On 26th she was thinking up a cake for Raja's birthday, and it ended up being the same as last month, just with a layer of filling in the middle. She baked it the same evening, filled and iced in the morning. The birthday already was, it's the celebration we delayed until saturday, so Lena and Milan could come.
She had, of course, made Karađorđe's steaks and those coteletes (what Dragana once made and she liked, and then remembered she used to make them long ago, so refreshed the recipe). It was a realy celebratory lunch, and the weather was fair so we could sit in the yard. True, the trees will stay barren for another couple of weeks, and it's not so hot yet that we need shade. Just right.
These days I'm cobbling the path. The part from the rear garage door to the terrace is done, even grouted with sand and the leftover cement (... 24 words...), now it's from that path to the chicken coop. Gradually running out of cobblestones. The plan is to switch to old bricks when I get close enough or run out of stones, and then pave a 3x5 patch with better bricks - leftovers from 2013 here and 2016 in Čankovo (from those two arches), so we can move the table to it.
On monday we made the 42nd frendz parti. She made pohovano pancakes. We sampled the last cask of tutifruti, the one with more of them vineyard peaches, the small and white ones, and one bucket of grapes. She and Borko then hit the beer (black Budvar, i.e. the original Budweiser), Dragana the tikveško roze, and I stayed on brandy. She said that my breath is bad after wine, while it's pleasant after brandy, and with everything else being the same, then so. I agreed with Borko that he'll drive me, anywhere within about 120km radius, to go and buy a car when I find one.
I was tracking the ads for a week, and asked the majstors at the service, so peugeot 207 got off the list because their small diesels are their frequent customer; renault modus was off because its hood is smaller than the oven door, it's still, per tradition at least 50 years old, designed so you have to dismantle transmission when you change oil filter, so it came down to citroen c4 or c3. See four looked a tad too big, but Stinge convinced me (in an oldwave discussion) with this:
The semiautomatic in a C4 Picasso is done by EGS system, which means you have all the advantage of automatic (you drop into A and hit it), but if anything goes wrong you don't have to visit the majstor in Borča where good morning costs a grand €, but you fix it with your regular guy. Namely, under the hood is a regular transmission, press plate, clutch, flywheel and mothercunt, but there's no stick with speeds "in H" nor a clutch pedal, the shiftage is done by a computerling. The difference in the feel, comparing with a real automatic, is that you feel the shifting, as if you shifted manually, everything else is the same (kickdown, cruise, speed limit and sosuch).
As what you mentioning the touch on the stick... there's an option, which I never needed to use in the six years while I had one, to use the pads on the left and right of the wheel to manually shift down or up,
So the choice fell on a C4 from some guy from Vračar, which is uptown Belgrade. I called him on tuesday afternoon, and we set it for friday, as wednesday is too soon and on thursday I'm busy. Then called, on repeat, Borko, him, Borko called Miljka (the mother of his son-in-law, they share a grandchild and the grandparental duties, his shift begins at 12:30). Turned out we all can but this guy can't, has meetings all morning, online and working from home, can't do it on such a short notice. Okay, wednesday was the plan B anyway, talk to you thursday evening. The guy sounded reasonable and okay altogether.
On thursday I took Nina in the van, to New Belgrade, for another dental appointment. She was done quickly, there isn't much to do. While she was there, I took the eggs (only three cartons, but it's a start... the hens were practically on strike all winter) and then heard Api all alone in the apartment. Okay, got her on the phone (my nokla is ten years old now and works just fine) - ah, she's at the gym, she just signed up and paid up for a batch of sessions, caught her when she was just about to enter... and oops she forgot to write down when we're coming... up in 10 minutes, wait. I went down to have a smoke and wait there. She did appear within the fifteen minutes, and then Nina did too in another ten. Went up, had a coffee (now with real milk! - a few times she had only some surrogate or cream, cream is fine). Then we hit the road. At about halfway, as usual, we called home to see how are the kids, then called the fastmunch (about 8km before target) and ordered patties (not quite the same as burgers: better, far better) for her, Raja and Violet.
I already downloaded the owner's manual for the C4 in the morning, and now finished reading. The thing is the fucking shark (what we called the ID Citroen, later DS, back in the sixties and seventies), it's the same kind of luxury car with all the comfort and gimmicks, the around-the-corner headlights, the raise-lower ass (gas suspension in the rear) and a hundred tiny lamps to light whatever you can think of, and the mp3 player built in and controlled on the steering, and that tall panoramic windshield where you can always see the traffic light even if you're next to it.... I'm taking this.
In the evening there was half an hour of suspense. I tried to phone the guy, then sent him a message, no response. Then Borko called to check and I told him I was waiting for the guy to call. Which he did, ten minutes later - said he was picking daughter from the gym, tomorrow's fine as we said. Then I called Borko to confirm, and he said he's checked with Miljka, she can hold the fort an hour or two longer if need be. Everything set, and we had a tutifruti for good luck and hit the hay.
In the morning everything went as planned - Borko appeared just a couple of minutes late, I knew the way (of course, the notary I picked is near Lena's last apartment and her first job is just around the block). We arrived with almost 15 minutes to spare. The guy was about 15 minutes late, which is not bad, considering that he's working from home for a whole year and was actually surprised with the congestion. At least I had time for two cigarettes. He found us easily - the parking behind YUBC is not the most crowded place - and let me have my trial round. The car runs nicely, and I'm not a complete dummy around an automatic gear shift, but I forgot a few details, the last time I drove one was the u-haul truck in 2006. I asked three things: out of two hundred electronic gadgets around the car, how many actually work (all of them), why is he selling (works at Ericsson Serbia, got an office Passat and has no parking space for the C4, pays extra 100€ a month for it) and how did he arrive at the price (from the book, then took it down a bit to sell faster). The price is funny, as I've seen C3s, a much smaller car with fewer features and more kilometers, sell for more. The counter, BTW, is to a 200km, same as I left it in the saxo. Okay, I said, sold. I thanked Borko for his cooperation, I'll have my own transportation back now. He took off and arrived home before noon, Miljka didn't have to change her schedule a bit.
The seller and I went up to the notary, where it went relatively fast. The building is the typical anonymous offices-for-rent building, with walls in pure white (to differ from such a building in the US - there, if you see white walls, check your account, you're in a hospital), looked somehow far more solid. Probably because the walls weren't hollow. He did have a prepared boilerplate contract, and pre-filled all he could (technical data, VIN etc) except my generalia, which he did on the spot. However, the girl said it can't be in red, if it's to be notarized, only blue ink is legal. He said he found only one blue pen and it was leaking. Never mind, only the signatures have to be in blue, so she just whitewashed his signature, and then made photocopies, and we signed in fresh blue ballpoint. He checked the banknotes - specially the 500€ (which are gradually revoked, in the attempt to reduce the liberty of handling cash among populace; intended against criminals, hits everyone... I asked on burundi about the status, and one said "regular", another said "mythical"). Didn't have much to count, it's only 3300€. Then we went to Vračar, to take him home so he can get all of his stuff from the car into his office car. It's on the north side of the Autokomanda intersection, then a few streets uphill, zigzagging. Looking at the map I couldn't guess where it was; later I found the address from the papers and guess what - the garage where it was is across the street from his address. So he's renting a space there. Along the way he called his son via the hands-free bluetooth gadget - he just held the phone in his hand (right one - no shift so it's free) and talked him into bringing down the spare key to the C4 and the key to Passat. The kid is also being schooled from home, but he managed to sneak out for the two minutes. Took him fifteen minutes to move all the stuff and show me a few tricks (like a piece of cable where the wires were crossed, to counter how they are crossed in the car's computer plug, so it's nearly impossible to take over, even if the thief plugs his PC in and has the software for this model. Then I had to maneuver a bit to get out of the garage, came out unscathed. It would take some skill with a hand shift - get out uphill as the garage is in the basement, then all downhill from there - but the automatic shift handled that for me. I got surprisingly easy through the crowd at Autokomanda, then took the highway all the way to Bežanija (just 3km short of airport) where I finally had no dilemma which exit to take (the one after mcDonald, failed only twice before and that was in 2016). Then it was the well known street through Bežanija and Zemun, which I took dozens of times already. After the Pupin bridge, it's highway a dozen kilometers to Borča, less congested so I hit the pedal without looking at the tachometer, just to see when will I feel the speed. At 126. Wow. I didn't have the time to burn a fresh CD with music (nanovo is without network, I revoked too many services on it), so I took the old CD from the van. The sound is great, and the controls on the steering wheel are really handy. The player doesn't recognize replay gain, so the volume up and down being just under my thumb is just right. Also the magical button to switch to next song.
Arrived at home nicely, got used to the comfort and layout... fine, comfortable. The twins were on the street... now checking the times when I was at the light on Autokomanda and called home to report, and the time of Sanda looking through the door... hour twenty, including the time it took me to get down on the highway. Hour fifteen was the regular good time to get to Lena's place, which is some six kilometers closer.
Had a nap after lunch, and then we took Linda and Sanda to Čankovo, to open the season and just look around. The grass is tall already, could be mowed. The cherries, both sweet and sour, will be in blossom in a couple of days. There may be apricots, perhaps we did dodge the bullet, what with this indian winter coming for repeats so many times. There are traces that someone entered the house through the street window (it's more open than before), but there seems to be nothing stolen, perhaps just the can of WD40.
The weather turned worse next day, and wasn't better on sunday either. At least we had a nice chat with Go, third or fourth time from gugolj upstairs, as it's becoming impossible to talk from zmajček - as soon as there's someone on skype, all the kids have something to say and a good reason to shout and scream, conversation impossible.
Today, this on UA:
>Importance of spelling and naming. RAISE is spelled with an E on the end. ERROR is spelled with an E on the front. RAISE ERROR should have become raiseError, but nope [it's raiserror]. Oh well. Anything that can reduce HUMAN error should be supported, as opposed to re-inforcing human error.
Note the chosen word, spell. It implies witches...
The case you found is where IT imitates life. Look at the word threshold. It's actually read as threshhold, because you pronounce both sh and then h, but in standard spelling there's a single aitch, which is, ahem, reused, which is where life imitates programming.