13-IV-2010.
Go is here since the sunday before. Lena had a moment of slight panic yesterday, when among the mail we found that her acceptance letter came from Utrecht... a month late. The deadline to send the filled form and advance payment was 2nd of april. The probable cause was "VI" instead of "VA" for Virginia in the address. It doesn't matter that the name of the city is Virginia Beach... which must have put the poor postal clerks' minds under illusion that it must be somewhere on Alaska or Why, Oh Ming.
From correspondence with my parents... they still suffer the whims of granny Marta, it's 22 and 24 and then 8°. Here, just warm enough to have a barbecue after a rain. While Go is here, special diet: two days sarma, two days beans with ham, now barbecue. When we pick our own spinach, there'll be filo rolls too. Here:
Lena went to Yogaville, which is some manor near A-burg, a resort of a sort. In the morning, when I drove her to the gathering place, the short sleeves under the jacket felt cold. It's three weeks now since I stopped wearing socks - the clogs finally settled on foot. The right one, with a somewhat lower dome, I tamed with combination of alcohol (isopropyl, we don't throw rakija anywhere but in our throats, now that we pulled out the last two bottles from behind the lower drawer, where it sat) and hardening my own skin. I went like that to DC too.
Our roses are growing like crazy. The tiny ones are almost there, the big ones are sprouting buds, we expect them to burst open any day now.
The irises are growing, some five of them, from the bulbs she put on the side and then couldn't find after the flood. They mingled with those magnolia cones, and now they come up. The radishes are disappointing, small root and they're already going to seed - they're just blossoming and the stem is as thick as a mason's pencil. On the other side, we ate green onions twice already. Some chinese or korean, when we drove it into the soil it was a 3mm pellet, now it grows something thin, like a ballpoint pen insert - okay, a ceramic one, 3-4 mm - but it's quite tasty and there's a lot of it. Some also grow from seeds, but the first crop is what sprouted from the grocery onions. It just grew green offshoots on the shelf, so instead of dumping them she just put them into the ground, and each of them grew between two and four stalks of green onion. Excellent, homegrown.
Almost every dinner, ham. Thinly sliced on Hasan II, beauty. And 4-5 kinds of cheese, whichever we don't forget in the fridge. The champion of the week is some columbian cheese in a skein. It's cheese drawn into thin strings, dried somewhat, then a whole bundle tied into a knot - we never found the ends. Some we unravel, some we cut. Slightly salty and ripe, real tooth entertainment. I posted a „guess what this is“ on ppp, with a knitting needle accidentally in the shot, and nobody could guess what it was.
One thing I don't understand. You say a kilo of ham is 70$, then a whole ham of 4kg cost only 35$. I don't get it. Here such a ham is 1100 din/kg, which is about 15$.
It's actually five and a half kilos, I checked the label later. It depends on where you buy. This is a pig area - the only cultures massively grown are pigs, peanuts and cotton. There are several local slaughterhouses which make good ham - Southampton, Ivor, Smithfield; the latter is american ham capital, and they even have farms in South America. Here as well the ham is more expensive when it's sliced and vacuumed. What Go bought was a pršut (i.e. prosciuto, italian) which is both a delicacy and a foreign recipe, and then she's in the wider downtown - all of which influences the price.
When you mentioned salary and David, I remembered to ask whether your status will remain the same once you come here. You'll actually be closer to David than you are now.
Ah, no, David was in Belgium, from previous job. This David is in Toronto. I once mocked them how they are under my jurisdiction, as our city was once the seat of the Torontal county, which was allegedly the origin of the name Toronto.
We don't know whether you switched to summer count of time. By us it was moved for one hour last week of march, and we're already accustomed to it.
Đorđe Nj Buđ** has pushed it to two weeks more on either side***, first here and then in Canada too, so we're on summer one whoa longer than you. I was driving Lena to school almost at the crack of dawn, now it's crack of dawn when I return.
The trees blossom here, there's polen everywhere. Next rain will exactly leave drops where it will all stick, all the cars will gain yellow freckles.
And now to grocery, the barbecue needs meat :).
That evening George found some neat piece of javascript, a pretty loader (of whatever), said „This is effing brilliant. It neatly solves a problem (well, an issue) we have in the webApp. This gets implemented now.“
So we sat around the table in the patio, finally, and a friend of theirs was there (later their kum, but nobody knew that at the time). We drank Negra Modelo, Ender had some soda. I see we were smoking Black Hawk from Smokin Joe, and Go had Seneca by some other american Americans (as orientals are asian, blacks are african, whites are european Americans, so the Indians get to be american Americans). It's cheaper in the reservation, no federal tax. The meat was excellent - her recipe for neck steaks says just smear them with the dry vegetable mix, vegeta-like, and ride on.
The check from these guys for whom I was repackaging the classic posters' database arrived this morning - espresso urgente rapido, muy rapido. Well, they got the database now.
There was some confusion initially - Gary said they'd pay, and then they said I should bill him. So he told me to give them nothing until I see the check. Which happened blazingly fast, considering that the Gary contacted me 4th of march first on this, then on 9th introduced us to each other, and then everything sat for weeks.
Amazingly, all of my old stuf I did for Gary was still working, the data were intact, and I only had to revamp a few routines (from Firriver) to get this all into a MySql database.
BTW, a propose David, the salaries were getting late, a day or two later each month (for a year, or two now?). We had some fun screwing around the matter on the platoon chat, so...
18:32:37 David I messed on timing of your payment...apparently it will be in your bank Monday*
21:47:51 me: As long as it happens 12 times a year, all is good.
Which is not pointless, one enterprise back home almost pulled a year with 11 salaries, but you can't fool fifty people at the same time, someone took care to read the month on the last slip they got in december, and it said „for october“.
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* Bank mondays are good, everybody should have one.
** Đorđe is George, Nj is W in juski cyrillic and also on all yugoslav cyrillic keyboard layouts; Bush should be Buš, but đ is next to š on the keyboard, and the Buđ typo, found once on B92, is unforgettable - buđ means mold.
*** wrong, it's two weeks on one, one on the other end
Mentions: Annenburg (A-burg), David Berton, David Krakovski, Ender Aquila (Ender), Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Gary Brandywine, George Whiteley, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), juski, kum, ppp, rakija, sarma, in serbian
13-IV-2010 - 13-IX-2024