The whole morning went in periodic chats with David, about the graphs in DSS... His remarks were mostly of cosmetic nature - for one, the understocked items shouldn't be bold (well why did I bother making them so if you didn't ask for it?), that the replenishments should be light green and not blue, „which will depend on the printer, though, but should be looking good in the end“,,, in some dozen episodes, all day.
Found out the averaga American is 7000$ in the red. Wish I could know how much of that is the interest and other bankerly inventions.
„And that will cause duplicate keys (which may be handy if you lock your keys in the car, but not so nice in a database situation).“ (this on UA)
No need to retell, now that dad has the cyrillic in his emails, it started going smoothly.
The weather is gone bonkers. It was Miholjdan [st Michael's day] with morning temperature of +2 dg. C. To make evil worse, the „nice“ weather is aided by košava, and yesterday and today it's around +7, decreasing during the day, and then joined by a pretend rain today, just enough to make things wet.
Here from tuesday til friday it was between the reluctant rain, can't decide whether to fall or stay in the air, over a shower, to some nondescript dewmaker. On saturday, when we visited the kids, a lovelly day, real Miholjdan - bit of blowing, the sky just scattered lightly with cloud, a phenomenal sunset etc.
Though in the last half of the previous month we lit up the gas furnace in the dining room for just once to warm us up, now we do it for three days in a row.
We today decided to try out the heating, finally. It turned out to be installed in the ceiling, works where it works, doesn't where it doesn't. Works in our room, Nina's room, the small bathroom downstairs... and that's all. Elsewhere we should either mess with thermostats, or shake up the ceilings. When we replaced the sagged piece of ceiling in Lena's room, we though it was some kind of reinforcment with plastic threads, but it seems to have been this heatin - so it doesn't wokr now, because we cut it out to flatten the ceiling.
We'll probably have to take a heat exchanger - we used those contraptions for heating in the last two apartments, and they're much more efficient than just letting current through wires. It's actually a bidirectional aircondition.
You say you sometimes practice an american dish. What can they have that's their own, autochtone, when America is comprised of many nation and each has its own.
They have their versions of brittish cakes, some four kinds altogether :). Some brownish cakes, patty sized just somewhat flatter, a pie (which is round, sized as a larger plate, the pan is lined with dough, and there's also ready pre-shaped crusts to buy, which then filled with the filling, and then baked in the oven), and cake. The cake is, eyeballedly, like ours, just a bit narrower and taller, something like a half cylinder hat or a bit wider. They phantasize a bit more with fillings, there are so many different variants of chocolate that they had to be named, and various grains to ice over with and other decorations are so many that they take a meter and a half of the gondola [aka shelf space]. Not to talk about the candles - there are those shaped as digits, so when someone needs a two digit number for years, it's two such candles, done.
And apart from cakes, they have their variants of some dishes - there's a tex-mex cuisine (texas variant of mexican, with just more beef), then pizza (which is just as round as the italian, made likewise of dough, tomato and cheese - which is where the similarity ends).
Interestingly, they know nothing of pohovano. There's „breaded“, which means with breadcrumbs, but to do that with just flour and eggs is unknown. Lena sometimes takes a kvašenica for a snack, and gets in trouble when trying to explain what is that. In the end she just says „yes, it's bread“.
It's really nice that your house faces east, so you have sun before, and the uther side after noon.
Now that we've taken something thicker for bed cover, and the angle of the sun in the morning changed somewhat, my alarm clock is out of tune. So far I was woken by sunshine on my face, and now the first rays which manage to poke through the magnolia hit somewhere beside me, so it happens that I oversleep in the morning.
We're amazed that Lena didn't join for the real soup the first day, all three of them used to be great soupers.
When you say soup to her, she means the mushroom one, the cream soup. I guess seeing how eager we two were, her mouth watered as well :)
Nina was a souper both last time and this year just like when she was a little girl. Mom doesn't knead the noodles much, except for a slava, Christmas, Easter. There's really good and quality pastry [to buy], even very thin ones for the soup that Fidelinka makes. There are other manufacureres, but those fall apart when boiled.
These noodles are all without eggs, and you can boil them as much as you want, they don't disperse. Who knows what they are doing to them. And they are really pretty thin and yellow, like domestic [make that homemade - same word in serbian].
In the end, it matters what the soup is from, the nodles there just so we don't slurp empty čorba.
Or that we go overboard with the noodles and eat šlingeraji with soup :): [v. house dictionary]
You didn't write what's [up] with your trip to Belgium. Did the Smurf [Jüzek] change the schedule or is this just delayed. We were glad that you'd be coming to Europe, and now silence.
Exactly that, silence. Not mentioned for two weeks already.
Gary probably already returned from Asia. You wrote he's preparing some larger project? Will a part of it be assigned to you as well?
Silence there as well. At least Paige finally paid what I did this summer, and from Berix I don't even hope. She paid a quarter back then, and let her keep the rest. She gave me a disk with fox version eight, which covers roughly another half, and I just wrote off the remaining hundred some dollars.
Mom saw off aunt Milica yesterday, who made a one day trip to her cousin in the village. She really more than helped. She underlined it that we send greetings to all of you.
Underlining back - that is, I supposed you sent her our best in our name while she was there.
Yesterday was our shopping day - we visited Burlington again (pet name Brljington [brlja being a muddy puddle or inkblot]) to reestablish our winter wardrobe. They aren't a posh shop, but are among the few cheaper places where you can still find wares of better quality. We didn't overdo the shopping - Nina got two jackets, I one shirt, but then we made a bunch of photos. Then moved to Target and found jeans for Go.
[this shot I just had to make simply because of this bright red - nobody else bothers to paint their entrance, and Target does at least that; inside it's all the same dull gray and beige like anywhere else, except the stuff they print]
I had a peripaethia [peripetija - almost a triper but without intent, just a long procedure with several steps, of unnecessary length and duration] with zmajček these days, the processor cooling fan wore out. Its bearing started scraping, made clattering noise, at night it sounded like someone snoring. The first one I found was too big and wouldn't fit, so I went back and replaced it with one that fits snugly. Then another fan, in the power supply, also went south, so had to replace that too - but found a nearer shop (and better supplied, [there's] nothing that [they] don't have), which is within bicycling distance. In the end all of it just refused to work - it powers on, touches itself to check whether it's alive, and in a couple of seconds decides that it isn't, turns off. I almost wanted to call Ricardo, and then remembered what he told me when I called him last time, so I did what he told me then, and now, knock on wood, it works :).
