04-I-2024.
On 2nd Jan congratulated me with the new year, in that group chat where he, Kees, Nina and I are... ouch, yes, over there the 2nd is a workday, not like here. Counting on him being mostly idle the first workhours of the year, I called him and we chatted for quite a while. I even talked a bit of russian with his new colleague. She isn't quite new, though, she replaced Inge soon after she left. Kees stays in Ireland until eleventh.
So what's new... well, things mostly went back to the old ways. Ralph is ciao, not in Firriver anymore, Briyesh is readying for retirement, David is rarely heard from, it's now normal that two-three months they don't say a word to each other, Das stabilized his team at about twenty people, for a couple of years no new faces and nobody left either, Nick turned out to be the main man, his day's work would take two other guys three days, Suez has gotten weird, nobody knows what's up with him, perhaps familial problems. There's no more command structure, the things slide by inertia and more or less, as far as he's concerned, the good old horizontal organization and democracy are back, as they were six years ago.
On third we finally screwed in the handlebar/banister (not barrister, I got confused many times), and all of a sudden the whole lobby and the staircase looked somehow different.
Today Sanda lost second tooth, ace bottom right. Tried to jumpstart the van. I was late again with unhooking the cable from the battery, and the little radio which listens to the key fob managed to drain it in two months. Jumpstarting didn't work, I guess it can't have both batteries connected at the same time, the clamp on the plus loses connection when open. But then I dropped the black cable from the terrace, hooked up the charger and left it overnight.
On burundi, someone unearthed a quote by Žika Milenković of Babe („grannies“, the band), where he said he knew some guy from back in the day when they did rastibuđilizovane klejbezable... and then I slapped my forehead - dang, we knew Žika from even back then (21-V-1977.)... And then various tiles started falling into place, I finally understood why did Žika fit us so well - for one it's not just that „Loša navika“ (bad habit) is our song for drunk merriment, we sang it many times, it's that Lena told us of a concert few years ago when a couple thousand people sang it on the square, all happy and in good mood.
And then it dawned on me that in all of this writing I haven't mentioned klejbezable. Must fix that right away, which I did on 5th. At exactly 13:00 I connected van's cable back to the battery, so the clock in it would finally show correct time. It started on first try, and I drove a round, perhaps 2km, just to make sure it gets enough juice. Ready for anything now.
Linda had one of her crying fits, tears and all, with well practiced lilt in her voice, mouth bent, responding to anything with just getting louder. It takes her just two minutes to push the phase into „and now I don't want it even how I want it“, blaming us all for not having guessed what was it that she wanted when she started. Probably something on the tablet - whether it's the disobedient game not doing what she wanted, or asking for money, or her video flipped to next and won't flip back... well, just about anything can trigger her. And she went on for half an hour, starting at middle of our lunch. To avoid the customary scene (where I try to raise some noise to make her understand that she's annoying everybody, which makes me blamed for all of it, worst man in the room), I went upstairs and took a nap. I think the screaming lasted for about half an hour. It's become frequent these months. The suggestion to, if the van can be started, go downtown in the evening for a walk, I forgot.
In the evening she spoke with Magi on skype, as scheduled the day before. Said she had to buy a car, because for most of the stuff she needs to go to the city, about 7km. She has a licence but little experience, so she usually takes a neighbor to watch over her and tell her if she did anything wrong. She said she's got half a dozen such neigbors, all widows or divorced. She managed to get husband's retirement, and needs a few more years of work to get her own too. Walks the pooch. She visited mom last fall, but for just three days and they both got ill at the time, so she didn't visit anybody.
Lena suggested to take us, some time in march, to Stockholm to a Mike Oldfield concert. The option of both was the first off the table, she immediately said she won't (... 17 words...), and I was also reluctant. In a couple of days I understood that concerts don't attract me anymore, that the couple of hours of joy requre days of preparation, and on top of that Oldfield has given up the complexity after the first album, and went into making huge structures of simple parts, sounding great but lacking the power. Furthermore, I don't feel like setting foot in the old western Europe ever again. For a hundred reasons. I'd be a second class citizen, wrong color of passport gets you in the slower queue at the border (though Lena said the slower column actually ends faster nowadays, there's too many of them in the fast one). I'd be persona non grata as a smoker and for a dozen other reasons, what need have I for that. We proposed, instead, that we better go with them to the coast in the summer, may they find us a place to spend a few nights and then we can move on to see Lajna (who, as if to spite me, didn't appear on skype since september).
In the evening I also called Joksa's brother-in-law, he's got a pickup truck and a small backhoe loader, to take away the debris from the front lawn before the snow falls, it's announced for monday, but he said he was busy and the snow may be nearly nothing, let's speak on monday, he's got a daća tomorrow and then there's that christmas, so when all that passes.
On sixth, finished washing the tiles in the bathroom, the last traces of gypsum and grout. We definitively gave up on all other network searches, everybody is shitting you and shoving you politically vetted or at least commercial content, with the Gugao leading the march, but the others ain't any better. As per Nina's recommendations, we switch to Yandex (Яндекс), she said it's what Gugao used to be at first, gives you what you ask for and not what it thinks will bring your attention to advertisements.
And Linda lost a tooth too. Hers also ended in a kinder egg yolk, and the picture will look great. And the tooth fairy brought her 2000 dinars.
Tried to send a message to Lajna, then also to call her, and got zilch. The next day I looked up the country code for Croatia and, ah, yes, it's not 384 but rather 385. Corrected it, sent another, one more in latin script, doesn't poke. Called her, got her right away, but she didn't get who's that calling, as soon as she saw a +381 number she immediately went into what is this foreign country number calling me for... and hung up. But now that I knew she had the phone in her hand, sent her another message and she finally appeared on skype. And we tried the video, a friend of her was there and fumbled around until the got the sound settings right and I could hear her. Then we switched to telegram, and talked for some fifteen minutes. There I explained we mean to swing by Istra this year, to salt our pants a bit, as we didn't in quite a while. Though, we ran out of text really soon. There was trouble with my sound coming to her choppy, artoo deetoo, hears half a sentence and the other half not and such shit. Just like it happens to us when we talk with Go, when we hear her badly most of the time.
Which happened just lie that in the evening, though much less than before. The video was slowed down, though, but we're used to that already, it's delayed up to a minute. Talked at large to 0:30. They plan to visit, finally, come spring. Stanley told of his experience when he went to pick some special beemer, basically a high class rare clunker, limited series with a leaking tranny... and somehow he drove it to a gas station, then walked two miles back to get his car, then paid some homeless guy 9$ to drive this clunker to a safer place then Tacoma where he bought it, some larger repair shop with lots of parking in front, where the car wouldn't be in danger of being towed away or broken into either („if I left a gold ingot on the seat, nothing would happen, if I left 20$ I'd find a brick and glass shards“). Then treated him dinner and a drink and got his story - he used to have a jewelry store but got hooked up on crystal meth, now his son is a drug addict and he kicked him out of the house to sell it and they're both homeless. Says the whole experience, this dive into the nether regions of Seattle life, cost him less than 20$, far cheaper than taking a cab. A cab would cost 20$ just to the airport, which is bare 4 miles from their end of town.
Eighth.
Imported the old messages from nokla into Calc (LibreOffice) and tried to bind them with the phone directory, which I planned for more than a year... and nope, no go. Didn't feel like debugging, but rather populated that column by hand, peeking into phone numbers. Missing the period between august 2012 and beginning of 2015 - well, a little fuckit.
Nina finally talked with those usurers, and it mostly seems they need a fresh look at things, because they all already know each other too well and think they did the app right and neat, but don't know whether it's just their own feeling or is it really good. There are two more candidates, will get back to her when they talk with them too. The money isn't much, fiftysome, but the whole thing sounds good. They mostly closed their little shops, as people keep wanting to handle their money online, so perhaps a dozen are still operating. When asked how did they sound, she said „well just like neighbors, it's Virginia Beach“.
Chatted with Lena as well in the evening, on telegram, says she has some other ails, changes of appetite, different types of nausea etc, but keeps going on. Will talk with her boss this week, to make some kind of plan. Milan is still not eating, save for his daily 100g of protein preparation, already went -20 kg, and ran a half marathon along the way, just like that. She says he's already thinner in face. Everything's loose on him, will have to buy clothes. Or he'll stop soon, I guess he planned for 40 days.
Ninth. Joksa's brother-in-law came at ten. I tried to move the van to ease his access, but what I charged its battery, wasn't enough. Never mind, the guy threaded his truck between it and the electric pole with two fingers' breadth on either side to spare. His physicker shoveled it up in an hour and a half, I paid as previously agreed, ciao. Clean bill, long love. There was some snow on the ground, but screw that. The kids didn't even leave the house, baba brought a pot of clean snow, off the car, to play with - inside. We went to Lidl without them.
Nina has some boyfriend in South Dakota, widower or divorced, has a son, is a bit younger than her, so she plans to leave the kids with us and go visit him for a fivesix days by end of january. The better if she gets this job. She knitted a shawl and a cap for him, sent it. It traveled 25 days but he got it and suits him fine (I didn't see the picture, though).
And then some time in february she means to pack everything up and go home.
Lena says „it will be a girl“. Not another ultrasound, but a blood analysis. They aren't thinking up any names yet, got to get to know the person first.
Tenth. We keep delaying the start of noodlemaking upstairs, the eggs keep piling up and it's already clean enough there, we really could now. We also keep delaying the purchase of larger porcelain (i.e. crapper, lavabo and the rest of it), still haven't done that. Instead, I finally took the mac out of its box, charged it and started looking at what it is. Well, well, it is a unix but ain't no linux, it's a closed box. The number of things which absolutely refuse to do anything useful before you get yourself registered with Apple and submit your Apple issued identification for inspection... takes more than half of the menu. That is, there's no menu.
- file manager shows no folders, there's no way to go to .., it keeps showing just the name of the current location. Managed to install double commander instead. It complains on every launch of that appp, takes five clicks to convince it to let it run. Can't use ef keys, many things require a two finger click on the touchpad. (found it the next day - ef keys appear on the touchbar while fn is pressed, neat)
- the keyboard layout is okay in cyrillics, but querty in latinic, and the layout of special characters is in 15:00 (v. house dictionary)
- in notes there's no way to turn autocorrect off
- safari won't allow any add ons without an ID, fuck that, installed WaterFox, starts goes and I immediately put both ad blockers and set Yandex as default search.
- at least upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma went smoothly.
- there's no theory to network it with linux to at least copy over the music; I was even thinking of finding an adapter from regular USB to USB-C and then use a side disk, i.e. to establish a frizbee network. But Filezilla installed fine, and the client finally connected when I almost gave up and, just for kicks, looked at the quickconnect options - and voila, the simplest looking one just worked. Transfering some 46G of music took about four hours or so.
- on the list of no-ID-no-way are its default drawing app, photo manager and who knows what else. Perhaps it has a proper camera, but I have no software for it. Unless I wait for Apple to give me a security clearance.
Well okay, mac's operating system will remain, it's sufficiently similar to linux, even has a few good solutions (and a score of stupid ideas), and for anything I want to do there's an open app out there. So far enlisted are the Waterfox for the web, VLC (in colors of Nina's sweater) for video and music (becuse Strawberry for mac ain't free, they say they have one programmer who maintains, so to cover his coffee... I'd gladly pay about 20 bucks a year, but they ask 5 a month), twocommander for the filesystem. The sound is much better than what nanovo has, with same speakers and same mrz files. I don't even notice the stereo image pulling to the right as it did there. What would this do if I hooked it to something decent...
Thirteenth. I bragged to Lena that I got the mac working and recounted briefly the above, and she wa really glad that I liked it, specially the touchbar. I installed telegram as well, and the cute feature is how it offers the emoji on that touchbar... so far the easiest way to insert them. It was quite unhandy on the phone, and on zmajček it wasn't laid out for easy pick. And here it's a breeze.
Mentions: 21-V-1977., More photos, Briyesh Dupta, burundi, daća, David Berton, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gugao, house dictionary, Inge Brandlicht, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Kees de Cock, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Margita Gunaroši (Magi), Melanija Merćep (Lajna), Milan Nastić, Mohandas Raj (Das), nanovo, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nicolas O'Keefe (Nick), nokla, Ralph Rotnik, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Stanley Berger, Suez Lima, zmajček, in serbian