08-I-2011.
Feeling a start of a flu. A real one this time, maybe, not the American lite, which used to go away in a few hours, or by the end of the weekend*. Our classic flu lasts a week if treated, seven days if not. So far, just a swampy nose.
Reworked the skype2dbf, found proper message IDs and should have some decent refreshing routine - for as long as the skype4COM interface doesn't change. It's funny, though, that I'm writing in this sort-of-autobiography (i.e. Byo) how I'm working on it. Feels a kind of meta, or even recursive. Yep I got the skype messages in a table now, and a routine which will go ever since the first skype chat with late James almost four years ago, but it just doesn't show the chats at all.
Got many things working, wrote myself some easier navigation - all those "see also" and "linked by" lines in the two editboxes to the right of this one where I'm writing this now act as hyperlinks, so I can jump around at will. For now, cleaned up some duplicate entries.
Next day we went to Čankovo, in the afternoon, to see what did we buy. Both Lena and I took our cameras along. It seems we waited in the cab while she went to check out the fowl fair in the preceding village - they had all sorts of pigeons, poultry, parrots...
We made a solid walk through the house and yard this time, took shots of everything we saw. There's a lot of small stuff lying around, it's obvious that it was inhabited just a few months ago. This is the window on the third room, facing gonk. Spot the razor blade, near the middle photo on the strewn newspaper. Interestingly, the newspaper is in hungarian (the language of the other village), not romanian (as the old couple were).
The wire, which goes around the window, looks like a phone wire, but there's another one, higher up, just as thin. It kept leaking power somewhere until I cut it all off. The other one was for the bell, which was dismantled, it's here in the window, but its trafo remained and it seems it was using up some standby electricity, never too much, perhaps 1KWh or two a month. But it was annoying, there was always some consumption, even when we don't even come by for the whole winter.
To the left, outside the frame, there's the door to the cocklestove furnace (or whatever it's called), which was in this room, stoked from the gonk. The doorhandle was tied with a bundle of phone wire, even though it had a proper latch. Wish I knew why the wire. Guesswork: perhaps the latch handle would snag into the clothes when someone passes by, so make it harder to open it. Anytime this door would open, some soot would seep out and require cleaning (eleven years later, there's still more soot in there).
We had a poser for the pictures, a gray cat with golden yellow eyes. Exactly the ashen color, so we called her Sindikat (Cindy - from Cinderella, +Cat - cindycat i.e. syndicate). We never saw her again, but we got a series of good shots. Just with this batch I found out that on Fujica the raw format actually works, it was their factory app that was making those little splotches of white pixels here and there, which made it unusable. I did try that really soon (I'd say after returning from SF) and while it the shots were looking really well, these spots would spoil it. Now with Lightchamber app it works drastically better, I can drag so much more out of a shot. The first one where I tried that was this morning's shot of the puddles in our street, its lower end where the sewers were dug by machine hoes in 1996. and the cobbles were disturbed and never set right again. Our half of the street has no puddles, but no use - we have to pass over this lower end to get out.
We took a few bags of trash to dump at home into our trashcan. There's no trash service in the villages, which was never a problem - any garbage heap would decompose and become black fertile soil. Even dad was doing this in the vineyard, with all the clippings and mowed grass. But nowadays much of the garbage is plastic, so it won't work that way.
We'll keep taking garbage home for years - torn clothes, worn out footware, broken porcelain and glass, various little bottles of plant poisons... The latter we surely don't need and won't use, we won't spray any. Even if perfectly organić produce is impossible, we don't intend to poison what we'll eat. To taste the tomatoes with the taste of tomatoes again... I love tomatoes and fondly remember them. In those eleven years across, found such only twice, near Undersville.
----
* therefore, by the end of the end of the week.
Mentions: Byo (Byo), Čankovo, Fujica, gonk, James Olsen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Undersville, in serbian