24-VIII-2004.
Twentieth.
Dad reports that Carp dropped by. He was programming a fiscal cash register down the street, so was in the neighborhood. Didn't remarry yet.
Barbecue tonight. She got into some japanese cuisine today, made first experimental sushi. I tried that back when Brlja was first time here (but he didn't dare risk a try, he ordered something in the „bro, gimme something concrete“ style), and as per my story they weren't too happy with it then. Now that both Lena and Nina learn japanese, we even bought a japanese cookbook and... now they like it too. The nori (the dried seaweed sheets into which it's folded) and short grain rice we found in that chinese shop on the boulevard, where I found the chinese bus business card.
The machine on the picture is Lena's computer in zmajček's box - I was still using the one Ricardo got me last year, so she got this one. The monitor is the little piece of shit he shoved on us, the Packard Bell, which is quite unrelated to both aitchpee and Bell, it just sounds. Well, it got the job done until further.
Nina notices every now and then what's different between here and home. Yesterday we went to search for a new guinea pig, and she just kept watching how the cars are bigger here, and there's no much hassle when getting one to go or leave it. Said she kept observing how they turn off the alarm, take off the claw from the steering wheel, insert the radio, and only then buckle up and start the engine. Here there's none of that - just belt, release handbrake, go. The advantage of having a small car - I'm no bait for thieves, and they are few of them per car. She said Corola counts as a bigger car there.
Twentyfirst.
Drove to Richmond, to stock their kitchen for the up and coming school year and move Nina. The nearest Walmart (actually out of town), filled the cart. And then oops, forgot all my plastic in my work jeans at home. Left the full cart at the register, returned after job not done. Then they went to the nearest Kroger and bought what they could with the cash at hand, just bare necessities and a cake.
Asked Nina what color does she want her room to be. She said ahem... orange... like this. And took off the stopper from the orange juice bottle. I pocketed it, and later told the guy at Lowe's „this shade“. He took the stopper, compared it with a dozen color cards, picked the closest match, read the numbers on it and typed the combination (of probably the CMYK* components). It came out exactly as she imagined it. The staircase is the smudgy blue and white (to cover up the fancy irregular surface), and the room is orange up to mid-window, and smudged orange-white above and on the ceiling. When the setting sun enters the room, if the door is open, looks like there's fire, when seen from the staircase.
Returned home as usual, started at dusk and arrived at night. The chinese bus leaves at midnight. Called a cab, 20$, UniJewel will pay. Seven in the morning I was in NYC (not Njujork), because Jüzek said he'd be there on sunday. Took a multiple ride subway ticket for 10$, lasts just as long as I need it. Actually need it only on arrival and departure, the rest of the time we walk, it's thirteen corners north and two west.
I arrived in Chinatown as scheduled, watched the Chinese do tai-chi in the park, came to the hotel around nine, left my bag and buzzed around the neighborhood until eleven, when my room will be ready. Avenues go south to north, counted from east, so 1st is on East River, 9th at Hudson; the streets go east to west, count from south to north; first one is just above the Canal street, which used to be a real canal; Central Park is from 59th to about 70th, anything north of 96th is not posh anymore. On sunday several avenues get closed for traffic, they pitch canopies and stalls and fair it is. There's everything, greek barbecue, thai food across, mobile phones, trinkets, clothes, even some atheists' union has a stall where they agitate to, finally, divide the church from the state.
Made this shot at the corner behind the hotel, this should be 2nd and 32nd. No, I didn't have a coffee at Starbucks, they don't have normal coffee (or they do, but takes too long to find it in the list and guess what it's called thiss week), but rather in this backstreet cafe. To the left of that iron sushi there's an indian restaurant, with front done all in bamboo; to the right there's a much more modest one, where I found I could have a humane lunch for about 6$ - soup, some stew, some meat. Real mess hall dish, just to make it through the day. I ate there later regularly, mostly dinners. They have free web access, but I had no machine with me, and the two they had were mostly occupied. Though I did use one at some point, to check something or report home.
In the afternoon I was at the office as scheduled, for just a couple of hours. Just to be seen coming on a sunday.
This time my room faces north, so I got a view - Imperial country (okay, empire state) building and Chrysler's tower. I didn't even try to open the window, so the glitter from the tower reflects on the glass. Until yesterday I ran a 1280x960 reslution, because the stock card that came with the camera was small. Now on monday (23rd) I treated myself with a larger, fits a few hundred shots, so I switched to 1600x1200. I hope it shows a little.
Workdays... well, dynamic and chaotic :). I was sitting by at least five different machines and didn't have a regular seat, because I had to schlepp on temporarily vacant ones. I heard a bunch of jewelers' stories, like the one when a lady brings a stone to set into a ring of her choice, and Akiv was smart enough to test the stone first. Saw it was no diamond at all, it was cubic zirconium, i.e. finely polished glass. He told the lady so, and she just saunters to a corner, pulls out her mobile and starts a fiery exchange with her husband. When she was done with him, she came back, packed the mobile, took out her credit card and bought a 40.000$ ring with a huge stone. This kind of hunters' tale makes the most of the office folklore.
Jüzek was there and creating chaos around himself. He's kind of managing stuff and putting things in order, but it seems he doesn't really know what he's doing. And it seems he's older than me just a year or two**... except he's got more whites in his beard and looks more serious, and has the habit to command, so he gave an impression that he was lots older than me. I barely noticed him while I was there - he isn't capable of keeping his attention on me for more than ten seconds. Asks a question, I answer as short and pithy as I can, and he immediately moves to someone else, or asks the next question and doesn't even wait for an answer. Besides, considering the chaos in which he keeps the company, it's no miracle that he has so many things to think about at the same time.
About my trip to Belgium, two weeks not a word. I should meet David next week in NY (going again, because they didn't start using the app, needs a lot of nudging, unfeasible on the phone). Now specially since Jüzek's son-in-law, who was the acting CEO in NY, moved to Belgium - now it's even less known who's in charge of what. Nobody, seems, is in charge of me, which is on one hand good, I'm in the quiet waters, but on the other, if I need something, there's nobody to turn to, I have to catch David. And he's rather busy these days, we don't catch the time to talk.
One day I spent working in Sima's pantry. It's more a paper warehouse than an office, and even so full of everything it is smaller than our bathroom. There's also the AC which cools the servers' rack (which are just flat boards aka blades, which plug into the frame, with disks somewhere and a common power supply, one monitor one keyboard and a switch to pick which one to connect to. This rack is right behind the wall, and it's all shoved into a corner by the reception desk. Expensive is the space here on Manhattan. I've seen roadside taverns with toilets larger than CEO's office here.
I see on the upper shelf some Fedex boxes. That's live pee funny business. To guarantee the quality of their diamonds, they send all the stones to be certified and appraised in the gemology (!) institute, which is an even smaller shop, two floors down. To make paperwork complete and paper trail traceable step by step, they don't carry the stones down the stairs, don't take the elevator, they fedex them. The guy from Fedex comes, picks up the boxes, takes them two storeys down. They check the stones, write the certificates, what with serial numbers, and return it all by Fedex, two storeys up. At each step two persons sign the takeover, and the paperwork grows like yeast.
Of course, normal stones have no serial number. These are a recent invention, because of Angola and partly South Africa, where various local wars were funded by diamond money. Now the official mines etch microscopical serial numbers by laser into the stones, and this somehow make them kosher and the rest of them are blood stones. In reality, there's absolutely no guarantee that the other stones can't get serial numbers. The etching is yet another trick whereby the price is elevated and some semblance of advantage over the competition, which still doesn't do the same, is gained. Eventually they all do it, they all pass the cost to the end customer, and everything is as it ever was, only costs more.
I shot this in the hotel room bathroom, just to show how clumsily they set the tiles, how big the gaps and how uneven it is - and this is in a hotel amid Manhattan, alas. Well she's a doctor when compared to these guys. Okay, a majstor.
Everything else is likewise botched. Various things around the hotel are done in some quasigreekroman style, with fake stone ornaments, freezes and whatnot in various corners, fake columns, ceiling edges, even inside the elevator. All of it is plaster or cork or sometimes a slightly firmer styrofoam, painted in metallic or stonelike paint. The emergency stairs were painted dozen times over, and each previous coat shows somewhere - it's peeling and falling off. One would say that theatrical fake walls are done more solidly.
There's real marble on the lobby floor and tesk. That's what you step on, put your hand on, made to lead you to a conclusion that everything else is just as solid. Yeah, right.
At least they firmly stick to the tradition: the hotel has no thirteenth floor.
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* for some reason the last one is black, but it doesn't say B, because it's meant to be „contrast“, spelled with a kay here to differ from cyan
** eventually turned out to be actually two years younger than me, found out later
Mentions: David Krakovski, Goran Staković (Brlja), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), majstor, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Njujork, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Simon Buchs (Sima), Tasa Radenkov (Carp), UniJewel, Yisaac Kwiatnik (Jüzek), zmajček, in serbian
24-V-2023 - 19-II-2026