30-I-2012.
Called the car parts shop, and yes they got the muffler for the saxo. Went to the repair shop, met Mišo - he's now the viceprincipal of gimnazija, invited me to visit him on the job ("any wednesday afternoon, got no class, and mostly nothing to do, come have a drink - I tell everybody to come on wednesday afternoon").
The shop had a busy schedule for the day, so made an appointment for 14:30 and went home for lunch. Ender has become a connoiseur of the cuisine, appreciates ćufte for the right reasons ("crunchy when they're fresh, and nice in a different way when they're cold").
Had my weekly chat with Jan. He has an infallible knack to call when the ćufte are sizzling in the pan, then keeps hearing the sound throughout the talk, and gets hungry an hour ahead of time. The web app is nearly done, got to tweak a few things and finally write the messages part and it should be deployable.
Went there at 14:30, and froze my feet off because it made no sense to sit in the warm lobby when the guy doing my car used to be an old student of mine. Exchanged a few stories about the old times, about a ghost škodilak ("it was a wreck, I didn't recognize the make - whole driver side was torn away by a truck, nobody died, though, just the old baba was three months in a coma, and this guy believed in Škodas so much that he found everything - doors, roof, hood - that was missing, and it took me days to put into shape, and then he wants to go to Poland... did you try the engine? no... he didn't even think the engine may be at fault, even as it was lying untouched for years... and bang, he tries it and it just works... and he got to Poland and drove it for ten years more"). The old muffler was holy shit - looked like shit and was full of holes. Replaced the spark plugs that Ender bought last spring, and took out my radio (as I have asked). Told me to keep the old spark plugs, they were actually better than the new ones.
The garage is nice - evenly paved, no ugly patches on the pavement, the girls in the office are cute but not too bimbo (though I had a total disconnect with the one at the desk until I was introduced as "this guy was my professor", then we had a common point to talk beyond official)... but it's all too american gray, aluminium and glass. Not a single surface on the whole building had any color on it.
Dropped by the electronics shop along the way home, and sure enough the plugs on the new radio fit without a hitch. When I remember fitting that 26$ radio into the old Corolla... the wiring took me whole hour, with plug adapter and whatnot. This just plugged in. OK, the antenna cable would need an adapter plug, but I don't care. The whole point of this exercise was to not have a radio, but a mrz player (v. house dictionary) which would just work when I press a button. And it sounds much better than the old one - of course, with the new muffler making almost no noise, sounds like a twice as expensive car.
In the evening, a digital surprise. sGradlj.com finally went over 2000 visits a month (attention whore I am, yeah), and I got over 500.000 image views on Panoramio. The first took 12 years, the other 5 to accomplish.
Mentions: ćufte, Ender Aquila (Ender), gimnazija, house dictionary, Jan Brenkelen, Mišo Radović, saxo, sGradlj.com, škodilak, in serbian