25-IX-2004.
Don't know whuch* idiot did the gutters here, but he should be remembered for the October prize or something such, if only they can think of a category into which to classify him. Everything is bass ackwards: the vertical, where it meets the horizontal, is protruding in it, not surrounding it, so it drips and oozes around it, very little goes through it. From that spot, going down, each connection is done so that the lower part goes into the upper, so the edges of the upper part are loose and anything that drips from them is likewise outside, dripping straight down or down the gutter's outer surface. With any more copious rain very little water goes through the pipe, most of it goes around it. Next to its bottom is the tap for the garden hose, which is also always dripping some. Can't replace it, because we don't have any main valve in the house but the one in the water meter's pit, out on the street, which can be closed only with a special crowbar (actually any pipe with sufficient diameter and half an inch slit on the bottom would do the job), which we don't have. This tap is about one brick long, and the valve's rubber gasket is at the inner end of it, so it doesn't freeze, and any water that would remain in the pipe simply drips out. Someone screwed a two way splitter on that for two hoses - but one made of a cheaper alloy, and the tap was copper, so it now got baked in that not even dubyoo dee forty can't help. The splitter already lost the thread (cheap alloy, I said) so I can't even screw a hose on it.
Which is why she started working on a little garden. We bought three sacks of soil, took out the junk, she weeded it out as much as she could, got the tulip bulbs and carnation seeds and what not else, we'll see when it sprouts. Interestingly, the old kitchen sink cabinet bottom, some water swollen particle board, we found in pieces. We didn't move it for a whole month, it was rained on a lot, but dried fast because that's where the AC exhaust blows hot air, and the wee roots of the tree on the other side of the fence chopped it into wee smithereens. We took the small rake and minced it into sawdust in a few moves. The particle board may out turn into good fertilizer :).
During the day I had some back and forth with the kids from the neighborhood, for climbing up the magnolia tree. I mean I don't care a dick's worth, let them climb, I'll start shouting if they start breaking branches, but wait, this is Americah, what if someone falls off and breaks something, on our terrain, and some trigger happy lawyer eyeballs as a milkable source of cash... Well fuck that, I took the camera and started taking pictures of them through the upstairs window. Doesn't matter that the leaves leave very few recognizable bits visible, that I don't know them or where they live, that such a shot wouldn't be any evidence anywhere... Just told them that I took the shots so I have evidence just in case, and that they should do with that information whatever makes sense to them. They just left and that was it.
Ricardo is at the beginning of the citizenship process, which means several visits to the regional division of the INS, for data check, fingerprinting and whatnot. This regional division (of which there are only four in all the fifty states) being right here in Norfolk, spitting distance from here, somewhere by the airport, it's logical that he'd come here, night with us, and I'll take him there, wait and drive him back. Ahem, „by“ the airport. No, I didn't start writing in the „style“ of „those“ guys in our local „newspaper“, putting quotation „marks“ on everything that doesn't appear in its most „literal“ „sense“ (umm... if this appeared there for real, their lector would stick a few more into this „sentence“), it just feels funny that I wrote „by the airport“ and there's a kilometer or two between them.
The busodrome in Virginia Beach doesn't look like. Not that it doesn't look like a bus station, it looks like nothing at all. One log cabin (literally), few signs, a largish parking lot. It may be look like a truckers sandwich joint if it was somewhere by the road, but this is on Laskin, which is a trade street, eight lane (in an insane layout - in the middle there's two lanes each way, then there are ditches around that, and then two two-way roads on either side... complete confusion). His arrival was ridiculous in itself - Go was supposed to call him a bit before ten (the bus arrives here at 22:15) to remind him to call us, but since there was nothing until 22:01, I just drove out to wait for him at the station. Waited for almost an hour, then went home to see what was up. He missed the connecting bus in Norfolk, because he counted on it being announced over the speakers - well, it wasn't. We called him to say we're coming. Go already emailed us the full instruction set - a detailed map, which then Lena printed so we were equipped when we went there. He did wait a while, but wasn't bored - had some miniature computer, about 18x25cm, almost three kilos heavy because of extra accumulators, so he was reading something. Actually, doing homework.
He passed the citizenship exam, which got reduced to 4-5 questions (of theoretical hundred) and lasted twenty minutes of the provided two hour slot. Since now all three have mobile phones, he called me as soon as he was finished, so I practically made an you turn when I got home.
Of house works, we had decided to put door panes on bedrooms. We wanted to buy white plastic doors, but it turned out that we only thought we saw them somewhere, no such thing as that. It seems that plastic doors aren't made at all, it's all something with wooden frame and pressed plastic sheathing (or plastified lesonit or something, devil would know what). Also the frame isn't pure wood either, only the verticals are - the horizontals are of some pulp which feels like lesonit when sawed, is rather light and pulls somewhat to cardboard when touched with fingers.
We started with Lena's room, where it chafed against the carpet while moving - possibly the floor isn't qute flat right there. I carved the place for the upper hinge, but only on the next day, when I bought a proper set of chisels. Now the door fit the frame, but still chafed the carpet, so we decided to shorten it by 4mm. Took them down again and carried into the „workshop“, clamped a longish slat as a ruler, to run the reciprocating motor saw down it, and started cutting. The trouble arose from the tiny saw getting warm, and when it gets warm it bends, so the cut was zigzagging somewhat. We flattened that with putty later... and then she noticed that I cut the upper side of the door, not the lower. Never mind, I'll move the hinge grooves a bit lower. She should repaint them today, not just to cover the putty, but to cover the ugly grayish taint it had, greetings from Blagoje the room painter. White doors simply don't exist, unless we were in the mood to pay three times more money.
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* I refuse to write „what kind of idiot“ because discussion on idiot typology is futile
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), in serbian