31-V-2011.
The peasants are on strike, the gov't is mucking up something about buyoff or fuel subsidies or whatever. Since they own their land, they can't just strike the way workers do, come to the production site and sit. Instead, they drive out their tractors and make barricades on select roads, burn a few old tires, there's never lack of those, and block the roads for at least dozen hours. Then disperse for the night and reconvene in the morning, until the negotiations end this way or another. This happens almost every year, as we never had a government which didn't try to fuck the peasants or at least get them to carry the worst part of whatever burden their measures create. Don't know which was it this time, doesn't matter.
Lena coming from Belgrade by šinobus.
So Lena was left stranded in Belgrade. The intercity buses aren't going, hitchhiking is even less certain, but she managed to come home. From that room she could easily walk to the Dunav (Danube) station, it's not far. The ride home by a šinobus takes more than two hours (it was always 90 minutes by bus - what technology makes faster, traffic density slows down), because there's no straight railway. There's a layover in Pančevo, and then possibly another in Orlovat. The latter is a wait even without layover, because two cars from the Novi have to be joined to the composition. Though it's possible that at this time there was no service to Novi, because someone stole a few kilometers of tracks, somewhere between Titel and Kać.
She didn't have much to carry - the rolled up packing paper for her drawings, and some tools. Regarldess, now I have the saxo, I can do a doček of my daughter and give her a ride, be it just the 300m to Fabrika station.
At work - some stuff with CAAR, version for 2009, small fixes. A default '0' in three places seems to have been wrong, should have been left as null or empty, whichever. Four days ago there was more of that, about new lookup list for oocyte source - whether own, fresh, thawed, oocyte, embryo, embryo banking (i.e. this cycle is to produce them for later) etc etc. Same for SHET, some fields must be blanks for some pregnancy statuses, some other must be null if cycle was canceled (or cancelled, depending on who checks your spells). Also, something called PGD can be done on fresh cycles only, on other types it must be null (not blank! - the sticklers). And a dozen more of such minutiae in validation and in the engine.
Found a snafu in the portal, where we named the SSN field as it is, forgetting that Jan named it SNN in his tables...
In the evening we all sat on the terrace and played kanasta again.
The next day Go, Stanley, Lena and I went in the afternoon to Čankovo to mow the grass. She was already there, took Lena's bike (hers had some fault, I guess). We had trouble with the mower, as that's the one dad was using for years around both houses, so we took the blade off to sharpen it. Seems we put it back the wrong way, which made it worse. Tried with the scythe, Stanley saw to that, but its handle broke in half after a few minutes. He went on with the remaining half, but that's tiresome and he had to give up soon. Then Zeki appeared, of course, he had to see what was going on, and he then brought his own mower, which was an honestly grumfed home job, a washer's motor on a steel frame, with wheels, blade and handle, plug and run. It cut rather low, and we got all kinds of places except flat. Got the job done somehow, as far as we could.
Go had tough luck with the water pump - the lever suddenly let go and she hit her fingers with it against the trunk of it. The piston got stuck and whatever connected it to the lever just broke. So we had no water, and then just picked up our stuff when we got sufficiently thirsty and went home.
Mentions: CAAR, Čankovo, doček, Fabrika station, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jovan Dimijan (Zeki), Novi Sad, saxo, SHET, Stanley Berger, šinobus, in serbian