20-XII-2007.
A bit grumpier than usual. She took me to K-mart to buy our regular dose of peanuts, fill up the fridge etc. The bill turned up to be a 101$, which didn't happen for quite a while. Because she bought jeans for herself and we bought a goose.
Bad ideas, both. It took about fifteen minutes to find the right jeans (which turned out short, almost ankle length), and I had to listen to Politically Approved Music, about six songs or so, interrupted with occasional "for only bla-bla-ninetynine". K-mart still hasn't recovered, it's not nearly as full as it used to be eight years ago.
Heard oodles of politically appropriate music to last me a year. Fuckit, ours used to manage to smuggle in a few things into the programme even when some politician croaked, but not here. A solid instrumental preprocess of that Bach's little thing which Jethro Tull also processed a couple of times, but it took too long to play out so they interrupted it with ads about five times...
And then we got home, and accidentally it played „Jumbo“ by Curved Air. Hmmm... played it again, then next day twice more. And I saw it remained in my ears and functions like a real firewall. Then went on to find the verses, because I don't quite understand every word from Sonja. I found it, with lots of typos and other errors, but then the same typos are repeated all over the internet. Then I found a decent site with critiques, just to see what's the word nowadays, and quite touchingly, Russians comment amongst themselves in english, with a smattering of our folks...
And what can I say, I started relistening to them from scratch, as if I hear them for the first time. And I feel fine - endure two more days, wash my ears of the awful krismissy music, untill this censorship passes...
We unfroze the goose the next day. It was moldy, despite being labeled as "best before 02-10-08" or so. It's in the trash can, and the next trashday is in a week. Luckily it is winter. Perhaps it was a series of decubitus blotches, not mold (didn't stink), but all the same.
I signed up at ppp on 2nd of december, at recommendation of one guy whom I knew from sezam and whom most of the oldwave and rasejani folks know by nickname. So I'm getting weaned off sezam. I think Boća probably paid my subscription for another year, but that's it. When that comes near to expiration, we'll start gathering folks from groups there into these mailing lists. There was almost nobody left there, the time of the BBSes is over.
On 9th, we got pictures (from Vanji's son's camera that Nina kind of smuggled last year) of the new roof on the terrace of our house back home. Quite dark and quite expensive - it cost 5000$, and I think the "friends" who did that skinned dad for as far as they dared. We'll hate it later not just for the price, but for the sheer stupidity of it. It has a dark green mosquito net all over, but then there's a gap below the frame (because the terrace is not exactly flat, I gave it some profile to direct the rain water where I wanted) and above (because there's a 100x100mm beam on top of the frame, plus 60x60 struts, on which then the sideways beams (30x50) lie and on which the corrugated metal sheets are screwed. So there are openings everywhere, including the gap between the bavalit (bavarian rough plaster) and the top of the roof, where any rain coming down the upper part of the wall freely continues down, doesn't get diverted to the roof.
But even this is better than the seven layers of something proposed by Prletić, with the stipulation that high heels not be used to step on it, it would be too soft and may puncture. All of this because of the crack in the concrete where the rain dripped into the basement.
Bought second (now first) monitor for zmajček, finally ditching the old 19" crt from 1999. Served well for eight years. New one arrived on 10th, as did her laptop, the last Toshiba we could find without the Vista, m$'s worst flop so far.
Mentions: Božidar Sokolović (Boća), Jethro Tull, Majkrosoft (m$), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oldwave, ppp, Prletić, rasejani, sezam, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), zmajček, in serbian
25-XII-2007 - 3-II-2026