15-VII-2010.
Had lunch with my folks, while they two stayed at oma. Thanks to my mom's comments since the last time, in 2005, she is not staying under their roof, and frankly, I'm also waiting for the day when we'll restart our house. Not that there's any open hostility or loud snide remarks, but there's such an undercurrent that I fully approve of this arrangement.
During the day we went to our house to do more work - the blue room being done, she switched to the bathroom. We dined with my parents, then the girls went back to oma, on bikes, and I slept on the old couch again.
The next day I went downtown to pick a bank. Went for the Zipper (rajsferšlus, in serbian, which is very close to its real name), because they seemed small and relatively unknown, so I hoped they'd have to be diligent. Oh, the fuckup, first they told me that, if I wanted to exchange dollars or euros, they wouldn't recommend their own services, as the surcharge is not nice, it's better to take out the currency and walk 10m to the kiosk and exchange there, the rates are better. Well fuckit, you guys are insane. Worse, they told me that online banking works only with internet explorer (not any internet, m$ internet), because it's the only safe browser. If I didn't get a heart attack right there, I'll live a hundred years. But okay, I don't think other banks are any better...
And ah, yes, they mentioned the swift codes, there's a catch, as, ahem, just like any other bank in Serbia, they aren't directly connected, but through their correpondents (wow, what, they send you articles to publish?) abroad (i.e. in the EU) and while the regular swift code is six letters, their codes at these middleman banks have suffixes, like WW, XX, FX, FF, PP, BB, RR, 2x... Literally „last post office Ivanjica“, beyond that one whistles (v. house dictionary). But okay that too, if whole banking of Serbia works like that, who am I to complain.
Went to my folks, booted nezavisni (was it on Ubuntu already, maybe I plugged zmajček in?)... and visited the office briefly, on skype. Reporting that
Got the modem&router, will take it to the house in a few hours to try it out. should be capable of 6Mb/s down, 384Kb/s up. we'll see
From the photos for 16th I see that nezavisni worked in the new house while she was painting the terrace side wall into some lighter shade of purple, so not all the walls are white. Which she managed to finish the same day.
The router turned out to be unnecessary, as the modem contains one by itself. So later I returned it to CompuWiz and took a simple Epson flatbed scanner instead.
Don't know how we made coffee, there was nothing in the house that could heat water - the old student rešos were who knows where, the gas plate had no gas as we had the gas meter taken off, it was in the attic; the stove we gave, along with the old fridge and mirko, to the son of dad's vineyard neighbor, to fix them and sell them, and in return they borrowed 1000€ from dad and never intended to repay. Actually the neighbor kind of came to take a look to see what can be done about the darkness, but we got so severely pissed off by the way he came - straight through the garage, through the yard, to the terrace door, not even bothering to try to knock on the main entrance, as if entering a building site and not someone's house - that we thanked him for cooperation and never saw him again.
The next day she painted the furniture - the set from 1979 - the sides the same dark brown as it already was, and the doors not into the same grey-olive, but rather some mild creamy-pink, nice shade. The kitchen still stood (or hanged) as we left it. It worked, as unwieldy as it was before. The furniture was picked for a rightwards corner and now covered a leftwards one, and there's a stupid corner which just collects trash.
We dumped the old couches and some other furniture to the terrace, almost on day one, together with heaps of other stuff - record player, books, cassettes, cloth(es) and other jetsom. They'd gather less dust sitting there than inside while we work. The trashcan, which dad bought while we were away, is neatly parked in the middle of the big room and filled as we go (not the one on the picture, which I got in Hungary on 01-XI-1995., but a big green street model with wheels). The trashday is on fridays, could be more often.
On 18th she started painting floral pattern on the cupboard doors and drawers(... 16 words...). I found my old denim shorts, and even managed to squeeze into it. Would be more comfortable than this knee low I bought before the trip, but I managed to endure about two minutes in it, just enough for the ladies to have a good laugh.
Mentions: 01-XI-1995., CompuWiz, house dictionary, Majkrosoft (m$), mirko, nezavisni, oma, rešo, zmajček, in serbian