Three things were happening in parallel. One, the building of the house. We have finished digging the basement, and filling the foundation with the excavated soil. But there was too much of it, so we decided to build a little hill, so the girls will have some slope for the sled in the winter, and it would serve as some windshield so the soil wouldn't dry so fast in the summer. The prevailing wind here is košava, southeast, and the blind side of the house (facing neighbor, windowless) faces northeast, so this could actually work - we placed the hill as an extension of that side, along the edge of the lot.
Then we were supposed to put a concrete slab all over the foundation, but that requires tamping the fill. Now tamping 85 square meters would take me some significant time to do manually, or we could hire someone with a tamper - but then with the basement just 60cm behind the rear edge of the foundation, the vibrations may just cause the soil to crumble and thus subject the foundation to unnecessary strain. My solution was water. Went to a neighbor who works at the city cleanup and greenery - garbage collection, cesspit drainage and parks - and paid for a whole truck of water, seven cubic meters. I laid a wall of soil around the edges and when the truck came I just told it to pour all seven tons on the foundation. That gave me about 7-8cm of water all over it, which settled the clay. Simple does it.
Then we had a moba to pour the slab. I think this is when we bought a cement mixer, an old used one, with a 50cc 2-cycle petrol engine. We got it from some pal of Arpi's, who was a mason at the time (and generally a bum etc... in the end, last I heard, he made more prison years than work staž). It gave us trouble at times, I had to have a few spare spark plugs around, but would eventually get the job done.
The moba was tough, this is eight cubic metres of concrete. We worked until dark, and almost wanted to call it done and finish the next day, Loba was already compaining that he was too tired, but oma was working like insane, she cries and keeps shoveling. This was the last time we called her, she works too fast too early, and pulls others with her, everyone gets too tired, no good. But we finished this somehow.
The app for stambena was progressing nicely. Lidija didn't do much, she was more of a designer at this gig; Radoje and I did most of the stuff. I was being both taught the trade and hands-on tested at the same time, and he came to the conclusion that I'm the guy he needs in stour. He went to Žića and asked for a place to be opened, he needs one more guy (this was the third parallel thing). Nope, can't do, there's an ongoing restriction on administrative hiring, only production is allowed. But the director of another oour got wind of this and, well, he knew me from kviskoteka and knew my dad... and he grew pigs at home. Now since dad was a graduate cowboy and in charge of raw material supplies, i.e. production and procurement of livestock to slaughter, there was something called "the green plan", whereby the food production industry would finance the peasants to grow more cattle more efficiently, and he was in charge of granting that money and checking how it's spent. Which meant he went out to see many stables and pigpens, and this director just built one pigpen for his pigs (here, in town, it wasn't uncommon, this is an agricultural area). So he arranged for dad to come check it out, and almost as an afterthought, told him to bring me along.
So I was being sized up and I knew it - of course, Radoje told me everything, the whole schema, and that it'd be quite possible that I'd be stationed in this oour and not in the stour central, but it's the same machine anyway and about 200m away (curiously, the enterprise where mom used to work was once in that same building). I passed. And the pigpen was actually great, surprisingly clean and not smelly - you wouldn't believe he had so many pigs. Washed it a lot, though, and the floor was profiled just right for the water to carry everything away.
Now the third part of it was that Žića, when this guy created an opening for me in his oour, all of a sudden changed his mind and created one in the central. The gates were now open, the schema worked - perhaps not the way it was designed, but actually better. Though I guess the pay would be better the other way, but hey, I came to become a programmer, so can't be a chooser.
So during this month I was often in contact with Radoje, and then was told when an ad for the position was opened, submitted my application and then sat through the last popravni exams in MPSŠC, completed the paperwork for my class, cleared the equipment in the computing sekcija (they charged me two cassettes), filled in whatever was required and at the end of the month just picked up my papers. There was no farewell party.