15-V-2020.

(... 2 words...)

On 8th we went to Čankovo and just mowed and mowed - she with the stigma (aka stiga, the swedish mower), me with the trimmers. Tried the trimmer head on the T2, but its engine is smaller and its overheat protection kicks in after a while, so I switched back to the good old švorceniger. The sour cherries on the street had again sprouted a hundred saplings along the sidewalk (and in its cracks), she mowed them too.

There was some rain so the new foil is now tightened with the weight of its lakes. Most of the remaining tomato saplings, brought as spare to replace any plants which don't take (in previous years it was sometimes as many as third of them) were gone. And it's not that the whole frame disappeared, it was the saplings along with their soil. Later in the day, at home, we heard a neighbor complain he barely found saplings to buy, only two guys on the big market were selling.

(... 15 words...)

9th and 10th, the weather being nice, we took the twins to two nearby playgrounds - one at the other end of our street, the other by the community center.

12th, had another long video chat with Go. Both Neša and Anita look great. He started another haircut by himself recently, and then mom had to finish it, which took two sessions, he didn't have enough patience to do it in one go. Anita has grown a lot since last year, and her eyes look larger than ever. Beautiful.

13th, we took the twins, on bikes, to 25. maj playground - I needed to visit the nearby serekeš. We met a girl, about 5 years old, who lived in our street last year, and the kid who remembers us from a few other playgrounds (greets us with "ćao, Filipinke!") - he seems to be everywhere just like we do. Looks promising... to be as ugly as his dad. Dunno why, but that's the kind of face I don't want to sit with. The kid seems to be OK, though. There was another older couple, with cute twins too, the girls being five months older than ours. "Watching twins grow is incredible, one could write a book". On the way back, just as we were leaving, met Lena, but didn't stay to chat, because Sanda was throwing a temper tantrum, being tired as a dog and yet bent on staying to play more and more. These days she gets that way often.

14th, we made noodles in our bedroom upstairs. With the girls helping... a bit, before it got serious. Then we got them down and went on to churn the thin soup noodles. Last time we spread them on a clothes grid, covered with tablecloth, but it wasn't enough, so we put another one over the old playpen (in the front room). This time I went to detelina and bought another grid (and a watering bucket, red this time, because the yellow one in Čankovo is gone... probably the same small theft department).

The 15th we declared to be Johana's 10th birthday. No special treats, just four special photos.

(... 2 words...)

Near the evening we finally went to the ninth frendz parti. We got delayed by the twins, who thought they were going with us, and started crying, fully synchronized, as soon as they understood they stay. The little girls from the neighborhood took them over eventually. By the time we reached the bus station - Lidl - Roda, she found out why her shoes feel so relaxed and comfortable: they were falling apart. She went into Roda to buy something else (... 31 word...)

While she was inside, I called Borko to explain why we'll be late, but no, he insisted on picking us up. Few minutes later, he did show up, with Dragana already riding shotgun, so we had a nice ride for the remaining three blocks. Didn't get too winded up climbing to the fourth floor, so I made only a token show of panting on third step before the end, which has now become tradition.

Small victory - when he said the coffee table may be a tad small, we all urged him to move to the kitchen (actually the dining room, kitchen is separate in those apartments), to which he finally agreed. The conversation flowed the usual zigzag, from the corona virus to Nina's wedding on the sand to a rather dirty bosnian joke (welcome addition to the jokes section of sGradlj.com)... We brought 1,5l of 2017 apricot brandy, of which only Dragana took a shot; the rest of us went for his son-in-law's viljamovka (and I quoted a few lines from Hamlet for that).

The baklava was great, specially with hazelnuts instead of walnuts, and appropriately just a little sweet - what you get anywhere, including Prleski, is smothered in syrup. After the first shot Borko and she switched to beer (the "Deep" from Lidl... somehow I don't trust a german beer with english name, sounds like something cooked up for tourists), and Dragana switched to rosy wine. Then for the third drink he switched to wine, so I repeated the catehism I remember from Tereza's father, "Wein nach Bier, das rate ich dir; Bier nach Wein, des trinkt das Schwein" (wine after beer, I recommend; beer after wine is for swine). Eventually, at some point after midnight, we two had another pear, he stayed at wine, Dragana abstained. She's seriously out of shape for drinking, after two months of isolation and no company for drinking. We don't drink solo either (he confessed he does, sometimes).

The weekend I practically spent trying to fix whatever went wrong with RawTherapee, the app I use to develop the raw photos from eos70 into jpegs. The 5.6 version I previously used would crash at times, kicking me out of my session (i.e. I'd have to log back in, leaving a phantom session, inaccessible, in the background). Some time this week the Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS - i.e. stable and long term support version) came out, and I just had to get it, because I couldn't load the unixODBC I needed to connect this Byo to the postgres database I wanted to switch to. But then I got fresh and latest everything, including RawTherapee. I also got latest Python and had to reinstall everything about the Dabo framework, which now stopped throwing kernel faults and came up with a minor error ("can't set horizontal alignment in an element of a horizontal sizer set to expand"). The other minor bugs were too simple and I fixed them. This one may be tough.

On sunday I created an account on their forum, and then one of the developers said it's a bug with Canon's files (well, the bug existed only in 5.7 and 5.8, it worked fine in 5.6). Got the nightly build, and bingo - it works.

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Mentions: 25. maj, Anita Jennifer Berger (Anita), Byo (Byo), Čankovo, detelina, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), eos70, frendz parti, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Johana, Lena Čontić, Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Nenad Berger (Neša), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Prleski, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), serekeš, sGradlj.com, švorceniger, Tereza Mazek, in serbian