Days of idling flow... Correspodence with my folks.
Dad asks how is it now, without income. Well, here it is:
We have for a few months more, and Bush also wrote to us, i.e. we got the so-called „tax rebate“. Bush talked at large how he'll reduce the taxes once he gets in office, but instead the tax remained the same as it was, it's the tax return which now gets done in two parts. The 600 dollars that have arrived are really the advance payment of the return. The intention was to recycle that money faster, i.e. not to accumulate it in the hands of the government and then wait for february-april, but rather to release a part of it in the fall. We also got stuff in reserve, and play it safe with the groceries for quite a while now, so when something comes at a good price, we buy more of it. We still haven't touched any of the cans. Speaking of groceries, in the first months here we used to spend 600$ a month on them, until we learned the ropes on what where and when to buy. Okay, part of that was various kitchen needs that we bought once and then used them for as long as they lasted. Last winter in Kroger they were giving free tickets for don't remember which cartoon to anyone whose monthly bill exceeded 300$ - and we didn't qualify. For now, we refrain only from beer, olives and peanuts; we even still buy them little chocolates (Nestle's, of course, Hershey's have some left taste). In a couple of weeks, unless it turns out I can't get the unemployment benefit (for lacking that AIN), I should be getting 250$ a week. Which means I should find a job by november. Actually found one, in Michigan, but that was not enough.
Ah, yes, they just called from Lena's school, as they said they would call us when that trial month was near its end. Well, they report no problems, she's doing great. True, we did have a bit of a runaround wiht multiplication table, but no complaints came from the school on that, and we'll get her trained, no quarter. She finds it hard to concentrate for longer than a dozen minutes, she has to get up, pick this or that, pet the Mrvica, go to the toilet...
Dad wrote that he sees Čarga often at the vineyerd. Says „they come across as a bit strange. The garden she bought from Arpi, not he. They often start fighting each other, the kind which gets forgotten in five minutes in a normal marriage, they even talk separation and splitting the property, and sometimes behave like in first month of a marriage. They came by this morning, tried the first loza of 2001, milk and honey. She's retired; don't know since when, but if I'm not mistaken, it's on disability. He works as a professor in a high school, can't remember which one - agricultural or 13.. That's where he is since leaving the bank. When the affair at the bank was happening (you'd surely know that better than we do), he didn't immediately leave the bank. He quit the work relationship only when the investigation (disciplinary) was over and he was exonerated. Meanwhile he acqured this professorial position, where he still works.“ [it's not that I don't remember what did they try to set him up with, it's that I don't remember he ever worked at a bank]
Ford says the Zero's board is still holding meetings and attempting various things, and that's exactly where they lost the time, trying for the enth time to smooth the affairs with Dakota. Today they seem to have given up, and Houston meanwhile greenlighted the start of operation. Ford even has in mind his old neighbor customer, a guy who has some plant in South Africa, and someone should go there and do a few things. The likely candidates would be Željko and V. [fart in the lantern, nothing happened of that]
In other news, today we went to the bank to deposit that „tax rebate“ and to pay off the last of the loan for the car. Having understood what kind of scumbag operatio is the way they calculate interest, I saw to it to pay it off acceleratedly. Those 5000$ I was supposed to pay off in, I guess, three years or thereabouts, but since the interest is calculated and paid (hence added to the debt) at every change, then the initial payments dent the main very little. Which is why I went on paying it acceleratedly, and managed to have only about 400$ left at this point, excellent. Cleared that and stopped treating the bank for any interest.
Tonight I have a PTO meeting in both schools, and still don't know which one to attend :). I suppose I should go to Lena's, because at Nina's it's all clear more or less already, but on the other hand she's a senior now, and guesstimating the colleges lasts whole year. The enrollment and application deadlines are all over the place, some begin in december and some in may... a true madhouse. They have some test (general application test, voluntary) for which she's preparing. She passed it once already, but now she's doing it again to punch out a better score. Says that, despite having a shorter vocabulary than the aborigines, she still scores more :)
So I went to Lena's - would have gone to Nina's, had she said that I should. There was about ten of us with the teacher, was quite fun. The classroom is in one of the six or seven standalone portable cabins in the yard. These were added when they were running out of space. Officially they call them cottages, but every now and then during the meeting it would be mentioned as trailer, as in trailer park, which is really more appropriate. I've seen around here some of those poor peoples' housing, the kind one can split in half, load on a truck and move elsewhere - it requires only the hookups for water, power and sewer, done. This one doesn't even have sewer, they go to the building for toilet, just across the basketball court. There'll be a new school in the area next year, and part of the kids will move, and they'll dispose of them containers.
Lena is doing fine, the teacher is very satisfied, and when I said that two years ago she spoke not a word of english, she nearly fainted. Now, she says, she doesn't even have any accent.
On twonyfirst Go called, so we talked for a while until it crossed my mind that this phone has a speaker, so I turned it on, and then we talked with her collectively, and on her side she played yahtzee with Ricardo and Marla and perhaps one more, so the whole thing was hilarious. We kept at it for as long as the batteries in her phone lasted.