11-VII-2009.
(... 127 words...)
Long afternoon on the beach, until eight in the evening... because we're far enough to the south and it's also daylight savings regime, so the sun sets around eight. We two walked up the beach for perhaps a kilometer and a half, while Ender, Eleese and Nina stayed at our spot. As I wrote to dad a few days later, „We dip for some twenty minutes, then walk the coast until we dry. Watching seagulls, crabs, fat Amers, and sometimes a procession of pelicans comes by, if we hit the time when they have supper. We dry up and then go back, it's almost dark when we return. It's us looking darker against the sky and low sun. Though, we've got tan on our faces, knees and shoulders, but you should see our feet, it's plainly obvious who wears what footwear. She has a negative from sandals, I from clogs.“
I shot this while we walked under the pier. This being America, they have lots and lots of timber, fat and strong. We walked to the south end too after that, all the way to the barbed wire fence, which divides the civilian beach from the amphibian* base (amphibian, it says, just don't know whether that's army or navy... now if navy can have airplanes, why wouldn't airforce have its own amphibians).
This Sandbridge is another city beach, rather far south, nine kilometers from the main [one], and it's a couple of kilometers long. It's accessible at either end, where there are showers and parking and awning with benches, and the space in between is private houses along the road which parallels the coastline. The beach in front of these houses is also public, but one needs to know where to walk, because one can't trespass on anyone's yard, even with fences absent or just symbolic. In the beginning we used to park at the north, nearer end, but even that soon seemed a bit crowded, even though it's almost without tourists, this is for (us :) locals. Then we moved to the farther end, with almost no crowd at all. The parking is allegedly charged, but the booth closes at 17, which is when we start getting ready to go. We'd pay a pro forma dollar or two, having financed this through car tax.
To avoid changing, or rather to avoid ending up with sand in [my] underpants, I'd simply stop getting wet at least half an hour before leaving, and I'd put one of the towels on the seat, and drive home so. The pants would, of course, be still somewhat wet, but the AC in the Corolla isn't so fierce. Visiting the Walmart on Nimmo was a problem, as wet pents are excellent if you want to freeze your balls off when pasing by the cold storage areas. This time I forgot to pack my shorts in the car, noticed them in the [rear view] mirror only in the curve before turning inland, when they slid from the roof to the rear hood. Pulled over, picked them, packed, no damage. Specially with the licence, card etc being in the pocket.
The first tomatoes ripened, proper homegrown, we already had salad twice, and of cucumber four times. Now to go find a ham. The deal we set up was to eat ham again once we have our own tomatoes. If need be, drive to Ivor, that's where we the last ham came from, its address is just thirty miles away.
Ender sold the blue kawasaki, the one which shook like a handlebar cultivator, and prepares another honda meanwhile. He got the machine for near pittance, because it could barely start. Disassembled it, washed, works... but doesn't pull. Found a clutch - someone bought it but didn't use it, had cost 250$, sold it for 50$ not to go to waste - and now the total investment was 600$ and a day's work, can sell for 2000$. Of customers only one appeared so far, and even that one came to rather cry on his shoulder than to show the color of his green. Regardless, each sold sooner or later.
Dad reports
Mounted the airconditioner finally overyester. We put it above the hanging element in the work part of the kitchen, and the outer unit on the wall so that the condensate water drain goes into the gutter by the bathroom. What we expected, this ain't even so expensive. I polled two three retails and this variant came down cheapest, though each shop has ACs from the same manufacturers. Total with montage came down to 22.000 dinars, which in currency amounts to (by today's rate) 330$. Still have no chance to try it out. It's neither cold enough to turn on the heating, nor too hot to cool us off. There are days. The mounters are two youngsters, Go's generation from Zmaj. They are from VIII-1. Now in case of need we have three way heating: gas, electric area heaters and the AC.
Well now you too can get used to fat shade :)
The AC is great, even when not wound up to blow anything really cold, for muggy days, because it dries the air. When it is muggy, and sweating is futile because it won't evaporate, the AC is a salvation. Now since we have this machine which condenses the water, we see that the humidity inside is mostly 33-39%, even when there's fog outside.
Just keep the doors closed while it works, so you don't cool off the yard**. Specially when it's muggy - a lot of energy goes just on condensation of water. Now our electricity bill grew a bit since we run both Alladin and Vodolija (Aquarius) (i.e. the AC and this water catching machine) but not by much, because what one condenses the other one doesn't have to, so it cools off the air instead of collecting water. The collected water smelled of swamp for a while, so we rinsed the machine as per instructions, with hydrogen, which made it right for a day two and then again. Until we eventually noticed that it would happen when we added tap water into the receptacle tank. Seems to be something in the tap water reacted badly with the filters. Since we stopped adding it, the water became great - temperature just a bit colder than it was from the well behind the corner, and tastes more like spring water. The receiving filter has some mineral grain, which gets mixed into water to give it the taste, so it isn't as bland as the distilled [one].
Lena went to get picture taken for the yearbook, and also picked the unofficial report of her end-of-year results, just to check whether they screwed up anything - which they did, but doesn't matter much. They missed one year of french, and the mark for the exam in english 2 seems to be missing... and regardless, she ranked 5th among 596 of them in the generation. And her friend Chuck is also a vukovac [recipient of Vuk's award, for straight A student, as per serbian terminology], with 4,0 average (local scale is 0 to 4), and ranks 57th. So how's this possible? Well, the advance and intensified courses count more, so Lena's average is 4,435. Of 24 courses required for graduation, she already finished 28. The whole fourth year would come as dessert :).
Fifteenth, took Fujica when I went to pick Lena from her yoga class. I'm accumulating too many shots of that parking lot. This time, at least, made shots of her with her instructor, who is just a nice girl, but it's incredible how she transforms in front of the lens. On every picture she's acting some character, from a bad comedy.
On UA, someone has a story of an old app which was as slow as a rheumatic snail, because it was overoptimised, one table had all of 59 indexes, and each index, when opening, requires a 4k to be read just to get its header. Then for each operation at least as many blocks nead to be retrieved, and possibly many more need to be written when a record is saved.
if my budget was open there would be plenty of work. Unfortunately its not and I've seen several examples of my correcting something at point A causing something to fall off at point B. :-(
>The real problem is it begins to distort your mind and you go "native"
I'm living with that problem for years.
Oh, you mean programming-wise... yep, it's a two-edged sword. On one side, you want to understand what your predecessors were doing. On the other, if that was so good, you wouldn't be cleaning after them. Tricky; you need to keep perspective all the time.
I once had a project like that in front of me, and was very adamant on how long will it take and cost - no easy way out of hand woven say/gets. The customer was seriously convinced it was a matter of a few days to spruce it up - where nothing short of full rewrite would save the app.
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* in serbian there's also a word, 'vodozemac', waterlander (which I used the first and third time in this sentence), which we can use interchangeably with 'amphibian' (noun only)
** dad never took this seriously, it was counterintuitive to him, and he often kept the door open.
Mentions: Eleese Aquila (Eleese), Ender Aquila (Ender), Fujica, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), UbiquAgora (UA), Zmaj, in serbian