09-IX-2011.
Long chat in the morning, with David, Daniel, Das, Laura and Jan. Which is about half the Firriver now. About integrating a SMS message server, simple to implement, just insert records into their database. And it can handle emails as well, so Jan said „this is something we needed yesterday !!“. Feds would become a communication center.
From Laura, „Richard wants one report we wrote for SFBC“. That'll be for Hana to handle. More Belrap - and that collection engine is so full of comments, incredible. Seems to be I had to write a lot of them just to know where to find things, because they're so similar and cryptic - what's „charact_1c“ supposed to mean? And it seems that today I messed with CAAR and perhaps even SHET... so the list of changed code seems huge, though most probably I just touched a tiny bit in two or three huge pieces of code. Looks can deceive.
Um, yes, Richard will also need SHET... ouch. It'll have to be any day but tuesday or wednesday, we'll be holding a 40 day memorial to mom. People will come and we're the hosts, dad and I, so I'll be busy. So scheduled for friday 20:30 aka 11:30 pacific.
(... 71 word...)
For some reason I was downtown in the afternoon - and there I met Joška, who was, on his side, waiting for Škrba to appear. She was visiting oma... and I don't know how we heard the news, who called whom, but just so happened that I learned that Lena enrolled into the state university, visual arts, painting. Where they usually have one or two hundred candidates, and accept ten. Some guys we know (e.g. Slavko, Loba) spent three or four years trying again and again, and she got there just like that. On top of the list. Actually two other guys made the same near-max score on the qualifications, but she brought more points from high school. Painters are notoriously bad in high school. So I told the guys we're going to banatskakuća for dinner, our treat. Luckily, she was still there at oma's when I called, so she joined us. It was pretty much dark when we parted ways.
The next day we went to Čankovo to make more brandy. For some reason I didn't bring the Fujica and thus missed the imagery... Made a bunch of shots with nokla, though, like this fine example of the old man's idea of architecture. This is the support, mostly moral, for the pigpen roof. The whole roof is hanging on the side of the kotarka (the corn drying cage), which leans this way ever since. He dug in some serious iron pole, what with pieces of ceramic insulation - it was obviously carrying some cables in previous life - on the opposing side, and chained it to the kotarka for balance. It worked, in the sense that the construction didn't topple, but it's got some serious skew, it's not vertical at all on that end.
The pigpen walls are equally flimsy. The partition wall is solid concrete, but then it doesn't really connect to the front wall, the bricks in the corner don't overlap. In a couple of years, one section of the front wall will just fall, and the edge wall will stay standing... for a couple years more, when it will topple in its own direction.
The triangle between this edge wall and the roof, where a gable would be, was made of solid oaken planks, tied together with some tough nails... to a quite flimsy slat. And that was just hanging there, tied to the edge beam by a couple of lengths of simple telephone wire. Grumf was building things rock solid, compared to this.
For the 2nd batch of brandy the stovepipe somehow didn't catch, it took a long time to create a proper draft, and it billowed thick black smoke. I think there wasn't any plastic or primed wood in the fire, but can't be sure. It cleared after a while, but we had to endure some quarter of an hour until then.
I have no idea which brandy it was. Probably plum or apple. I didn't start tracking the works in Čankovo until 2014 or 15, so these first years are a kind of a blur, no idea what we did when except by pictures. But then every brandy coming out of the pipe looks the same, it's like water except that the liquid is more cohesive, doesn't make droplets so easily.
On eleventh we went again, she was distilling a hydrosol, don't remember which plant. The only shot of the kettle is when there's only water in it. Probably sage, by memory, we had a lot of it growing around the fence between front and middle yard.
Mentions: Alan Ford, banatskaKuća, CAAR, Čankovo, Daniel Berton, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Fujica, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Hana Burberry, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Joška Apro, Laura O'Hare, Mohandas Raj (Das), nokla, oma, Richard Fauntlerault, SFBC, SHET, Slavko Burić, Slobodan Šumić (Loba), in serbian