08-XII-2022.
Nothing much going on. She is making more delicacies. This time there's a novelty - pumpkin pekmez (!), which is yet to be tried out (with next pancakes*), and pumpkin flour, which she makes by dicing, running for some 20 hours in the dryer, then through the blender.
We go nowhere, do almost nothing. I write Byo, just filled the summer of 2016 and november of 2014. I touch my mrz pladžer** sporadically, though not much more than a day or two each fortnight. No hurry, really.
On fourth we set up the spruce. The same old plastic job from previous years, same string of hundred leds, we just bought a dozen shiny balls to replace the missing ones, and moved them away immediately, because one got smashed within a couple of minutes. Fuck that, ever since we have this spruce, it was all plastic, how come it's now glass? Sanda and Linda were screaming, Violet trying to explain it to them... Luckily, it's tiles everywhere, easy to brush away.
Around 19:25 I started summoning the next frendz parti, and while I dialed Borko I noticed Dragana tried to call. So I told him tentatively that we meet tomorrow unless I call again. Then I called her and she said she ran around a lot yesterday, all in 100-200m circle, but did five places and then in the afternoon the leg hurt so badly that she barely managed to get to the bathroom to throw the iron. She simply can't stand. So we adjourned.
On sixth I decided to poke a bit at solitaire, so it would show the difference (as I now solve more than half of the games, so I'm in the black) and the percentage (ditto, didn't cross my mind while I was at 10%, now it's around 60%). I was already trying to calculate those in my head, and I thought what for do we have these computers, anyway... and then I made an incredible bug. In the line
procenat=ok/(ok+ko)*100
for the first ok it said undefined, the other one was zero. Huh, what? I even called the children... Nina said „that's javascript, you're asking the wrong daughter“ - she does js even less than I do. Lena just the same, doesn't know where to begin, without looking at actual code... And then it crosses my mind that I did touch it in the editor where I also made notes, in another tab, to remind myself of things missing in Byo. Which I write in cyrillic. And sure enough, the o in the first ok was in cyrillic. What a facepalm. Anyways, by evening I got it all working and then I played it until I went to sleep (reading Benford at times), and it went quite well. The previous round I was bad at, below 50%, now I got up to 70%. As if I pumped myself with something, by just taking time to work on it. Deflated the next day, down to 61%.
Magi reported today that the paper arrived. Her mom did call the day before, something about... well, here, from skype:
she: My dears, a ful tanks! Today I got te birt certificate. How are you? Did winter also arive to you? Here it did, it's cold , stil no snow but tn we have fog to export. Kis you al a lot.
me: all okay, there's some drizzle, still no frost nor snowum, your mom called yesterday, something she can't make mobile calls, some guy came to fix something and now she doesn't manage her way through it with my dad it was the „teevee is dead“ when he leaves the remote on nondefault settings.hey, she said you'd bbe coming after new year... we see us?
she: oooooowch, I have te impresion tat mom's bored so se makes for „dynamics“ to herself and al oters! Se's expert to raise my presure and tat's wat I need te least now. I stil haven't recovered from te los of my husband; administration is kiling me, but literaly. I don't know anymore wat to send to wom, wom to cal, write e-mail, to form my page on teir site and to pas tem te documents and ten my mom apears wit a huge problem tat se has someting green on her pone and it's suc a big obstacle! I plan to come wen I complete everyting wit te oter retirement fund ( here tey have 2 ) and wit te organism troug wic I ask for aid on two bases. In case I don't keep up wit teir demands, I lose te rigt to aid wic is not nnegligible. Besides, I started seeing our lady doctor of coice, see her 2 times a mont, and most probably al tis stres caused my very bad blood image, perhaps beginings of diabetes. I need to also find wo wil take carge of our kuca*** (te dog). I'm faling apart , I mis my husband to te pain! But let me stop complaining, wen I come to ZR, tis time I'l come to see you to see eac oter and alk it al out. Kis to you al
Congratulated Melanija on her birthday, she replied briefly with „thanks for remembering exactly the day and the year. We in Florida on Golf side to shorten te Boaton winter a bit. We enjoy the sunurises and susnets. Guess which of the 2 photos is which?“. Easy, if it's gulfside, then the one with some land on the horizon is facing east.
Around lunch majstor Mile's son came to reshuffle the tiles where the roof was leaking. He climbed up and worked for half an hour, said the tiles were fit too snugly, no space was left for them to wiggle, so when they shrink in cold weather, they tend to pop out. The drizzle went stronger and weaker as he worked. Refused to charge me a dime. Come spring, we should just screw the tiles in in those places and forget about them.
In the evening called Boća, just like that, to make him write something for suština, without actually telling him why I won't publish what I wrote - to not push out his april article. And as if he knew what I meant, he kept returning to „it's all in godly hands, alright you don't believe but in the end it comes to be so“. Well, we'll see. We talked at length, he passed me a link to his saved broadcasts of his once virtual radio emisija. Tried to play them upstairs on cimet, but something seems to have wiped out the player from the page. We tested this year's cherry, good one, we'll do that on monday.
In the morning (9th) I let it play on zmajček, nice, she even likes it, listenable. Nothing that would stick to my ears, but then nothing that would raise my pressure either, not a small thing.
Our Rundek (the tomcat) returned after five days, when we thought he was gone forever. Like new, not a hair missing. He either didn't get into any fights, or had no proper opponents. Wasn't particularly hungry either.
Aleksa appeared. It's been a few years since the last time. Wife is here too. He brought some guys to clean up the yard and trim the wallnut. It suits us how they cropped it - no low branches chafing our garage roof, his terrace or gable now, yet the crown is big and tall, will provide good shade like before. Haven't seen him, she did, says he's as fat as before, 120 or thereabouts, and told her how both grandsons are now big boys, and also as wide.
Eleventh. Went for groceries, but called Dragana first to see about tomorrow, so we'd know what to buy and what not. Nope, none of it, leg is fucking her seriously. Not that she wouldn't be able to walk the 20m to the cab, it's that she can't sit for five or six hours straight. I asked her whether to pass dad's walking stick to her, thanks but no, thanks, she used one when she was fresh from surgery for a month or two, won't do that no more. She suggested gavež (a local plant, saw it on Carska bara, can't find proper translation, our wikipedia doesn't have it, and all the mentions on the web have it as gavez (!)). It helps with bone healing, actually is not recommended until the break connects, because it makes the bone grow so fast that it happens that the surrounding tissue may get caught in the crack. Nope, tried that already. So we adjourn for another week, nothing tomorrow. Just when we planned a bit of barbecue.
The gas stopped in the afternoon. The pipes do get disturbed here and there, just this week we were without water once, from 9 to 16, because they're building measuring stations, to detect leaks and plan where to dig - the whole network is aout 60 years old and the concrete pipes are brittle. And it often happens that when one team digs, they break someone else's pipes.
Twelfth. Having slept until noon on eleventh, I stayed (more Benford) until after two, but just couldn't sleep. Kept turning, shifting pillows, and eventually got up before seven, urgent pee. Snow! It's been ten years since we had snow this early. It wasn't cold inside yet, the eight cubics of concrete have lots of inertia, and then she went into the basement to start the fire in the boiler, to lessen the heap of kindling there. Linda and Sanda wanted to get out as soon as they got up, but getting them dressed up is just too much. Made them a table snowman, which lasted whole twenty minutes.
As the gas didn't come yet, I called Srbijagas, got them on the fifth phone number, and the majstors really came fast. And it turns out that we had gas all the time, it's that the heater detected low pressure in the heating pipes, and the guy just turned the black knob and it all started working. So that's the feed valve? Looks like a volume knob on an older radio. It just didn't get into my head, just like it didn't five years ago, or else I'd remember. There's another valve, a real one, behind the boiler, but it's near unreachable behind all that kindling. Even less logical is the idea that the heater won't do tap water if the pressure in the heating is below 1,2 bar. But so it is.
Then she notices, after lunch, that the opticians are working on the pole opposite our house, so I walked out to talk to them. They said they should have been doing houses now but fuckit it's december, they had to skip last two days because of the rain, so january then. You get a router, and its wireless is so much that one would suffice for the whole street. And the speed, the guy said, „I load a movie and it comes down whole in three seconds, and I picked the second slowest plan“. Okay, let's see when it comes.
----
* if Peter Pan makes a cake, is it necessarily a pancake?
** the letter dž, on cyrillic keyboard, is where y is, bottom left. I know, that's where z usually is, but it depends on your definition of usual - our keyboard layouts aren't qwerty, they are qwertz, or in cyrillic, lj nj e r t z. So if you type „player“ on a cyrillic keyboard, pladžer is what you get. For mrz, see house dictionary.
*** in her haircut latin, this could be kuca (a puppy) or kuća (house), so she had to explain in the parentheses
Mentions: Aleksa Pajkov, Božidar Sokolović (Boća), Byo (Byo), cimet, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), emisija, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), majstor, majstor Mile, Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Margita Gunaroši (Magi), Melanija Tisarević, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pekmez, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), solitaire, suština, Violet, zmajček, in serbian