On fifteenth I finally took the insucker (vacuum cleaner) upstairs, to pick the dust which spread when the guy grinded the tile for behind the crapper. I've already washed both the vessel and the airflow directing screw, but nope, it's the filter which is congested, the gypsum caught in it. So I washed the filter, up there in the new bathroom, and let it dry. She made another batch of noodles, we bought a new barrel of 160 liters, what can we do, we have too many eggs.
Nina acquired a cat, from a farm somewhere, where she was met by some dogs first, then a huge curly hog... The tomcat she liked on the pictures couldn't be found, and this kitty turned out quite friendly, white with tabby... where the armor would go, with a white stripe around the base of the tail, it's tabby from eyes to tail topside, white on the bottom. They'll call it Sushi, rice below, nori above.
She succeeded in fixing the laundry washer, the door lock part arrived, she replaced it, it all works. Also the battery for her laptop, will replace after our chat. Now for that cable to the heating unit... Linda is now wiping her ass without stating that „she hates herself for that“; Sanda still won't, though she probably knows how. Raja finally understood multiplication, when he needed it, he was trying to calculate how much of something he'd need in some game, to acquire enough of it to gain something he wanted to have... He even asked for some book on maths, to learn a few more tricks.
On sixteenth we went for a round trip. Old house first, stipulating that we may have to leave the car at the carwash by the railroad crossing, because of our old street being repaved now. But father's*, they're repaving only the slope around the railroad crossing, and only one side of it, total length of about ten meters. Naprednjaci M.O., repair a bit, publish as whole.
There we found the mailbox chock full, because meanwhile there was some election, so we got the invitations for at least three of us. I didn't quite follow who of our children got it and who not. There was also some advertising trash from SNS [the ruling party], masquerading as an official letter. What wasn't masked went straight into the trashcan, we don't even look at that.
Then it was Lidl next. We're changing the brand of mineral water. We are used to knjaz but aren't addicted, are no brand fans, it's that our milkperson can't use the 1,75 liter bottles, so Lidl's saguaro brand can do, as long as it has magnesium, and I don't care if it really has zero percent of that mexican cactus. Walked over to Roda, on foot, not to complicate matters by moving the car trhrough crowd twice. She checked her bank account (her serekeš is in the lobby) and I visited the pharmacy (also in the lobby), and look they had the 3x50mg and more than one pack at that, which was becoming a rarity recently. Last time, at a different pharmacy, I asked whether they have become a boutique, as they have only one of each. For the evening I still have the last 100mg, cut in half.
Combing through the heap of bills... well, not that bad, except ouch, 1870 dinars for parking on 30-IX-2023., when we were trying to guess in which building exactly was Lena living. Because we didn't announce that she should pay our parking. So pay tuition instead... Finally mounted my bicycle and rode off to pay it all, it's been a while. I yearned for bicycle since last fall, and didn't have a chance to sate it, as the two were now already too big for the seat fixed to the handlebar column, when she starts dangling her feet it's becoming dangerous, and her head reaches to my chin, even though I raised the handlebars all the way. And even when there was some reason to go, it would always occur that there's also something to buy which turned out to be too much to carry on a bike. Now the purchases became smaller and the weather got nicer. True, the sky was bright gray today, still not those colors, but good for a bike ride.
In the evening we decided after that we're still not sleepy, so we finished what apple was left (two and a half shots each) and then I went out to the terrace like that and brought the quince cask, and filled the bottle... with some overflow, because we didn't keep too many lights on. But it's okay, it's the best space deodorant there is :). We stayed until four, thus having celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary.
Amazingly, we didn't stay asleep that long, got up at 9-10. She made a fish čorba from the pangasius we bought in Mere, and put two tuna steaks in the new frajer. What they say that you can't be full when eating fish is plain wrong. Of all the ingredients for this lunch we bought only fish, flour and carrots, everything else is our own production. Only after lunch I took a nap, and she woke me up after three hours, all comatose.
In the evening we talked with Nina first. Telegram is giving me bullshit, I have the flatpak version, which works but it's the flatpak system which craps, it insists on its own set of folders, to avoid the component hell so it keeps its own copies of everything, which comes out quite large and confusing, and when you download a photo you never know where it stuffed it, and it deletes half of it on exit, chaos, you don't know what's where. So I took the regular version and installed it, and it worked, downloaded the photos where you tell it, but also stuck to its own config, didn't see the camera, then did but couldn't connect to Nina, or did but said her Telegram doesn't have a camera, then negotiated the connection half a forever and never got past that. Then I ran the flatpak version but the regular one held on to something, so I eventually took the mac and we finally chatted. The cat has gone native already, acquired a set of favorite sleeping spots, mostly in the hall. Kids are okay. After the washing machine, she managed to fix the printer - injected the ink into cartridges. The chips on the cartridges seem to have no way to gauge the amount of ink inside - there's no dipstick or pressure meter - but simply count down the time and when it's up they announce it empty. There's a hack to reset those timers, so this is another piece of hardware which was taken back from paid and leased into bought and owned. The other one just won't - the aftermarket battery is not accepted by the laptop, reports not genuine, refuses to charge it. So the Chineses had also went to the scum side, the fucken Lenovo. In other news, Linda is gaining roundedness, even has some cheek, almost like Sanda. The difference between them was never easy to spot (except when you try to lift them, Sanda felt heavier), and now it's decreasing.
Then we talked with Go and Stanley. They're waiting for the passports to arrive, then get the airplane tickets. Anita's top left ace tooth finally got out, grew up almost to half the size by now. Waiting for the top right, the molar on it is still holding on nothing and refusing to fall off. We saw Neša too, briefly, he's in another phase when he just dashes through the scene, but I managed to make at least one shot - from the flatpak Telegram, which somehow started working meanwhile. Stanley is cleaning out his stock of cars, in these two weeks he managed to marry another couple of vehicles, and means to get rid of three others before coming here. For one of them he was partly paid in some cryptocurrency, a Solana... which gained some 16% in value meanwhile. Then we talked about those currencies and decided they were a complete dance. Money isn't the measure of value anyway. If it was, the stock market wouldn't be so crazy.
Nothing much for the rest of the week. We talk with Nina every evening, half an hour to an hour. Sometimes she tricks the twins by giving them the phone so she can finish her lunch uninterrupted, so one of them carries us around the house, passes us to the other one, showing us this or that. They mastered the medium and even aim the camera quite well, but I don't manage to catch [screen]shots because the bandwidth is still limited, and if the lens moves it lowers the resolution, raises it when the scene is still for a few seconds, which rarely happens. Linda pronounced deliciously „I love palačinke!“ (pancakes).
Nina mostly completed the repairs around the house. The inside doorknobs got their turn, they were all of different model and state of failure, and yet none of them were of any model we didn't have in the house, all deja vu. The last fix was the toilet paper holder, which Rein had bought but didn't mount, said „finally, it waited thirteen years and a half to be replaced“.
I finally replaced the bathroom door lock. She made two-three more rounds of noodles, the barrel is already half full. The long delayed work on inserting links in the Customs of tribes and Serbia for beginners (part of sGradlj.com, same code) I finally did one way (links to other articles in the current one), and also provided for stealing photos from Byo. Along the way, I had previously prepared a bit of code to transcode the russian koi-8r codepage to unicode, for when I once finish all this and move on to finish writing my mrz (mp3) player, because I have a bunch of files by Aquarium and Čiž (Аквариум, Чиж) in that codepage. Just for kicks I tried automatic tag completion in Strawberry on one of them (pulls them off the web), and lo and behold, someone invested the effort and all these titles exist in the database, and it corrected all of them in ten minutes. I whitewashed in vain.
Neighbor complains. By some inversion it happened that he and wife stayed here, and their parents' house in the village was passed to their son, who's a full time farmer now. Says the buyoff price of wheat was 41 din/kg last year, it's 18 now. Pig, live weight, was 400 now it's 180.
Still unclear who's messing with the market, is it some dumping incoming again. The prices at the butchers still didn't budge.
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* in banatian speak, it's not the gramatically proper „očev“, it's „ocov“ or „očin“ [dick, of course]