03-VIII-2018.
The guy in Kraljevo, with the best Citroën Jumpy van available (3500€, medium kilometers, unfortunately metallic gray but the rest is fine) didn't reply to either messaging or calls. So I called a guy in Niš, who sells a Peugeot Expert (same thing, repackaged slightly - 8 seats instead of 9, different dashboard), rather new with less than 200.000 km, 7000€, price not fixed. So I asked Stanley what to do with the guy. He said
The expert looks good. Jew him hard. The tires look to be winter tirrs and well worn. Treba novi gume! Možda. Off the top of my head, show up with 5k euro cash. Apparently thr 500 euro is called a bin Laden. Id show up with ten bin ladens and show him youre serious :) complain about the tires.
But then when I called the guy, he felt deeply insulted when I said 5000. Just hung up on me. Then ten minutes later called back to feel insulted some more, with "sorry I was a bit nervous, did I hear correctly that you said 5000?" and then didn't even want to negotiate, just said "you are inserious, good bye". Well, I've learned the difference between "serious buyer" (the common phrase in ads here) and inserious one - the serious one pays right away, the other one has a triper. Well, your bad.
The third van, not too far from here, looks good. I'll let it sit for a while.
Speaking of serious, we had some rain in the evening. Went to the garage to check whether the door holds - the guy from ppp who did it last winter alegedly made the bottom watertight. And it was - all the water we had flowing through the garage was coming from the drain in the floor. Because we were connected to the city rain sewers while we were in the US. Why did dad feel that we should plug in into everything that city/state provided I don't know, he was such a believer. So I grabbed a handful of plastic grocery bags (no, we're not bying plastic grocery, if we can help it) and stuffed the drain. It will stay so.
The basement was only slightly flooded, perhaps 1-2cm in the near half. Will dry out by september.
The travel plans are changing. Presently it's Lena travelling to Nina around mid-september and then they all (i.e. she, Nina and the kids) return for her birthday, early november. Go and hers should be coming a couple of weeks before that. She is already making sleeping arrangements - perhaps move one bed downstairs so Nina with four kids gets the yellow room, Go and kids get the blue room, Stanley the couch(es) and we two go upstairs into our mattres-in-a-hole. Or something like that.
All those rooms are white now, but the names remain.
Van first.
Found this in "Firriver sucks" document:
Nina and Bruce and Kees were working on a web service to serve a few things to a customer. They only needed the customer to be more specific, i.e. to tell them whether the fields served are to their liking, should some of them be renamed, added or removed. They were told they’ll get some kind of liaison officer from the customer. All of a sudden, Briyesh has hired a guy (I guess a Norwegian or from Tierra del Fuego) to do web services. Ivana just wants to have this working before she’s to show this new guy what he should do (i.e. nothing).
The mention of random countries was where I was wrong - the guy they hired is allegedly russian - Jevgenij. The web service ended up as a non issue, the customer never replied and he never wrote it.
Mentions: Briyesh Dupta, Bruce Furlane, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jevgenij Nosorowetz, Kees de Cock, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), ppp, Stanley Berger, triper kombinacija, in serbian