06-III-2023.
On 28th Magi called, set the visit for next day, and so she came. Managed to find the street, but with the confusion about house numbers in our street, had to ask around, easier that way. And she found someone, started adding stuff to the description and it clicked when she mentioned the twins - „ah, the thin blonde, yeh, over there...“. My lady was glad to hear this.
So we sat for some three hours. She talked a lot, specially about her late husband, how his first wife died of something years ago, how their younger son died of overdose (all of this in France, where he went in 1972 to study language but found work instead and got promoted several times), how the older son didn't respond to calls when the guy was dying, but appeared at cremation and then rapidly vanished. Seems that this son also powders his nose often.
She, then, plans to cram somehow the remaining five years to full french retirement. She already inherited husband's, and will be getting something from here, and even when she wins this third one, the total will be limited to 1700€, as per french social. She complains, vents frustration, but doesn't even ask how much of a monthly income would suffice for a decent life here. She's got a house here, or could live in that apartment with her mom, the cost of rent alone would practically double her disposable income. In any case, she looks better than on 26-V-2021..
On third Lena sent, via Telegram, into the platoon chat, a link to one of the four advertising videos she shot in Novi. Looks good, specially in the discarded bits they ran during the exit credits, where she laughs a lot. In the official act she acts officially.
Out of the blue, an email from Melanija. She dreamt of us, now retells. Sitting with us, talking with my dear, kids running around, somewhere in an apartment. Half guess half miss. It seems that reading Byo last year left some impression, there are clues. I'm of a mind to publish again, but not advertise it much, once we get optical connection. Which is don't croak, donkey - may be june again, because they said it'll be in march, april latest, perhaps may.
She had haircut the vines from the garage to the gate (we don't have a gate, the name is just a placeholder), and did it knee high. Even if it doesn't bear much fruit this year, let it rebirth at least. The last two-three years it overgrew, to the point where it obstructed passage, we had to bend/break it in places just to avoid chafing against it. Now in the place where one vine is missing she planted josta[berry], the german hybrid of black currant and gooseberry.
Then it was my turn to chop the cuttings into manageable sticks of about 70cm and tie them in bundles, which suddenly ended after four bundles. For a while the job looked endless. Took me three hours.
She finally planted the few dozens of strawberries into quasi flowerpots - the water bottles chopped at half height into two vessels of 3l each. Laid them out as shown.
Some thornless blackberries are next, just the kind we already have at the garden, to fill the fence on Aleksa's side. Should have some pekmez in two-three years.
On the evening of fifth we talked with Go, but the connection got bad really fast, and gugolj froze. Then I started Telegram on my phone, and it worked nicely with the voice. When I tried to turn the video on, it froze too. So I don't know how's it now with Stanley's father, we know he was bankrupt last time. Sent a bouncy check to some guy in Nigeria, and waited for the promised two million to arrive :facepalm:. I'd sort of understand such a thing twenty years ago, there were people who didn't know the tricks then, but it's 2023 now.
Dragana managed to get me on my phone, as I kept it on charger and set it to not suspend while so, which I did long ago but it finally worked. The next day I poked around its files and found where to turn the wakeup-on-call feature, which worked just once, using a trick I did early on and then forgot that I did it while on Mobian, and not on Manjaro Phosh. Tried to repeat it but it kept resetting my edits to the .rules file back to default, so back to square one. Maybe. More messing ahead.
I kept busy with it almost until the departure to the 95th frendz parti. We took the apple of the unknown year, probably older than 2019. I also went into Roda to get some USB cables, the current bunch wore out, but they don't keep them anymore, the shelf where they used to have adapters, plugs, cables, mice, headsets and keyboards is now full of pans and pots. We got to Dragana some ten minutes before Borko, as he was detained by his daughter for something. She's on antibiotics again, middle ear this time, and Paja also changed her pressure therapy... so she avoided drinking. She drank the first brandy with us, he poured her the second, but it seems that she swapped that with my empty glass - which she didn't exactly notice, but saw how my glass got much fuller while hers got empty, all of a sudden. I didn't notice at all, except that I thought that this third glass took quite a while to drain. Borko already finished his first glass of wine when I finished brandy and finally switched to wine. Since Dragana didn't drink, neither did she - stayed on one brandy, one beer, so us guys drank one bottle of wine, period. And when the ladies don't drink, they become somehow silent, so it turned more or less into a discussion between us guys. I did succeed in preventing him from telling the same story about a mathematician in USSR, which begins with getting a tip ahead of impending arrest, and ends in an evening elementary school course for diggers somewhere in Syberia and Planck's constant (in his version, Cauchy's convergence criterion). Version that Borislav Pekić retold in a novel was much better.
The longest discussion was, actually, about Fefi and, related to it, DBA, and what did he find on his second wife when his first one was so much better by any criteria, except perhaps in compatibility with his overbearing mother.
The other subject was Milan Kovačević and his „Karavan“ series, and accordingly, Zuko Džumhur with „Hodoljublja“* and dozen other such educational and yet very popular serieses**, and why aren't they made anymore. Step by step I explained that such things were the fruit of socialism and the notion that television should also be educational, which is impossible today, education is now a commodity and has to be paid, and the screen now receives only the stuff which will raise the ratings and the price of advertising space. And advertising is that king Midas, whose magic touch turns everything into turds. And then another step by step explanation on the example of email, and how that is now reduced to known senders only, because anyone else is suspect, could be advertising.
The next day the hens arrived at detelina, so I went to pick them. Everything was fine, too bad that the white ones weren't offered when we subscribed (the expression for „I put my name on the list for hens“ is just „I wrote hens“). They had 2000 hens to distribute, and in that house I forgot to buy the cigarette tubes. But got the hens safely home.
In the afternoon I walked to that car-sheet-metal-worker [autolimar] cum car painter to see about that rear door on Joda, but he wasn't there. Met that guy from skrobara, our once neighbor on Vir in 1988, walking with his missus. See them often around here, she met them the other week. On the way back dropped by another neighbor because we'd be running out of tobacco in a few days, had a long and wide chat with him, not bad plum brandy but it's not his own, and I'm not in the habit of drinking during the day, we do it as nightcap. His wife will bring a kilo or two tomorrow or overmorrow.
By dusk I noticed one of the new hens got out of the coop. They stayed in the cabin, didn't exit into the rest of the coop, it takes time to build coexistence between the old and new flock, but this one found a tear in the netting on the part of the ceiling which we left for air. The chicken wire rots in a few years, must be she left that way. she put her back, said we'll have to fix the nettings. Wood holds, wire falls apart.
In the evening, right when I was finishing the cliffhanger/intro transition between the first two seasons of Stari Gejt (stargate, on putlocker), she comes and says that Aleksa's dog came into our yard and ate all the cat food. He got them a couple of weeks ago, I guess to keep our cats away. Well now it came here. His son came (he and wife have returned already, I guess to Germany), leashed the mongrel and dragged it away. And we know where there's a hole in the fence, that was made by burglars when we were in Virginia, even the pole is bent. We patched it, sort of, the net is partly unraveled there.
Eight of march. The neighbor came with 2kg of tobacco. She left off, and she went to check on the hens and found that the dog barged into the coop last night and took two (new) hens and ate them by the fence. Found the feathers strewn, found the weak spot in the coop's netting. Well fuckit.
Vasa of burundi announced the weather worsening for the weekend, so if you meant to barbecue (roštiljati), it's a will not can. I replied in fake italian, „vietato rostigliare esterno“, which got a bunch of laughs from the folks. He joined with „raspagliare di ognio molti pericoloso“ („raspaljivanje“ - fanning [the flames], „oganj“ - flame, fire, same sanskrt root as ignition).
Set the limar for tomorrow. Swung by detelina to buy them tubes I forgot yesterday, and wrote six more hens, Najka said they're slated for end of month.
Marinko on folder vs directory:
but believe me I was once in a situation to explain why I still say directory when it's called folder now
and I asked them if they knew what's command promt, what CMD was?
says the dude, of course I know, even went on salting how he knows that you have to push it as admin... I interrupted him there and asked what's the command to list the folder contents, and he goes of course I know, it's „dir“... and stopped right there, he got it... and I so long goodbye.
In the evening it came to my mind that it wouldn't be bad to roast a fresh version of Manjaro to the phone. Avoiding to touch megi's multiboot on he SD card, I roasted it on the eMMC card, the main and faster one, because the factory OS that came with it was more not working than working. In less than half an hour I had a working phone. In the morning I installed Telegram, and it worked right away, without fucking around with account registration, I simply copied its folders [not directories, this is linux, expression is permitted] from the SD card, beatus linux, everything works. Well not quite everything, the alarm clock still doesn't ring while the phone is suspended, the snapshooting app doesn't save - needs a .20 version of something that's on .23.0, and a few more piddly trifles. But I got everything else.
Friday, 10th. Finally caught up with the sheet metal worker, says it'll be 150€, he'll call me on monday or tuesday.
In the evening I felt like taking a leak, but the bathroom was, of course, occupied - all four grandchildren love to take a gadget with them and sit for a while, so I went to the yard to water the yew. I noticed that the plate with cat food is clean, and also the floor around it - cats never clean it up. Nina said it must be the hedgehogs. Well they do but they come out earlier, not after 22. Then she heard something from the yard, oh fuckit it must be the dog again. I grabbed a slat and an old spade handle and went down the yard to look for it, and there it was. Got into the narrow passage behind the chicken coop, and then got inside. Aha, now I know where the weak spot is. And it doesn't know how to get out, so I managed to slap it on the back a few times, when it was crouching in the corner, just to make it understand it did something wrong, but instead of looking guilty, it turned on its back, rocked a rear paw and stuck its tongue out, as in „and now scratch my belly“. Nina turned on the light on her phone, to see to grab the dog by the collar, and dragged it out, through the garage, all the way to the street. We later noticed two more of the young hens were missing, but didn't see more feathers spread anywhere.
Didn't see it all day saturday. We used the relatively nice weather (on thursday it rained, on friday almost) so we barricaded all the passages where it snuck under the fence. We found that those two hens flew over to the other neighbor, and he did call to meet at the fence and returned them. Also insisted that we take a rooster from him, same as the last one, just smaller. He loves to see a rooster, but can't keep so many of them, so let this one be on our side. And the coop was more quiet since then. The rooster took a few days to get used to the new place - first night he didn't know where to sleep, reacted to each appearance of the neighbor as if expecting food.
On sunday (12th) there's the dog again, in Juliška's yard. She's bitching, says it's destroying her flowers, pulls it out and brings to her door. She'll see to getting rid of it. Aleksa and wife are gone, and the son is maybe still here, we aren't seeing him.
Called Dragana in the afternoon, to see how's she standing with the drinks, i.e. can we count on her as if she were fully manned. Said she was okay, therapy gone. Good, there's a backlog waiting for you...
On monday afternoon we took, on bikes, the girls to Springfield. They had some birthday scheduled for 18, so we left earlier, let's say it was 14 to 17, so they had time enough to jump, run, climb and what not to their full. We even got the routine right when they sit up there on the platform, stick out their hands (sometimes legs too) through the net, and I aim the ball at them. This time they started catching it, with more skill now. Though, Sanda tried to troll me here and there, she'd throw the ball way out left. Okay, can do that once, but when she did it for the second time, I simply left my position. Then later we did it again, and they got better at catching, and I threw it better too.
For the 96th frendz parti at Borko's we came a couple of minutes earlier, counting on him taking the car to pick Dragana, and assuming that who knows where'll he find a slot to park the car, so we sat at the bench by the entrance and waited until 19:30. We concluded that we have waited long enough, and his terrace seems to be lit from inside... perhaps they were already up there. We got up and there they come, right from the parking. Climbing up went much easier than before, at Dragana's speed...
We drank a bit more than before, and the conversation zigzagged considerably, even showing the gags from phones didn't take too long. Dragana, amazingly, joined my deer with a beer, as it allegedly goes well with a lasagna... But then didn't finish it, switching to wine side. The famous line „Wein nach Bier, das rate ich dir“ was quoted.
Well, this time we were sleepy so we dispersed quite early. Were in bed by 1:15.
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* hodočašće+rodoljublje = pilgrimage+patrotism
** well it's plural, right?
Mentions: 26-V-2021., Aleksa Pajkov, burundi, Byo (Byo), Čedomir Spajin (Paja), DBA, detelina, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), Ferenc Farkaš (Fefi), frendz parti, Gorana Sredljević (Go), gugolj, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Joda, Juliška, Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Margita Gunaroši (Magi), Marinko Protić, Melanija Tisarević, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Novi Sad, pekmez, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), skrobara, Springfield, Stanley Berger, in serbian