26-VII-2022.
Mostly nothing happening, as we don't go anywhere much, it's too hot. When the forecast promises rain, we get only a thin veil of smeared chemtrails on the sky, the temperature drops from 38 to 36 and we feel a bit better.
We presently have about a dozen cats - Džimi is now the matriarch, Johan died a month ago, Rundek, Zelena and Žuta are mostly absent by matriarch's order, come only for breakfast, and Siva is just moving from one place to another to sleep, she's too old - I actually thought she'd go within a week of Johan, but she recovered... to the point that she too had a couple of kittens, somewhere in the corner, and just forgot about them, they seem to have been so small that they didn't even stink when they decomposed. Then there are the five of april kittens (four by Zelena, one by Džimi) and now four Džimi's. The five are ready to go to Čankovo next trip. Siva even breastfed two of the five once.
Overyester we took Linda and Sanda to Čankovo. She picked two buckets of tomatoes again, anything that was near ripe. She found where the thieves enter, there's a place at the farther end of the fence where there's a gap below it, a child or a thinner person can easily slip under. I cleaned the grass around an old roll of chainlink wire, which I plan to take there and lay half on the ground, half leaned to the fence, then shovel some soil over the laid part. And then, if this doesn't stop them, roll barbed wire over that. I may lose one meter of land with that, but we're not using that stripe anyway, price is small, if that stops them.
The path beaten through the weeds on their side is clearly visible, as is on our side. They never bothered to cover any traces.
At some point the girls noticed my old nokla on the table. It still has buttons, some five dozen of them, so it was interesting and I had to show them tricks with it. First, how to display the time, large. Then we took a selfie. And then I showed them the tape recorder, aka dictaphone. The nice thing with the digital, in-RAM recording, is that there's no rewinding, as soon as you press stop it's ready to replay. Just like the accordion player who switched to guitar said, „guitar means a lot, no need to stretch it“ (it rhymes in serbian - „gitara mi znači, jer se ne razvlači“). They made some ten recordings before I convinced them that they had enough. It was sheer fun.
We talk with Go perhaps once in five days or sooner, but just an hour or two at a time. We aimed for sunday evening this time, when Stanley was there too, so we saw him. Not the kids, though, they were asleep. The skype connection is quirky as usual - for the first twenty minutes it's okay, then it becomes bottlenecked, so we turn off one or both of the cameras, so we can at least speak clearly. It used to work just fine, ten years ago. Never mind, in three weeks I'll have the new phone, install signal (app, I think russian) and then hit it. Stanley left a car window open one evening, and they stole from it a phone bill (!) and the keys to a different beemer, which was ready for sale. He's considering whether to carry a weapon at all times. At work (on the previous location; now he's back at the Hungarian, under different terms) he once had to just reach for it, and the guy who was crawling under the fence just did about face and crawled back the wa he came. This week there was an attempted shooting at a mall somewhere, the guy just pulled out two automatic rifles and perhaps fired a couple, when another guy mowed him down with 10 hits out of 15 bullets. The exemplary exercise on „why is it not good that the citizens are armed“ just proved why it is.
Some businesses are moving out - he told us about a high end repair shop, who have so many expensive customers' cars on ther lot and around it, that they can't keep up with the damage done to those cars - catalytic converters, pieces of outer trim get ripped out, or there's random vandalism. The cost is slowly pushing the business into the red. And there's a restaurant in LA (or SF?) which gets fined daily, by the city, for having graffitti on its walls. They pay the fine, paint the wall, next morning it's all over again, the graffiti are there again, there's a new fine. If the guy hasn't closed yet, he'll do so soon. And the city doesn't go for the perpetrators, though the footage clearly shows who they were, it fines the restaurant.
On the corner of our street, across from the corner where Zvezdana built the gray box with three apartments, there were a dozen trees, with nice shade. It's all been shaved off, trees cut overyester, roots pulled yesterday, someone will start to build something. Not a regular house, anyone would leave at least the sidewalk row for shade. I guess it will probably be another gray box with a two-pedalj strip of soil around it and fuck the shade.
The next house is a four apartment building, two facing our street and two the next. The tenants (owners?) used to park their cars under these trees, now there's only what lawn they have. One apartment has a garage, though, but in the last fifteen years I've rarely seen anyone use a garage for the car. Nowadays the cars don't rust. And the lawns in our street are rather narrow - even Zvezdana doesn't park at right angle to the road, but has paved most of her lawn and parks the small hybrid (registered in Timişoara ) and the large car (registered in Bucureşti, ergo leased, all leasing companies register there) almost parallel to the road.
I'm watching Babylon 5 slowly, just reached the season title episode last night. One episode every other evening, and even for that I have to close everything and sometimes even reboot the cimet and make sure it doesn't open in VLC, just ordinary media player is light enough. Also have to take care to have about 1G of free space on the puny 64G disk (card), it can get into straits with less. And still at times the picture stutters, so I pause it for a minute while it drains its buffers. But it looks good and sounds even better.
Today we wanted to go to Peskara, and everyone got ready and we got in the van, when I noticed the wind blowing huge cloud of dust from where the trees were taken out. Just as I told Nina not to take the beach ball, as it'd be blown away to the next village south, the wind got stronger. I hoped it will be like that time when we had our two hours and came back under a shower, but no, it got worse very fast - I drove five meters in reverse, to get on the road, and then we had a consensus to just not go at all. If we caused the rain, I'll be glad if we did. (didn't, next day neither)
On 28th we went to Čankovo again, she picked tomatoes and I plums, and then she made pekmez the same day, tomato juice the next. Ever since she started shredding the fruit with a stick mixer, it's so smooth, probably because the skin is in tiny pieces, and it spreads so neatly over pancakes. The one on the picture doesn't count, it's the shreds of the last of the batch, not properly rolled. Lena and Milan were supposed to come, but a big rain was forecast for saturday, finally, so sunday it will be.
As the visits to Byo came to a standstill, and the current method to lure lurkers (by posting links in my tagline, on both UA and burundi) isn't too effective, I decided, on twentyeighth, to finally email a link to Melanija. As she's on east coast, and waited until the evening to start reading, her hundred views registered in statcounter.prg on 29th. Then we exchanged a couple of emails. Not much of a literary critique, but more of who remembers what and how it really was. I replied on 30th, among other text
From these scribbleings of mine you could amend your autobiography, but then it wouldn't be auto.
See introduction, under „Sources“ - wouldn't be the first quoted email :).
This now becomes yet another painting of oneself in the corner, what do I write to a reader when I wrote everything there? And queued are a few other forms of recursion, meta text(ure), we talk about the text, because of the text, and* then this conversation becomes a part of the text, influences it... so until it twists unto itself.
* i wrote up to where the asterisk is when we had a blackout. I have an UPS so message wasn't lost, it's just that the monitors aren't on battery, so I blindly saved it and... here, an hour later, I continue. After two months' draught we finally get some rain, didn't even bind the dust, and we're already blacked out.
The big rain did come, but the downpour, loud as it was on the tin roof over the terrace, lasted just a few minutes. In the end, it just stabilized the dust for the day. The next day it was all dry again.
Mentions: Sources, burundi, Byo (Byo), cimet, Čankovo, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Melanija Tisarević, Milan Nastić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nokla, pedalj, pekmez, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Stanley Berger, statcounter.prg, UbiquAgora (UA), Zvezdana, in serbian