proper utf-8. Not writing the tags back into the files, not yet. At least the waiting room is now empty. That's about 500 new songs, which were waiting there for about three years, on the average. This was fast enough.
So even now, 40 or 50 years after the fact, I'm mad at various editors, and others who had a say, mostly saw to not allow the rockers into the studio until they have a track record of success, so there are no complete recordings from the legendary guitariads fom the late sixties, when the Fair was full (not to mention Zaječar, where it began), and so many important bands have left no recordings at all. But then, symmetrically, there are just as gaping holes in the opus of Ibrica Jusić, who allegedly once farted in the bathtub and that was not recorded either.
During the day the weather was mostly shitty or worse, the whole day was a dusk, neither rain nor not, and some eastern wind. Stayed so into the evening, so when we picked Dragana it was already dry. We were a bit late again, there was an urgent trip to the bathroom at the last minute, so she called while I was warming up the car. Then, a couple minutes latter, I just messaged her a „now“, which it seems she didn't notice*, because when we were in front of Lesnina, she still had the lights on in the kitchen. Some advantage, the position of her windows. So I tried to ring her, and she switched off the light during the second ring, so I canceled. All in all nobody had to wait too long and nobody was confused much.
The concert... well, operettas. There's not much music which would carry me, and the enforcement of the abilities of human voice, called operatic singing, aside. Half the fun was to guess in which language is what (by order: hungarian, serbian, german, spanish; italian and french got an unjustified [absence]). I wonder whether the two can speak all the languages they sing. Well, for experience I simply enjoy the sound of the orchestra, the fullness and richness of sound, and the voice abuse is just another instrument. Their insistence on some alleged text in acting in that, well fuckit, history is on record as being able to produce even worse, one ignores that part and ciao. Actually, rock opera isn't much better, as a rule it's not rocknroll at all, just an operetta with electric powered music... better only in how they don't insist on torturing their voices, they got microphones so at least the words are understood.
The chance to insert a bit of political bullshit wasn't missed. The forelast song, which I didn't hear announced, was the Radecký march. Where the said pan Radecký was actually Radetzky, because it didn't matter at all that he was a count and a general and of immense importance as a strategist and war hero, he couldn't possibly be allowed to have his name written in czech, he had to be transcribed into german latin. This was inserted, I guess, just because some ten days ago a video of vienna philharmonic playing the „March to Drina“ (qv.), so let's accept this olive branch. Then, of course, they finish the concert with the same „March to Drina“. Had I not played it so many times as a kid, and seen how dad gets fired up on it and expects others to follow... thanks, not a taker, you didn't need this at all.
Wish there was at least some snow. If we didn't see the kids regularly, this would have been a real dull time. I didn't even take the shooter in [my] hands, what shots I made were the screenshots on the mac, when we talk. So Linda called on ninth, one tear after another, and what was the occasion - Nina went to work (as she now does on mondays and thursdays, then to meet folks that matter to her), others were still asleep, and Alisha didn't arrive yet. She showed us a decent heap of wet paper handkerchiefs she already used. I think we broke the record - from ceaseless tears to a full smile in about for minutes, and at about eighth minute we heard Alisha's voice, ciao gbye.
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* the standard „didn't seem to notice“ has no place here, she was alone, so any seeming would be unseen.
5-I-2025 - 5-VII-2026