The main chandelier above the dining table almost fell. It's a sizeable piece of glass, and it is held by the neck, i.e. by a bakelite ring around it, and it failed. Did I say failed? It fell apart. I crap on your sound movie*.
(... 23 words...) This new chandelier is just a plastic pot, she just drilled a hole for the cable and neck, and four more holes around it for ventilation.
Time has come to get that planer in shape. She took to painting it, part by part (and many parts could be dismounted), with the silvery paint for stovepipes (called bronze for some reason), as if it was a car. Because we mean to make that staircase while Go is still here, and will smooth the planks on it.
On twonysixth uncle Staja came to keep dad company. We got them here for lunch, it being a saturday, so there. Seeing by the shots, there was a pork shoulder in a plek with potato halves around, and swiss chards from Čankovo (of course, we aren't crazy to buy when it just grows by itself). Can't see what was drunk, the labels (aka etikete) are in the dark, and I can't guess whose style they were, we still haven't developed our own etiquette. There are two bottles on the table, and there's brandy in the shots. Perhaps dad brought his, or maybe this was the time when uncle Staja brought his dženerika.
I was stubbornly eager to learn, finally, whether the dženerika/džanarika is that kind of fruit, closely related to plum, that we call ringlov here. The answer I got was so circumspect („round then cornered“), that in the end I knew even less. The thing cleared when he brought a ltier [of dženerika brandy], possibly right today. I wasn't expecting anything special, but this was... Fuckit, how can they drink that? Swill that be swill, our worst is three in the brow compared to this.
We didn't throw it away. We used it. Had enough alcohol to serve as disinfectant for jar lids when pekmez was cooked, and a few other technical applications.
On twentyseventh we went, together with Go and Neša to see Lena. At the new roommate's, few blocks below the old place. We never saw the roommate, not sure we missed anything. There an interesting photo occurred, worth of an article on suština.
An opinion took root that the vampires don't see themselves in a mirror. Those who asked at the inventors' (therefore in more forested areas of Serbia) say that's not in the tradition. But such blunders are inevitable when one doesn't use the original stuff and goes for the chinese j... romanticized chewy that that fire attendant placed into Romania, because count Ţepeş was allegedly more interesting than the simple miller Savanović. I'll never understand the british sucking up to aristocracy, as if they hope to become related to them and inherit the titles if they behave politely.
Of course we all remember the key scene from „Fearless vampire killers“, when the old prof and Polanski lead the quadrille** and come to the big mirror where they two are seen alone. Something like that happened to me.
How did I achieve that? By learned methods.
In other words, I learned that when something unexpected flies into my scene, to shoot first and think later. This time I even had the time to understand the trick, while taking the shot.
The trick is that these two mirrors are not one mirror (which should be clear from square one, but isn't, see below), and are attached to cupboard doors. A student's cupboard, as it were, can't ever close completely, no matter that the lady didn't have an exaggerated count of garments. Perhaps there was a timed avalanche of painting gear inside, don't know, and better that I don't know.
So the doors don't close completely, and the left frame shows the scene some 20cm more to the left (and the right one to the right) than it should. Just enough that I'm not in the scene, because I was in the gap, created by this simple geometric feat.
To the classical quandary of our other daughter, „are my eyes fooling me, or is this a trick of light?“, the answer is, thus, affirmative. There's no trick, I didn't mess with the scene, the picture shows exactly what I saw with bare eyes. It classifies as a trick only because the spectator somehow expects that the mirrors are coplanar, and the view in them is unbroken, whole. The tricks are often based on this property of the eye, namely the brain, to first see what it expects to see, then later maybe notices what it saw. If it did, fine, if it didn't, also fine.
And, BTW, mr Stoker (really a fire attendant) was, to make things worse, an Irishman. And he picked the Dracula story second hand, from some murky peddler, who amused him for a couple of days with his allegedly transylvanian legends.
Then we went to _pahuljica to a good lunch. Neša liked to watch the geese, that they had in a pen, fenced area doubling as a zoo. Then we drove Lena to Vidikovac, as she'll probably spend a couple of days at Zlija's. There was some lunapark, a fair of sorts, and we found this nice terrace to have a slow coffee, at ease.
The sun was setting, nice angle, bunch of good shots.
There's a shop on this terrace which offers not catering, not kejtering - it's ketering. The word is „slow food for long life“. Neša had fun with flowers, straw, spoon. All in all a nice afternoon, third Miholjsko summer. And I probably wouldn't be able to find that terrace again, I have no idea where this was.
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* memorable quote from a cult movie
** in serbian it's transliterated from french as kadril, because the Frenches don't pronounce the u; however, there was already a number of appearances of 'kvadril' in newspapers here.
