Around this time we'd come to the building site to do this or that - I remember cleaning the mortar off the floors meter by meter - and once we forgot the keys (as windows and doors were in place since last year, so we could lock the house). Luckily, Nina was with us, and thin as she was she managed to squeeze through the tunnel from the basement, and unlock the pantry-to-garage door (aka Johan's door) from inside. So we didn't just kiss the door.
Many times this summer I went to the placić (explained 02-IV-1991., see the part about hedgehogs) to sift the gravel, sometimes alone, mostly with her. We'll need about eight kubiks (cubic metres) of A fraction. For the sift I got the trick and the tool from Faik - a soldier's bedframe, with its wire mesh. It being 2m long, you only need to lean it above the wheelbarrow and thow gravel at its top. The eyelets in the mesh being about 10mm, the smaller stones fall through and larger roll away. I propped it with the one extra pole left over from the fence. The fraction I drove to the terrace, where it grew into quite a hill. What we did with the larger stones is still unclear to me. Some of it must have gone into later, much later, building of the staircase to the entrance and from the Johan's door to the basement (the landing, though - the steps themselves were again sifted fraction). The rest must have sunk into the soil, which is why we never could properly till the front lawn.
At DBA these months we were trying to transform ourselves from a self-managed, society-owned enterprise into a stockholder company, even with the cost of buying ourselves off from the state (because the society-owned was overnight magically transformed into state-owned by government fiat), just couldn't decide the proportions of stock which would go to everybody. The simplest, everyone gets the same, was out of the question, because the workload was never equal, even among the programmers. For a while, the proposal by Brata that Sale, Vanji and I get 15% each and then the rest be split more or less uniformly over the others, as per staž in the company, was floated for a while, and then Blaža, with the backing of few others, came up with something smoother - Sale would get 7%, Vanji and I 6% each, and the rest would go between 3 and 5% each. This eventually passed by september or so.
One of these months we got a faulty keyboard from Remont, where the whole kombinat fixed its trucks. The keys were scrubbed white, no print on the caps, with the mix of oil and sand, which was the black around and between the keys. Still unclear how that worked a week before. We hung this one as a trophy in Carp's shop, and just gave them a new one.
Once I found myself in the system hall with my old Vaha - now owned by Čelik, who took it over after the dismantling of stour. I was supposed to get some data, but couldn't hook into any kind of network. The one peesee that sat in the streetside corner, behind the printers, was connected as a terminal, with a simple serial cable, which meant there was no way to access the filesystem, no download command, there's only the screen. So okay, I'll send it to screen, doesn't matter, there's no binary soup, it's all text data without unprintables. I've set the communicating app on the peesee to log everything, and set the file to display onscreen, and then extracted its contents from the log, and that was it. They didn't become customers, perhaps this was just this one shot, they needed the data. Don't know whether we charged them at all.
Of the old gang I think I didn't see anyone, they all jumped ship on time. Just one guy stayed in Čelik, who used to work at NuProm, but I think we didn't meet that day. We did, some seven years later, and then we told me that they finally managed, by applied magic probably, to sell both the Vaha and its huge AC. The latter got a better price.
Gargamel bought a motel in that village where I did my first private lessons in 1980. Wasn't exactly a motel, I guess he bought the village culture home and repurposed it into a combination of tavern, disco and a fuckodrome for his sons. Don't know why he picked me as an observer. Redecorate he did, not that didn't, there's the mirror ball, some lights (don't know whether lasers and strobo, it was daylight and no demonstration), has a ledomat (new word, icemat - ice making machine), better furniture in certain rooms, black leather. Yeah, right, what's that all got to do with me, eh? I caught a chance to slip out, got on a bus, gone. Yet another case when I get official transportation to there and return on my own. Got used to that already.
17-XII-2019 - 23-VI-2024