05-XII-2004.
(from email to dad and the reshot notes page)
On third bought a new disk, 80G, to have a copy of the database with me. The transaction log (in Gary's?) grew to about ten gigs, need to look into ways to empty it.
Today I really leaned on work for Gary, and by the notes I see that by third I accumulated 51 hours, which I then billed him for. That'll be another 2040$... will not be wasted. I know there are foxers who can charge even 100$ per hour, up to 125, but fuckit, they have to pay the office rent, this tax, that tax, indemnity insuance and hundred other knicknacks, which I don't have to. During the next week I piled up another 17 billable hours.
I see I'm using SPTs for his stuff (seaquell pass through cursors), the same as I'm consuming in UniJewel, which means I'm streamlining so I don't have to do it this way here and that way there. In Paige's directory I also see some SPT classes edited at this time, but now whether he did that himself, or I helped him or just gave him some guidance, fuckit then, there's none of my signatures in the text.
And the domestic pleasures have started too: she kneaded four pleks* of kiflice (croissants) with ham, cheese, sausage and combined, and some with jam. Last night she put yogurt to ferment. We finally found a yogurt with proper taste, but it was too dense, must use a spoonlet. Not like the croatian one, which was like our sour milk, this was softer, pretty much like thin mortar :). Alright, like whipped cream... so we tried to find a recipe on the web, counting that if that doesn't help, I can always resort to calling Slave, he and I once made yogurt, he may remember the ingredients and their amounts.
We found only one recipe, and that was in slovakian, so we don't know what's the measures - on two liters of milk you put one „kelimka“ of yogurt, and I only know it is not a spoon (which is a lžička)... so she just eyeballed the amount.
I can just say that finally I dined on fresh kiflice with liquid yogurt :).
And yesterday's lunch was the real soup (young beef) and dill sauce. Grew just enough of it in the old dish sink, doubling as a flowerpot. Because there's no place where you can buy dills, but she found seeds somewhere, guess at Lowe's when we were procuring something tenth („nešto deseto“ - phrase means something completely unrelated).
Drove around the end yesterday - went to return the digital cable contraption and to cancel subscription for that part (gives only six channels, all of which are a repeat of what's already available in analog, or advertising for other channels, for which one should pay extra, and are still rife with advertising, ergo are already paid once), then to drop the books I didn't order at the mail (they send them and if you don't return them, they expect to be paid), then to buy another curtain hanger like the one we took for the ground floor (see the wide picture), this time for Lena's room, to pay the monthly installment of the mortgage, to change oil. Weather - a beauty, springtime. Sun shining, it's hot in the car, had to crank up the AC.
Don't know what's up with the seagulls, it seems there's not as much food on the beach, the walkers thin on the ground, so they fly deeper inland to eat. They get into disputes with crows at times, but then the starlings attack the crows, plucking their feathers in flight, need them for the nests. Three or four starlings attack one crow, and there's no chance it could evade them without losing at least two feathers.
But then there are ducks on the surrounding ponds. It dawned on me that I have finally learned the answer to the question „where do the migratory birds go in winter“: well, right here :). And they hatch here, there are small ducklings. They cross the road in the morning, Lena said her school bus stops innumerable times to let them pass.
No photos for today, only video - because we were laying the carpets upstairs, in the hall and Nina's room. This shot I extracted from the video, which is only the minimal 320 pixels wide, so give what you give. So now the orange room has the carpet as well. It's the same carpet as elsewhere, it only looks this color because of the setting sun hitting the orange walls. We managed to cut the carpet so that it stretched all the way into the closet and the hall in one piece. It's quite unwieldy, stiff and hard to grasp, but we managed somehow. We had to glue it at only one place, where it connects with the piece in Lena's room. The glue is a bead on some strong tape that you put under the stitch and heat up with the ironing iron** and then step on it. We accidentally fit the pattern too, so the seam is unnoticeable.
On sixth, again something around DSS, David asks me to recheck the last zip, which turned out to be quite okay, only the name of the zipfile remained the same as the day before, ahem... Told me to see with Valerie about the next batch, and gave me the right to pester her if she doesn't send it by noon. About the inventory, chaos. Because it's supposed to use a barcode scanner, and what if a barcode appears which we don't have in the items table, which is a highly probable scenario. Furthermore, the meaning of „there's none“ - none at all, was scanned zero times or... no no no, it's „none in the current bin“, it's inventoried by bins. Fuckit, this is as if I'm introducing a system in some agriculture on romanian border, where it's not the automatization of their existing system, it's that the system didn't exist, start from zero. Or from minus one, because they kind of have some rules except the rules are enforced sometimes, or in some cases some other rules are, and there's no top rule to decide for the cases both of them cover, or when neither does. Chaos, I said. On top of that, we're like supposed to keep separately the materials and finished products, with the stipulation that a simple stone may be a finished product if it's sold so, or a finished product may be sold as material if customer want's to insert it into something larger. There's more - the Access app doesn't distinguish between the two kinds, it's all „items“ in it, and the type field (finished or not) that we introduced, they don't use anyway. By that time it was nineteen thirty his side of the pond and he went home. I don't remember whether we ever revisited the subject. The system is futile.
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* a vessel for a casserole, fits the oven. From german Blech, sheet metal, which we call lim or pleh, this vessel is plek. Don't ask. Also „sheet metal worker“ is limar; can be called plekadžija only for fun.
** if you think this is superfluous, remember how many times you wrote the „m$“ before any of their products, regardless of uniqueness of the rest their names. The iron at least has many meanings, so distinguish.
Mentions: David Krakovski, DSS, Gary Brandywine, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Paige S Stevenson, Radovan Tomić (Slave), UniJewel, Valerie Marceau, yogurt, in serbian