12-X-2023.
We woke up in some sweat. We turned the heating on, to dry the house faster.
The whole day passed in throwing out the burned stuff from the kursalon, off the terrace into the dumpster. The larger stuff we simply threw, for the small the shovel did the work. It lasted whole day. I specially made a shot of her throwing the iron*, to finally catch that scene after all these years.
We still havent begun to put down the soot from the walls. She just begun to wash the jars, at least from the upper floors of the shelf where they blackened. Few actually boiled a bit and left the residue around, so three jars of pumpkin chutney were thrown away as well. She washed the windows in our bedroom as high as she could reach without a ladder, just to let in some light. The glasses have cracked and will have to be replaced soon.
I called majstor Mile to come, asses the state and tell us what to do, recommend other majstors... and he come with his worker, who immediately thanked us for building the stairs and next asked about Neša... he indeed remembers the kid. It was already dark, and our improvised light catches only the landing and the bedroom, I need to bring another extension from the garden. He lit the place with his phone. The verdict is that the most charred beam needs to be replaced, as well as the support arm between it and the wedding gown**, which then also leans on the wall under the gable, so it isn't losing support, that's how I built that wall and the gable. He directed us to the guy to do doors and windows.
To Radoslav I gave the old motor chainsaw, to fix it if he can and then we'll haggle. He wants to cut his walnut down, too close to terrace, roots may lift the concrete. Now we set a deal that we get his internet and the 2000 dinars I asked for the saw is now zero, need not pay. But he didn't know the password to his network, the sticker on the back of the router where the password was printed he peeled off and threw away, as he always does. Then I remembered that I can change his password, just need to plug a laptop straight into the router with a proper youteepee cable. That meant making nanovo work, and I didn't take it out of the backpack since september party. The windows on it is in who knows what condition.. but then I had a bootable linux mint installation on one fleška [flash drive, word I stole from some russian site and inserted it in local slang here, don't care whether it spreads, it's self-explanatory], so went on to check its disk... aha, there, it's a 750G, 120 of which is the see drive, rest is dee, sparsely populated. I gradually moved whatever I wanted from see to dee, took almost all day, and part of the next. The installation kept getting stuck on „removing duplicate files“...
In the evening we were so tired we couldn't sleep. At least we had a bath and... what to do in the evening when there's no internet, move to tutifruti. The shot glasses we used upstairs being all shards now, so we put to work the ones she bought in the banja. During the night Nina cleaned the fans and cooler in zmajček.
Thirteenth in the morning the guy with the truck came and took away the dumpster, price a trifle, 5400 dinars. Whole day we did more or less nothing, just went shopping. And yes, in the morning I did all 280 photos that I knit these days, and kept trying to install the linux on nanovo.
In Lidl I found those pressing pliers for wiring, not the kind I need, I need the krimping pliers (whatever that meant). Also found a jacket, same kind as the one I wear for last four winters and which got worn out and pockmarked with tiny holes left from tiny cigarette embers. It's even in some color and just as close to the body. On the way back we swung by the paint shop, to buy masks, there'll be a lot of dust and soot in the air, and the flex tube for the syphon in the garage, because what I improvised from the old bicycle tyre got old and fell off. The montage didn't work at first, this is the turkish lavabo [washbasin] with a thicker body, so I had to combine the long screw and one gasket from the old one with the rest from the new one.
After lunch the fatigue from yesterday caught up with me, so I slept the whole hour upstairs, completely confused, I guess I was figuring out all the nonsense that was criscrossing my mind while I was in turbo mode, and proved out to myself which one of them was wrong for which reasons, where the bug was and what was the error. Then it took me half an hour to clear up my head after waking up. But then, by the time we took off to the garden, I was fully awake. We called at some windower in the area of her old elementary school, and scheduled measuring for monday. „And why do you insist on aluminium?“ „Because I've just seen lots of molten plastic.“ „And aluminium, what, stays? It bends, and all the rubber gaskets that were machined into their grooves just pop out, nobody alive puts them back. Aluminium is for grocery doors. And where plastic is 400€, the same unit in metal costs 700€“. Convinced me in two words.
In Čankovo we decided to do nothing, being tired from the previous two days. Not just the labor we did, but from turning on the heating to dry the house, which kicked us far off balance. And the weather was strangely hot, even the lower branches of the big cherry (not the cherries) went full blossom. I pumped up some water to make coffee, but whoopsy daisy, can't do, there's no coffee. They stole both the jar (second already) and a spare pack of 200g. Now this really busted our mood. Have the half of upstaird burn with two cubic[ meter]s of stuff, living in some semiemergency mode for three days in a row and it's somehow all okay, we're not cunting out, but go to garden to relax and have coffee, and then see the coffee was stolen, now there's a reason to becunt.
In the evening I fried a somewhat older variant of linux mint to the fleška, and coolly installed it on nanovo. Everything just the way I imagined it - it kept everything that was on the dee disk, a beauty. Though, none of these are any original files, they are all copies of various things from zmajček, but still, finding them and copying again would be a few days' work. Just like Raja asked whether I lost any data on cimet - „well no, not really, maybe couple of lines of text, everything on it was a copy from here... it's the playlists. There were about 6000 songs on it, out of some 23000 that reside on zmajček, now remembering which 6000 were they, that would be impossible to know now“.
Saturday, 14th. Nina, Linda and Sanda sleep on one couch in the big room, Violet on the other, only Raja is in his bedroom. Because something stinks in the yellow room. Sure, water came in, it dripped on the cupboards... so we went on checking what's the stink, because she wasn't able to determine the source. We first pulled out the bottom drawers from each cupboard, nope, floor dry beneath them, just dust. The slit between the sidetiles and the floor was grouted few years ago, the water couldn't have reached the stone wool under the floorboard, and didn't puddle on the floor. So let's see the carpet. Although both Nina and I shoved our noses into its pile and felt nothing suspicious, when we took it out and spread the moist part over the yard bench, we felt the stink, from the underside. There it had the combination of dust, water and who knows what else, which caused the stench. I explained to Raja that the plan is to let it dry, then vacuum it thoroughly, then wash it. Ten minutes later she comes and tells me the plan would be to let it dry... These weeks often a day comes when we have a dozen „you took my say“s (v. house dictionary) in a day.
For lunch we packed ourselves into the van and went to Elmont. Lena and Milan were a bit late, irrelevant. We got a table in one of the gazebos, and the waiter was a spitten Žan Reno (Jean Renaux, I guess). For the kids we ordered right away, they don't have the patience. Linda wanted pancakes, and what she got was a feast in itself, with a ladleful of cherry (not cherry) pekmez. We two had ragoux čorba and a plank (a real plank with a gravy groove around, with about six kinds of roast), Lena had a wiener [steak, not the sausage... you Amers confuse matters], and Milan, of course, had a karađorđeva, after the waiter said it was properly filled with kajmak. Turned to be kačkavalj (caccio cavale) cheese instead. He didn't like it, but then that was the only fault in the whole show. And it's hard to find a place where they won't play any tricks with karađorđeva.
Picked this shot just to show the amount of meat, allegedly for two persons - we had one more dinner and two lunches out of the packed leftovers. Also, there's a karafindl in the background, seemingly ordinary restaurant issue, but actually weird, carres three bottles (oil, vinegar and... what?) plus a cup with toothpicks, and shakers for salt and pepper - the latter being just right, and I did encounter many bad ones in my years.
Then we all went home, and we took them upstairs for a tour of the soot museum.
In the evening we made noodles, which we didn't do in many a week. A small batch, just six eggs, just to have some at hand for soup in the upcoming couple of weeks. Sanda and Linda weren't too much in the way, and we had to explain every bit of it to them. And before sleeping we entertained ourselves the poor man's way, without alcohol. For a change.
Sunday, fall came. Suddenly it's cold, a november like rain. We took the carpet into the garage. In the basement she picked the ready leaves of last week's crop of tobacco, which she left there to yellow, and hung it to dry. I did small errands - made another batch of window washing liquid, filled up in both vehicles, took the vacuum cleaner (the water one, brought it from garden yesterday) upstairs and vacuumed from the salon all the dust that it could find. Called Jeptel to come replace the molten equipment... which they'll be able to plug into the extra cords I gathered from garden and terrace, all of them I made myself). Tried a few techniques of scraping the soot from the walls - the sticker unsticking tool, the pocket tool left from our late son-in-law, and the ordinary spatula. The scrubbing and wire brushes also work, but the result is spotty and they raise a lot of dust. The scrapers do too, but at much lower speeds, the blades don't launch it, it just falls straigt down.
We hung the salon door, and she stapled a nylon foil over the broken glass. They can't be closed, the rubber gaskets are askew and hard now, so we rather improvised a bolt from a piece of wire and one screw. Scraped the part where the Jeptel guys need to do their work.
And now slowly on.
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* „to throw the [ironing] iron“ is to puke, in slang.
** our carpenters have specific names for each of the beams, and venac (wreathe) used to be synonymous with a crown, and at weddings the words are used interchangeably; venčanje is thus a wedding, but the king Stefan Prvovenčani - the first-wreathed actually means first-crowned; and venčanica, the name of the beam which encircles the construction, also means a wedding gown
Mentions: cimet, Čankovo, čorba, Elmont, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), kajmak, karafindl, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), majstor, majstor Mile, Milan Nastić, nanovo, Nenad Berger (Neša), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pekmez, Radoslav Pajkov, Ryu (Raja), Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Violet, zmajček, in serbian