19-IV-2009.
So we spent three days in Undersville, mostly uprooting what we could. I got me a galon of gas[oline] (and a canister) and a pre-measured amount of two-cycle oil, so we fired up the machinery and leaned on it. The hedge trimmer starts easily, the chainsaw really hard. I was bent on clearing the foundation down on the slope, and it had a tree growing right in the middle of it. A frequent species here, which has no year rings on a section, looks like you just opened a can of corn farina. It's easy to cout. Last fall with just a handsaw I cut down one which grew close to the house, at the kitchen corner. Now I cut this one, which went easy with the chainsaw, just after you drop dead starting it.
Then I went on to cut the vines growing over the walls. It's easy to cut with vintner's shears, it's watery, actually don't ever chop it above your head, because it drips the thin sap for minutes after. I'd be all wet if I did, „deadline immediately“, as the current slang on ppp has it.
And I managed to clear it, well rather, and even this right wall with a window hole appeared. The hole faces nowhere, it would require digging out on the outside. And then I had to quit the work, because the shears fell apart in my hand, the handle just broke off. The metal seems to be some cheap gray cast, pooch's dick, chinese junk.
Neighbor's brother, out of work for some time now, appeared to see whether there's any work to do, any penny is welcome. He seems to be a veteran from iraqi war or some such, and got fucked up just as most of the valley did, this is four villages grown around woodworks. I even know where in Virginia Beach they had a furniture salon. It's all boarded up now, the one remaining sawmill works at one seventh of the once capacity. This brother took to living in a trailer at the bottom end of their lot.
The neighbor's kids appeared, so we had a bit of conversation with them too. We were a miracle unseen to them, they never met anyone who lived in that abroad. The neighbor, by the way, kept clearing the trees all the way down the slope to the brother's trailer, don't know what he meant to do with that. I see he leveled a piece at the lower end and mounted a largish trambulina (that's what we call it, and the story of Tramp and O'Lin as inventors is just a reporter's fable, fake ethymology; we say trambulina for whichever reason).
She also cleared what she could, some with that hedge trimmer, some with shears. She was specially fighting the ivy, the proper virginian kind, which climbed up the north wall all the way to the top of the roof. Which is a futile battle, it needs to be weeded out regularly, week to week, until exterminated.
She cleared most of the plateau behind the house, to that foundation, it was now visibly flat. And she cleared the path down to the creek, again, we did that last fall already. There on the slope there's more junk than elsewhere. The alcos club from the trailer park above the opposing slope have found a place for boozing out here, and of course their dick hurts to take away the bottles - the bottles and cans were spread everywhere, and there was all kinds of other junk too. We found a tractor tire and a supermarket cart in the creek, one metal bend frame leaned to a young tree, which grew and wrapped its bark around it, to the point when it became inseparable unless by a saw. The wood or metal kind, whichever.
And she planted some tomatoes, radishes and whatnot, so we'll see. That came to nothing, the deer are passing that way and this was to their liking, a delicacy which can't be found elsewhere.
The coffee we made on the small gas rešo, the instant kind. We brought a half galon pot with a frying-pan type of handle (american thing, not sold at home), so we'd heat up as much water in it as we'd need. In the morning it was visible how the humidity condenses on the upper part of the pot, which was still cold enough (well, was, in november), and the gas, when it burns, produces water vapour. We drank it from those small metal cups, dark blue enameled, which we bought for exactly this. Oh, how I lost the habit of drinking anything hot from a metal cup, it scalds the lips. We parked this by the north wall, in the shade, because except the first one in the morning (which we had in the room), every later one would be in the hot weather.
We walked yet another round, climbing up the other part this time - the first evening we just went down the creek to the end of our stretch of it. There we saw that a tornado felled eight pines, all of them slim, straight and firm. So, in the case we're after building something, here's our beams. We'd need to think of a way to taylor the trunks into beams, but the area was grown on woodworking anyway so that should not be a problem, just to haul them out, and at the downstream end, behind the neighbor's house, we have a right-of-way, it says so in the deed and title, all the way up to the road. Some smaller machine should be able to haul them out... Anyway, the plan is to build something on that foundation next year, and while we're at it, we may rent a bigger trailer or one of them container houses (which may go up to sixty some square[ meter]s or maybe stronger), just to have a place to live while we do it. There's idle neighbors in heaps, the workforce would be found.
I was stubbornly intent to cut a row of boxwood shrubs, which may have been decorative and not in the way while the hous was easy to pass through, but now that the house is more or less an obstacle - the way throught the kitchen is clogged because the neigbor used it as storage, and the big room is lacking a floorboards (and the floor support already lost half of the loadbearing planks) - it is getting in the way of the next best path, around the house. Ow, hard it is. The boxwood is such a hard wood, that I thought it'd rather burn then allow to be cut. It needs a laser, fuck the chain. I chopped three and gave up halfway on the fourth. Three is enough for a path.
For dinner we mostly managed just like we did when we fixed up the house - Maruchan soup, with hot water from the coffee machine. We used that hot water for coffee as well - we didn't bring the filteruša, can do that at home, but it'd be a bit complicated to do in a hotel, you never know whether they have filters, and to carry a pack of that... Why leave home if you have to carry half the household along?
We returned today, probably still in the daylight, as it didn't make sense to begin any work now, what we managed to do, we managed. We left a neat pile of firewood to dry, guess the neighbor will find it useful. I told him to cut those two big trees by the road, they were getting old and leaning over the blacktop, so I'd rather not have them fall on anyone or cause damage. Later we saw he did cut one.
All in all we did grab decent tan, my nose being slightly red, and her shoulders like chocolate vanilla icecream - the vanilla being the covered areas...
When we returned... from correspondence with dad:
[about the car]
Ender fixed it for me. He said the cables and spark plugs were suspect. I thought it shouldn't be the cables, I replaced them and the distributor in one go two years ago, and the spark plugs the year before that. But when he heard where I bought the distributor, he said „it's the Autozone, they sell shoddy warez, in two years you probably got a loose contact somewhere... now with these cables you'll see, the insulation here was poured under pressure, with cables like this you can wash the engine with a hose while it works, not a drop can get in“. And really, he got about eight years off the engine. Starts, goes, purrs and is less thirsty.
[on saplings]
We found in Colinsville (next place, where we had the room in the same hotel as last time) saplings of tomato better than what we'd make ourselves, and still cheaper than what's sold here, so she planted them as early as last evening. And the peppers, put the sweet ones outside the chicken wire fence, hot ones on the inside - just that there's more of these hot ones, and there's more room on the inside. The logical thing would be to put the hot ones outside, as a defence measure...
[about the remainder of the fence separating us from Juliška]
We'll paint it white, this little that's left on the edges, and the dark red rear wall of ger shed fits nicely with the tiles, so it'll stay. We'll nail the rest of the chicken wire to it, so the cucumbers will have something to hook onto.
[about the house in Undersville]
The house is, of course, in worse condition than last time. Some two guys have, as we hear, had a bit of a party inside, so there were some four windows where the glass stayed intact, in the harder to reach parts of the house. Someone started taking out the loadbearing planks from the floor in the big room, and the main power cable, from the place where the line enters the house to the meter is also missing. So we decided to stick to the original calculation: initial price 30000, discount ten for the house, we paid 20. Write off the house and we're ten thousand good right away :)
(now this is bogus math, but there it is, that's how I wrote)
[on Lena's chances to get into college as a native]
Only on Nina's account, i.e. if she's financing her, because she's paying taxes here - I don't do that anymore. Found in the law that I'm exactly the one untaxable category - a foreigner working for a foreign firm.
[on Nina's college grant]
Actually the six semester grant extended to the seventh semester too, because simply nobody checked whether it expired :). Or there was a stipulation that the better students should go unchecked, on account of saving on dropouts.
Mentions: Ender Aquila (Ender), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Juliška, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), ppp, rešo, Undersville, in serbian
3-V-2026 - 5-VII-2026