The priest neighbor keeps feeding whole slices of bread to the birds at the back alley hedgerow, without splitting them down into smaller pieces. That's the remains from the food for the poor, or whatever. The seagulls and other birds carry it away, but it's too large for their beaks so it falls off, and some of it into our patios. The seagulls don't go there, so the rats can have it. In the shed we found under its floor, when we tor it down, in the farthest corner, we found a rats' nest. Juliška must have one, now whether it's in her shed or under the deck, who knows.
Last night I took m$ and her friend to a concert in Norfolk, some Ukrainians were playing, „Gogolj bordello“... which is a mix, there's five of them (drummer, guitarist, rhythm ghuitharrhisth, accordeonist and one oldster who bows into an electrical fiddle) who are from their, or are thence Gypsies (the main guy is, though he isn't too dark and also is named in german)(just an art name, Ukrainian-Lithuanian by father, Rroma by mother), then on Uglješa* chiseled like a boulder on bass, than a small Roman (of them Latins from the other America :) on other percussion and 2nd microphone, and two girls who sing a bit dance a bit, one is 100% Korean, the other could be anything between here and Ukraine. The music is... so, as if that Kusturica's orchestra for weddings and funerals, or Bregović's, they could play at a buč**, but it's made up as the hardest rocknroll, drnka drnka rhythm all the way and all six or eight of them, depends, are incessantly in motion. Merry, all in all, the audience taken with it (of course, they paid for it, if they paid it has to be fun).
The venue was the Norva, and parking was no problem, just two blocks away, who'd a thunk. Well Nawf'k doesn't have much of a night life, the folks go there to work in offices and shipyards, in the evening it's sit home and watch teevee, barely anyone lives downtown. Walking out we met a bunch of Russians, had a chat and exchange of impressions with them for half a cigarette's length, but I didn't feel like staying longer, seeing the friend impatient.
We bought both seedees, partly to help this intrusion of eastern Europe into the eastern coast. The foreband were of the same ilk, just a bit more raw and... ahem, one song they played was a spitten „Hajde, Jano“. When I mentioned that to the oldwave, Škrba first chimed in with „I don't realy go for petards“, but then someone, perhaps SoniBoj, found a whole video about how the whole Balkan (there's just one, no matter what your language may think) and Asia Minor are fervently claiming that song as originating in their culture. And our text, which doesn't make much sense today („let's sell the house and the horse, just so we can dance“) is not the source material, it's some tavern owner ordered, just to fan the flames of local raspikuća („who drinks away the house“) into dert and loosening the [money] bag.
Something is pulling a lot of power in the house, in july we consumed 50% more than normal (we always see last 12 months on the bill, plus the current one). We switched everything off and then let breakers on one by one, and found one suspicious line, which made the power meter speed up even without anything turned on. I couldn't measure that there's any lowered resistance on between the wires on that line, but it may be leaking somewhere into the ground (though I wasn't able to measure that either). We turned that line off, and then we'll see.
The project behind our back alley is some social apartments, don't know how exactly how that goes, whether the lessor is relieved of the tax for providing lodging to the endangered (ie. those with less than 14000 per household member per year), or is the government directly paying their rent. The other project, on the other side of our street, goes at regular prices, but the tennants are also half black, or only seems so because they stay outside more. All in all,, as m$'s gang says, „you don't live in a ghetto, you live between two ghettos“ :).
The next house, the #2, is still not rented out yet. We see agents come and bring prospective customers, judging by forgetting to turn off a different light each time, so the look changes. The other day some guy came to wash the carpets, and we already forgot when was it that those two guys came to paint and clean up. The amount of rubble they threw out was unimaginable. And just as they promised to clean out the gutter, so the rainwater wouldn't fall on our side, so they forgot. The gutter fills up, becomes heavy on our end, then either licks down or spills over, to our side of the fence.
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* ugalj is coal, but Uglješa is a royal name, we did have a king Uglješa Mrnjavčević in XIV century, died in the first big battle with the turkish invasion, so it can't be offensive and politically miscalculated
** bucsú, village fair of Čurda