[date is arbitrary - could be any day of this fall]
Going to the hospital's south wing to do some work. Trying to get back to downtown the shorter way, down the narrow path between the railroad track and the fence, driving the clanky trabant. I've been down this path many times, first driving the DBA yugos, then dad's kafeni, now this. Once I even had to drive backwards, because not only there was a train parked on this track, but also another one on the one track I'd have to cross to get out (the industrial track that goes behind the fence into LebarProm). Višnja was impressed then - for some reason she kept me company that day, I guess I was to return her to her work. There's a slight curve to it, so initially you don't really see all the way through, only after you're halfway in.
Well, this was the last time down this path, because it was deliberately blocked by a piece of track dug as a pole smack in the middle of the path... near its exit on the other end. There was no sign whatsoever, ever. It never said "don't drive here". They just got annoyed with the six cars a month that would go that way, so they put the pole.
I got even more annoyed with this attitude, and decided to drive around the pole. That meant to either blow the fence, which trabant can't do anyway, or to straddle the track on the left, or drive 100m in reverse between the fence and tracks again, of which I chose straddle. I got through. It blew a hole in the muffler, though, near an existing hole in the floor (never knew where that one was, probably somewhere above the pedals). Because of this hole, the exhaust fumes were entering the cabin for the next year or two, until we replaced the muffler... i.e. pulled together enough money to do that.
For this winter we bought four hens. Used the leftover siporeks blocks (still lots of them around) to fence a piece of basement for them, put a lightbulb and fed them there. Had eggs all winter. Then in spring, perhaps summer, the stink became a bit too much, so we slaughtered them (not we, we took them, perhaps to Oma, for that) and had good soup and roast several times.
Granma wanted to get rid of the big cherry that we two planted by the garage back in 1976. It was huge and bore copious fruit, and luckily the garage roof was flat so the girls would climb on it and pick cherries at ease. And I climbed deep into its crown and would often come down with a bag full of cherries. Nope, granma was adamant, take it out, I can't swipe the leaves anymore. Well why do you, you need not, why swipe at all? Well how does it look, so unswiped, can't have that, just take it out.
And we couldn't convince her at all that swiping the leaves is not her obligation, not even necessary, nope, her mind wouldn't accept the possibility of „don't care how the backyard looks“, we had to cut it down. Partly dad, partly I, we cut it into short logs, which I gradually drove home for fuel. My axe got lodged into one tough piece, couldn't push it through even with a mallet, couldn't pull it out, until next season when it dried. Not bad as fuel, but only when it dries.
In other news, Brlja has a mobile. It's not as large as the first models, the likes of which we were seeing in Hungary, this comfortably fits into a pocket, probably a Motorola or nokla, though Ericsson (hun. eričšon, erichshon) was popular too. Costs him a devil and a half - not just the phone, but the calls are charged on both sides, and if you're roaming, pants fall. Ouch, when that gains traction here, I may need to start watching for grannies at the steering wheel, holding the mobile in the left and pretending to drive with the right.
The rest of us in Avai didn't even think of getting one, the price is a bit too steep and as a programmer I exactly prefer not to be easy to find when they need me, as most of the time it happens to be something very urgent and utterly irrelevant. The first symptom of my great love of telephony is that the phone line is under her name, which happened by circumstance so now it's her name in the phone directory. Though, there's some doctor in town with the same surname, and his wife has the same name as she, only the hungarian version of it, so we had many wrong number calls.
No matter how flimsy our phone system was so far, everyone knew that programmers go to Lastovo [island] for vacations, exactly because there are no phones there.
2-X-2010 - 4-VIII-2025