04-IV-2023.

Yesterday, with girls downtown. Raja needed underpants, the twins needed light jackets. My task was to buy tickets for the concert of tokyo symphonic orchestra (no, they won't be playing Tarkus, but „anime symphony“), which I accomplished in two turns - they said cash only, so I had to visit the serekeš first, to bring some. She bought a jacket for Sanda, but nowadays even the Chineses operate on minimal stock economy, so they didn't have two sames. Walked to their other shop and found a sufficiently same one for Linda.

Then it turned that the underpants for Raja were too tight, so she and I went downtown again to get substitutes. Visited, finally, the old house again - well, the weeds are finally eradicated, grass only. Knee high, though, but mowing it will be easier. The apples almost blossom. The thick wad of bills was all wet, among the platan leaves. The one for real estate tax was again unreadable, all eaten by the snails.

The house on the corner by the railway, the one on which once the flat roof of the shop across fell when a storm lifted it, was always creamy yellow, as in šne nokle*. It's now graphite gray. Back to stalinism we go, it seems.

Found how to process the shots from the phone in RawTherapee. There's a problem with the current kernel in its linux, some fix from the previous two wasn't brought over, so the shots come out quite green to cyan. Now with this processing the results... may be interesting. It looks like a genre for itself, like polaroid or lomography.

Thursday dawned with snow. Well fuckit. The apricot blossoming is almost over. It stretched to more than three weeks - usually it's ten days - and there's still a few flowers open. And the cherries and the cherry opened on friday.

We'll see, but this isn't good.

...

Four days later, it does look good. In the night of 5th to 6th, I checked the temperature online every couple of hours, and it never went below 3°. She checked the thermometer on the terrace in the morning, 3° there too. The blossoms on both the cherries and the cherries look good. In a few days we'll see if we can spot tiny apricots. Maybe they're there already, but I keep forgetting to bring my reading spectacles when going out for a smoke. Now I went out with a binocular, and it... kind of seems possible, the bases of blossoms which still haven't falen off seem a bit thicker.

Ninth, first egg from the new hens. Met Adža in Lidl. She didn't recognize him, as he got a lot rounder. But I did, he's not much different from what he was in 2010. Then he was a lot different from 1977.

Twelfth, all day in Čankovo. Got a bucket of ripe manure from the heap along the way, to soak the blackberry saplings (thornless!) before planting them, two more buckets on the way back, for the rest of them that she plans to plant around the yard. And these should be a sort of fence-by-the-fence, with a second row of poles on the inside of them, so they'd be in some sort of a corridor, and then we can put razor wire on top - the neighbors have again opened the hole under the farthest piece of fence. There are traces of a dog going that way, but this time we also saw a piece of okiten fitting that's exactly the color we had last year and then it got stolen, plus the exact kind of drip tube. I actually made a shot.

I mowed all along the fence. First I replaced the transmission head on the švorceniger, that transfers the rotation in the shaft to the rotation of the disco saw. Last year I was a bit overzealous with the 1,4KW engine when I was cutting some piece of wile accacia, and managed to damage the cogwheels - they're probably the same model as for weaker motors, so they were the weak spot.

We also cut a couple of accacias that were growing by the fence, and most of the elderberry, at least the part that was growing on our side, so I piled up the branches to cover the hole again.

Everything's in blossom, the year looks promising, despite having had snow just a week ago.

Later in the evening we hit the papazjanija (mishmash, nondescript gruel of all kinds of ingredients - our name for tutifruti in which we added old pekmez), to the point that in the end I tipped my shotglass and it smashed on the concrete floor. It was all brown on the inside from the summer savory tincture, and I've long ago concluded that washing it is not in order, but rather replacing it once every year or two. Perhaps we still have another one same as that.

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* šne nokle - snow dumplings, in hungarian „madár tej“, bird milk, is foam of eggwhites cooked in milk with yolks, all with sugar


Mentions: Čankovo, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), pekmez, Ryu (Raja), Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), serekeš, Stanimir Hadžić (Adža), švorceniger, in serbian