20-IV-2021.

On 5th we gathered at Dragana again, it was her turn to be the host. All regular and as it goes, brandy, gibanica, butkice, salad, wine, beer, whatever each chose. We remained at the table until three in the morning. My beard was due some shortening, but somehow failed to do that - I try aiming for a monday, so the hair tips in the mustache soften enough until the weekend, so I don't poke. It was past wednesday already when I noticed the omission, this train has passed, so I did it for the next sitting, on twelfth.

On seventh we first took out the girls in the new car to Lidl, and then I had to find which button blocks the rear door locks and window controls, because it was impossible to bean them up to not jerk them all the time. Anything is a toy that a finger can reach. On the way back, some chick is leaving the Naftagas parking lot, in a camouflaged vehicle (painted the asphalt-concrete-like paint), then she sees us coming, stops and reverses a meter, to let us pass. Then as we came closer, she stepped on it, got out and left, and passed us with a big smile and one finger salute. Oh, girl, had I just knocked your door a bit, how would you explain that away? Linda, of course, fell of the seat when I stepped on the brake, but this is a well padded car, not even a bruise on her.

In the following days the weather finally got nicer, so I went on cobbling the yard path to the chicken coop. I'm already running out of stones, there's not a meter left to the spot where I'll have to switch to bricks. The soil is full of sand these last two meters, that's where the sandbox was in 2013-2018. That is, the path skirts the sandbox, and there was no sand under it, it had a plastic foil on the bottom; it's this surrounding where the kids kicked the sand out.

On tenth it was the right time to mow around the old house. Nothng had the time to grow too far, and the soil was just dry enough. The vine that dad had set up in the back yard is finally dry, I don't see any green anywhere, so hopefully the neighbors will stop complaining about it growing under their roofs (rooves?). It has gone completely wild, covered the whole garage and started up the walls. I kept cutting it closer to the roots, when I saw where, and it seems to have finally worked, the beast be dead. So far.

I managed to mow the street lawn too, when I, at last, got the idea that the cable may just be long enough if I stretch it from the bathroom to the street (it is). Kind of late now, because the cable is chinese junk and started breaking somewhere by the loop where it goes through the stirrup which keeps the socket from falling off the plug.

Perhaps we'll have a couple of apricots... Presently the cherries and cherries are in blossom, and everything looks fairily taley likely, and the weather is getting better.

In the afternoon, amazingly, Das called me, text only, on skype, about the translation. How to import the translated texts into the captions table, given in excel format. Wow... he didn't even know we had a whole mechanism in there. Pointed him to what to look for on the current whatever-passes-for-a-wiki on Firriver's internal portal, wished him luck.

On twelfth we visited that butcher near ruža again, with girls, on bicycles. Even in front of the shop they found some girl to play with. Her granny recognized them from last year. Then went to the playground at Lesnina, and Sanda went down the slide perhaps once - the rest of the time they were in the sandpit. The sand was dry. And of course, had to drop by the chinese shop in the building, to buy more pieces of plastic, this time one sitnisajzer for just 700 dinars (properly it would be sintisajzer, but "sitni" means small, paltry, and we all liked the lapsus so we adopted it), quite loud and screechy, but at least it plays correct pitches and does karaoke, i.e. you can hear your own voice through it. No adjustments at all, just a dozen demo ditties, from the same awful repertory of sapling farm rhymes^tm (word rhyme in serbian never means a song or anything else, it's just a pair of matched ending syllables in lyrics and/or epics), of exclusively anglophone origins. Fuck them. Still, I'm under impression that I've developed immunity against those.

Some folks are just returning from work, it's 15:15, and obviously feel overdressed - they were just right in the morning. Some folks are freshly overdressed, because they looked at morning temperatures and not through the window, and some others are in almost summer gears - saw a lot of knees and elbows.

In the evening, walked up to Borko's place, 43rd frendz parti, with stopover at Roda to get wine, and without any hurry got there on time. My backpack was a tad heavy, as I had the camera, flash, liter and a half of brandy and the jeans jacket. I walked in just shirt, with rolled-up sleeves. No socks, just clogs on my feet, which made Dragana shudder at the thought - I waited all winter for this time of year, to get rid of socks until at least mid-october. And my feet weren't even cold.

Around midnight, when we opened the terrace door to air the room, the wind turned to cold and strong, we had to check that no windows on the other side were open, or the draft would just slam the door. We drank a respectable amount, and around three went with her to catch a cab - their station is right across her windows. There were none, our regular guy had a fare out of town, two or three others were either closed or had no cars. So we went on foot, at a bit faster pace, and by the time we reached the cemetery, her legs hurt, so we sat on the bus stop bench. Saw a few cabs whiz by, but since this is near end of town, they're on call if they're going our way, and even in the other direction they rarely go back to their post, they usually have a call. By some miracle we flagged the third one, from the company which I never call - five years ago they played ads during the ride, and my rule is "you can do that to me... once, and you just spent that". This is perhaps third time in these eleven years that we flagged a cab.

On fifteenth, to Lidl again. We usually take two carts, so they both have seats, but this time they wanted to be together in one cart - so okay, I took a bigger cart, as I had to buy water (seven 6,25l bottles, one sixpack of 1,75l knjaz). It was cloudy and somewhat windy, so when she went to Roda to buy a few more things, I stayed outside with the girls on the shop's playground. Then had to go back to the car to get the wiper, because the slide was still wet. Then Linda peed in her pants and was cold. Don't know why she didn't say, or perhaps she did but I was at the car... anyway, we had to wait the ten minutes and then she came out and we went home. Then I understood how much bigger is c4's trunk than saxo's: I could line two rows of these big bottles here, while in the saxo it was one row plus a hand's breadth.

The weather is worse than in january - cloudier, rainier and altogether shitty. The cherries and cherries are in full blossom, but it's too cold for the bees to come out. We still turn the in-floor heating on for most of the nights, and the AC is on too. Officially, the heating season ends on this day.

I got a decision from the state agency for restitution... the first case, what land they took from my grandfather to make room for that chemical factory's expansion, i.e. the half of the lot at the house, and perhaps some piece on the other end. The first and official decision we got last year, and it said my share was 87000€, with a stipulation that a multiplier would apply. Then in the news somewhere I found that they'd pay only a sixth of that, and now they specified that I should get... 12000€ apportioned over ten years. Which means 1200€ a year, in three parts - some in dinars, some in euros, some in state bonds. IOW, a masturpiss. Now I'll have to go to the bank to open two more accounts where to receive this.

On seventeenth Nina came up with a great trick to amuse the girls. Since these days they alternate between playing Cinderella and Panzla (from american Rapunzel, from german rah-puhn-tzel), because they mostly watch those (the Netflix subscription is still on), and they also love cosplay, she took one of the yellow frotir (dunno translation, that's towel cloth) blankets and tied the narrow end around Linda's head. It held almost fifteen minutes until it snagged among the chair's wheels. In the cartoon it slides almost frictionless, in rl it gets stuck.

On nineteenth we held the party, the 44th. Probably the last one with photos, as it seems that we all had enough of same faces in same places. This time it was mostly the girls who were on the photos, and we weren't bad either, but then first it was my dear who wasn't satisfied with the looks, then Dragana also sided with her in her usual SMS comment when she got the photos the next day.

This time I barbecued. In the afternoon we went to Lidl, unbelievably alone, and loaded the cart full of meat (lots of air there, the boxes are oversized), wine and whatnot. Then I remembered that I didn't buy more charcoal last time - I took that one bag to the garden for the class party, and even wrote it down right here (but didn't remember to read). So I made one more round to get just the charcoal. We fired it up a tad earlier - by 16:30 the kindling was already aflame, when I came with the coal. The barbecue is permanently outside, so there's water in its thermometer now, and as it heated up the glass started clearing up at the edges, toward the center. The american market being the biggest, the outer scale on the thermometer is in the fucking fahrenheits, and I couldn't see the celsius at all. The dial also started getting stuck, so it wouldn't budge until the bimetal forced it with enough pressure, which means it kept jumping. Never saw that on a thermometer.

Then we waited for a couple of hours, and in that interval Lena called. Said she got a job offer from some british startup, with some minimal staff and no obligation to sit on too many meetings to chat up stuff with the team. And about half more money than now. It's not bad as she is now, but it's mentally burdensome, as the firm is in its expansion phase - they want to tripe this year, next again, then double for the next two years - which is a factor of 36 by my calculation - so they can hold enough of the market before anyone may pass them in a curve. She's some kind of product manager at that, i.e. she knows what they have and what's where, and it's now her job that the newbies get to know it well enough to work on it. So she has less and less time to work on what she came to do - to develop the app, to write code. And when she finds the time to write something, and submits it for junior peer review, they always find a line or two for which she didn't write a test. Well fuck that, I'll write the test... and what you write is as if leg written and it only matters that you have a test for everything, never mind the code being awful. On top of all that, they became a big protective shop for all of them persons with special identity needs (they already have four trannies and neutral gender persons, whatever that may be), and every sentence spoken is scrutinized for the next round of politically correctional action, for another set of meetings to raise the awareness on this or that previously unnoticed phenomenon. And so the work stops being fun.

Then I went to pick them up. To give them at least this one ride in the new car. Borko did actually sit in on my test ride, but that was before I bought it. I planned the path so I'd first pick Dragana in front of Lesnina, without taking any left turns out of a minor street or doing about face - still not quite at home maneuvering this in tight spaces. Despite my taking a slightly circuitous path, and having to wait at the light twice (the first time I just stepped on it and passed on time, it may be a diesel but it's a two liter beast), the six minutes I told her I'd take was just too much, I had to wait for her almost a minute. She almost got straight into the car, then stepped back, went to see it from the front, then got in. She likes it nicely*. Borko was waiting, curbside, in his street. Had to open the doors from inside, they couldn't get in. Seems to be the doors stay locked from the outside as long as the engine is on.

It almost sounds fishy. Whatever I buy, whatever I do, there has to be someone who doesn't like it, even if it's me who does that. This time everybody, literally everybody, loves the car. Incredible.

They were amazed that I took the right path around the overpass, no cabbie ever drove them that way. Well I don't like to turn left here, and there's a rain drain which sunk and I'd have to drive around it and if there's an incoming car from the other side, he's very likely to cut the curve and I'd have to either stop or drive over the drain, risking both right wheels. Besides, this route has the right-of-way over the other one :).

Otherwise, evening like all of them, except the girls turned it into a fashion show. Though, Sanda's dress was too wide so it had to be tightened with a clip. This is all from the wardrobe exchange with Vera. The twins adore her daughter.

Alphonse still didn't fix the bug, it only happens less frequently now, I stay logged into UA for a couple of weeks at a time. But when it happens, it still doesn't know how to log me back in automatically, not to mention preserving the session. So I just close the tab and remember to come back a week or two later.

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* the joke translates well. This is a straight answer to "how do you like it" - and "how" requires an adverb as an answer.

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Mentions: Alphonse D'Alchembert, butkice, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), Firriver Fertility (Firriver), frendz parti, gibanica, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Lesnina, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Mohandas Raj (Das), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), ruža, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), saxo, translation, UbiquAgora (UA), Vera Vraneš, in serbian