On wednesday (2nd) took a bike to downtown, to Mongol's shop, to print the passport photos for Nina, Raja and Violet. The twins' passports expire in april, so by that time it's either them all going home, or a second trip to the embassy. Turns out Mongol now owns only the second shop, in the street behind (which was closed when I checked it) and this one's owner, well, recognized me. He attended that computing course I held in Dom back in 1984. Said he was into computers first, then in 1991 he ran the first local TV here. Same story back then, he was into tech and his partners into money, hosed him well. Then in 1999 he made another local TV station, which I remember seeing briefly... and then we were bombed and the advertising customers ran out of money... if it were a sack full of cunts he'd pull out a dick. So then... eh, girl, look, switch this from millimeters to inches and just enter 2 and send to print. And don't crop the paper, your scissor is 50x50mm, and if Amers say 2" it has to be 50,8mm square, you never know into what kind of fool you may run, 50,8mm as Jefferson rounded it to, there's no logic in it and we better not count on any logic. I tried to dump the 200 dinars banknote with a corner missing, and the girl said no, can't take that, we submit our daily cash into a serekeš and the machine just spits out such banknotes and then it's do it all over again.
Outside I met Joška and we sat for a smoke break (he doesn't smoke now, doesn't matter). Another guy came by, also an old (and repeated) club member, and I just had to check (though they do look alike but all the same), yes, that's his sister who worked with me that one semester in 1980 and his dad retired from MPSŠC in 1982 when I inherited his work on the class schedule.
On friday went to the little shop to buy another crate of apples, may the kids be alive and healthy for liking apples, and 5kg of carrots. Being just nearby, decided to take Joda to a carwash, didn't wash it since, I'd say, last inspection, kept assuming the rain would. And there I remembered how their machine takes the banknotes, so I inserted that bad 200 dinars, and it recognized it and spat out two chits even while that faulty corner was still outside. There, one needs to know the machine's logic, one never knows when it may come handy.
It was her birthday that day, so we celebrated it with what tutifruti was still in the bottle and the quince left from Divčibare. Still had some for the next evening.
We set it with Lena to go to zanatlija on sunday for a big lunch. Then in the afternoon Boba called to belatedly congratulate his aunt. He meant to do it on time, but Milena and he were getting the apartment ready all day, and when they were done, it was today already. This means the house was sold (43000€) and the former madam is paid off, peace now. Added them to the lunch.
The lunch was great, we got there separately in 15 minutes, even with Nina sticking to her tradition to do her hair and whatnot when we're already around the van and the kids are getting inpatient. Just when I thought she'd be done, I heard the blowdryer. Well it's still okay, we were never late for anything. And it was all fine, everyone pretty and hungry, then sated later, but I have no idea what was said. She picked the farther end of the table, among the kids... and couldn't hear a thing, talk was impossible. Music. In the other half of the room someone celebrates, the tamburaši* also had an accordion, they hit the pedal to the metal... Asked the waiter to move us to the yard, I see it has a wall and a door now. No can do, it belongs to the owner's son and his wife, and it's still being decorated. Then I saw guys with paint buckets there. So we tolerated this until the band took a break, ah no, it just got worse. They played turbo boom bang crash from the PA, and the big sound box was exactly over Raja's head. Can the volume be turned down a bit? Can not.
I limited the tip to just 400 dinars, never mind, it's the last.
When we returned, I winterized the van - unhooked a terminal, so the receiver for the key fob won't be consuming power over the winter. And who knows, I may actually drive it sometimes.
In the evening convocated Borko and Dragana for monday. Of course, she had to mock me, „so the phone does work sometimes?“. „Yes, by some miracle I received a couple of calls and four messages today, knock on wood“.
Today I noticed that I didn't get any emails for the last ten days, not even spam, so looked up where's the console in Tandrtica (Thunderbird). Found that it has some file where it keeps track of someting, which is now unreadable, which is a big deal - but not if the file is missing, it can create new one anytime. But couldn't delete it, so I made a new profile on a different disk, and moved only the emails, address book and filters from the old one. There was so much junk in the old profile, whoa... every add on, either external or part of once version, left its set of files or a subdirectory.
So I finally replied to Škrba about the article I wrote for suština (shot of the rear yard entrance to the electro school, made on 25-V-2018.) and scheduled it to be published in 2028. Told him to publish it whenever he feels like, there'll be more of it. What I didn't tell him is why he and not I, well he didn't ask, and better so. Just put it on at some point. When he asked us, back then in april, to publish nothing for a week to keep Boća's article on top, I took it seriously. And not just to keep it on top, keep it on front page, which is last eight articles. Because its both illustrations contain some christianistic inscenation, which is fine by me, they take any public space whenever they want, no objections and I won't try to push them out, I'll just drop in from time to time to see whether the coast is clear. It's on the bottom now, next article would push it off the page, well, I won't do the pushing.
The 85th frendz parti went well, she made pogačice with čvarci (the new metal rolling pin from Lidl, good) and boiled two hocks, properly salty and slightly smoked this time (for a while they weren't salted enough, as Mrkšić was trying to preserve the water and sell it at the price of meat - everyone loves to sell water). Dragana said „what will I do now, hocks were my plan for next time...“. For nibbling, she meant to take čvarci, but then they were more expensive then best cuts of beef - seeing how the folks here like them and consider them a delicacy, their price skyrocketed over the last three years. They are simply a leftover from melting the lard, and cost almost nothing for the last couple of centuries.
I meant to serve the last of cherry, but there was barely half a liter of it left, so I took hare trišnja (cherry+cherry) instead, of which now we have also less than half a liter left. Besides the empty chatter, there were two special moments in the conversation. One was about the movies, how we grew up watching Fellini, Altman, Bergman, Hitchcock and them french guys, and now there are no such movies to see. Well, there's no studio which would finance such guys today, that's why they staged that intentional disasters with Cimino's „Heaven's gate“, lured them into making a great movie which would flop at the box office, and they now had a cause to replace such guys with, in turn, the guys who came from TV, from TV ads, from music videos, from comics and now you have guys who came from and grew up on video games. While, OTOH, the cut scenes in longer games are now movies unto themselves, you could quite cut out the gameplay and be left with a real movie. Which already happened, there was a movie of Final Fantasy (Nina's contribution to the debate). And also now they're off TV and don't have to care to insert a pee break every six minutes for ads, or to fit the story into one hour slot or whatever, they're making the series for streaming. So there's already one with episodes of any length between 20 and 120 minutes. The slot is gone, it plays on demand.
The other moment was when Borko was retelling how Đoković lost it - when he was ahead, and had a perfect ball which he just needed to pass over the net to score and pretty much defeat the other guy, ... he hit it over and out. The ellipsis in this sentence took at least two long minutes, during which he reiterated some of the introduction, repeated the current score, emphasized some of circumstances, stretched the time until the bell.
Sanda and Linda pretty much arrested Dragana („the girl“), sitting in her lap for half an hour. Not an easy feat anymore, one is 15 and the other 14kg. She didn't complain about her ankle, but I think she had a hard time.
On friday (11th) we talked with Lena. She had three job interviews, all in the 92-100K€ gross annual, and just couldn't decide. Then a fourth one walks in from California and offers 150K$, thus solving her problem. The dollar is about the same as euro nowadays (and both currencies are churned ceaselessly, the consensual economy has volume up to 11). It so happened that her technical with the fourth came before the one with the third, and there she had to solve a problem, which she did to their general satisfaction, but then discussed it with Milan and he came up with a more elegant solution or two. Then next, in the interview with the third, the exact same problem was set, and now she not only had a solution, she had two or more, and readily discussed the pros and cons of each. They were floored. „It made me look like an expert for exactly what they need“. „Well now you actually are“. What floored the examiner in the fourth was that she shared her screen to show him what she did, I think that graduation work, the game. „I've had more than twenty of these interviews, and this is the only time when the candidate shared their screen to actually show me something“.
And their majstors had a disaster at another location, so went there to fix it asap, and the trouble was compunded by them being seemingly just one day away from finishing, so Lena and Milan paid them. Never a good move... They were even offered money back, but no, just get this finished.
On saturday I finally started working on something I tried already but gave up when I screwed and deleted what I did - a mrz (v. house dictionary) player in Python. I already had downloaded something to start from, which would probably work, but I need more. Not just an app to play the files I give it, but to maintain the whole library with several playlists. Ever since Napster i accumulated some 29000 titles (with ocassional cleanup it may dwindle to 26000), which is not for faint-of-heart apps. There's a lot of work ahead of me, will have fun all winter. Which is delayed until further, the weather is just nice, as if it were october. The neighborhood reappeared only on monday, when the last of the leaves fell.
In the afternoon I took the girls (Nina, Violet, Sanda, Linda - Raja still recovering from that quarter flu, baba stayed with him) to a rođendaonica at the other end of town, where Vera made a birthday party for her daughter. The place is some american style shopping mall, initially was named something jewish, now it's something english, just out of town at exit to Novi. Not bad enough, but I really never needed anything from there that I couldn't find on this side of town, so never had a reason to take the trip. I made a lot of shots, talked with folks - kids' parents - and the kids were all sweet, a beauty. Looking at all these faces, all of the kids and waitresses and hostesses... genetics, fuckit, I keep seeing the reincarnations of various faces from 40 or 60 years ago. Of course, never completely, there are no true doppelgängers, but many of them are just close enough to remind me of faces long unseen.
The kids had lots of fun, all games and play. I even had a piece of cake, so then had to wait until half nine to try to eat, barely managed to. She tried out the new brzožder by the community [center], got the burgers (not pljeskavice, that's with chopped onions in the mix), and while Raja cleaned his, Violet took two bites. I ate more than half of her leftovers, couldn't do more.
Seems we're down to two cats - Džimi (Jimi) and Rundek (the grandgrandchildren of the dynasty founder), and three kitten - Mimi (a tomcat from may, actually their brother-by-mom), and Dženifer and Amelija, the august kittens (by Džimi). The old Siva (Gray) didn't eat for two days, just came to observe the meals, and stopped coming today. She found it a week later in the basement, half rotten.
On sunday evening I was dežurni by the mobile, taking care that it doesn't suspend, and managed to catch Dragana's call (no ring, though), as she announced the next sitting. On the forum I got instructions on where to look, what to read, what to try, but I'm somehow reluctant to wade into it, it's unwieldy - if there's something to edit, the editor is clumsy with the palpable keyboard, and if I approach it from zmajček, the graphical editor won't launch. My option is the vim editor, which is a horror, it's so 35 years ago. So if I really want to edit something, my option is to boot into Jumpdrive, edit from zmajček as its disk is then mounted on local filesystem, then boot the phone back into Manjaro to try it out... which means one trial and failure cycle takes a few minutes. Takes more patience than I'd have these days.
Few hours later we talked with Go and Stanley. Saw Neša and Anita after quite a while. They're so sweet and merry, to granddad's delight. Stanley will have to find a new workplace soon - not new job, he's a solo player, but a physical place. His kind of partner, the Hungarian, is co-renting a repair shop with some Koreans, and they want to expand to the whole shop, and this partner has agreed to move his business elsewhere. Maybe to a different city. On the apartment front, their negotiations with the lady are stalled, they paid the same again. Her son got it into his head that they should engage a rental management agency, which would take 12% and manage payments only, specially if it's the new tenants, when they make the most. Doesn't matter that the apartment owner is losing on every tenant switch - the place needs cleanup, few fixes and new paint and makes no money for a couple of months - they don't care.
On monday, well, a whodathunk. Someone on UA asked for help, and I chimed in, and later he said he found a way to do the same from the PEM window. Sure, I said, that was always an option, but finding what you need in there is cumbersome, the window's font is too small nowadays, which is why I suggested this way. And then Kristin jumps in and says that the font is adjustable there, told me how. And yep it worked. I suffered the small fonts for almost twenty years. Really, who'd a thunk.
In the evening, at Dragana's, the 86th, all regular, drank, ate, switched to wine/beer. We decided to ease up on inspiration front, it's getting hard to remember who got what, so the 2018 tutifruti we brought this time will also reach him next time.
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* local variety of a string band - tambour in two to four sizes, and a double bass, traditional around here for the last couple of centuries. Also in croatian flatlands, partly with the same songs, just with minor keys in some places - I know the difference but it's not easy to spot