12-II-2010.

It's sunny but it blows, cold from south, which is weird. Seems to be the cold air which reached even Texas and Florida is returning now, recipients weren't happy with it, but why did they have to send it over us.

Eleese is with us for the weekend, extended one, because in DC (where she lives with her mother) they still didn't get their ducks in order, and the schools haven't announced when will they go back to work. They seem to have got the centennial snow, guess they could shoot the “Die 2 hard“ without snow machines, and perhaps the puddle by the airport would even freeze, though there's no theory the ice would ever carry those motorbikes - in the little tub where we catch the drip from neighbor's gutter we had 5cm of ice the thickest.

For this weekend they finally forecast a night without freeze. Though, no more than -2 until then, and it went all the way to -4 this week.

On the Matrix, Ender replaced the brake discs, and now it turns out that the scratching sound from front right wasn't the brakes, it was the bearing. Will have to replace that too. The sound is the crunch from Star wars, the periodic, lowering the pitch as it slows down.

The car was obviously used somewhere in the north, where they salt a lot and spread the ground pebbles - there's a lot of pockmarks on the front hood - and it seems the salt got into the bearing, and then so did the sand. For now it sounds bad only when braking, but once a ball isn't round anymore, it can only get worse.

The cosf of repair is their treat, they'll get the car when we leave. It would regularly had cost about 600$, but he found a way to lower it to 240, the better.

Wrote three checks to Lena's school, total around 280$, for her AP (or whichever) exams. The „advanced placement“ (another silly term) would allow her to skip at least a semester, or two or three (depending on where she enrolls) on any american university. If she'd be on one.

She submitted her matricular paper, with a few days beyond schedule, because she did something that wasn't done before, and the professor knows nothing about either (comparing four methods of extraction of thymol from thyme, aka mother's little soul in serbian), and was eventually unsatisfied with the precision of some measurements, as then there weren't enough reliable data to make it conclusive. And then she needs to present the work in public.

She refused to take part in the diploma handout ceremony (the shit with togas and square caps) because it's both commercialized (someone's making good money on these garments), and consisting of speeches, patriotic songs and is all in all just an expensive little village show. They were all shocked, didn't fit into their heads that someone can just come and pick up the diploma, without the fanfare.

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Mentions: Eleese Aquila (Eleese), Ender Aquila (Ender), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), in serbian