17-II-2005.
Nothing specially new, except the weather is improving and we're gradually preparing to open the season of construction work. Another week or two and we may just start. The temperatures are around 10-15 degrees, a good part of the day stays sunny, a bit of rain occurs, not much of a wind either.
Lena got another special paper, she was announced the student of the trimester on sciences. She says it was not much of a problem, she heard it all last year - namely, it so happened that in this academic year the physics crriculum was scheduled for the seventh grade, while in the other one it was in sixth. Here it, of course, goes a bit extended. The maths they do is for ninth grade.
There's a ridiculous situation with the mortgage for the house. A bit of a greasier check from Gary came by, so I immediately paid an extraordinary installment to the loan. The app they have in the CU (which we call ŠKZ - štedno kreditna zadruga - savings and loans cooperative, renamed to stambena in house slang) which calculates the payments, simply didn't foresee anything but end-of-month payments, so no extra payments nor any other disorderly greenery. So the payment of 18th of january was applied against the interest for february, and the february payment (early in the month) was taken as if paid on 31st of march. Well, I see no valid reason to reason it out with them, this is the way they calculate, period. So the next payment is due on 30th of april. I wonder what would they do if I emptied my savings account on 2nd of a month, kept just a couple of bucks on it, would I still get the interest for the whole amount for the whole month.
I'll accumulate money now until end of april, and then I'll get to chip away a sizable chunk of the main debt - and that would include the tax return too.
Gary unhooked that Brandon Citroën guy (who sometimes omitted the ë from his signature, perhaps some accidental filtering happened en route, who'd know, but he turned out a lemon), the guy was simply in over his head. Fount some programmer girl, name sounds african or asian - Tameka Lemapan - who will take over hereafter. Brandon was a strange kind, first not a word for three weeks, then shifts into fifth and keeps demanding stuff few times a day, and just when I expect we'd be almost done, he just disappears and not a word. Then two months later he comes back with „hey, let's finish this“.
Our power bill is less than what it's in the summer, while the consumption is not too different. In august and september it's 1700-1800 kilohwats, and 1400 in january. And the power is cheaper in winter - october to may it's 0.0558$, june to september 0.0688$ per kilowatt.
News from home - Miljka and her sister have a total of five kids. Dad's pedagogical obfuscation of numbers... One of them is already a grandmother. The sister was the younger one, that much I remember... Škrba was the one complaining about the lack of snow, but dad says „don't see why he complains, here since 25th of january it's all white and gets replenished every few days“. Well, he complained in december, has shut up now.
We bought an electric barbecue, not to waste time waiting for the south winds. That is, we bought one last week, but took it to the kids in Richmond. And now we bought another one, exactly the same. Why same? Because theirs broke, and we didn't keep the receipt. Now we'll swap them, and then get a replacement. It's not bad, the meat stays juicy and has the smack. The smoke and experience are missing, but we'll do that when it southerns enough to sit outside. Few days ago we moved the old bathtub, filled it to a third with particle board debris, then the leaves she kept from last fall (neighbor's tree leans over our north fence) and then topped it with bought soil from bags. That'll be the nursery. She keeps buying seeds and bulbs, wants to make a jungle :).
I patched this one three times. The first sinemaspatch was made the same day, with Canon't pstitch, which didn't quite manage, the array wavers, the shots on left and right edge ended lower. The second time I did it with the canadian autostitch in 2013, a bit better but with lots of black edges. That one could probably do it much better, at the price of typing various numbers into fields with obfuscated names, then waiting for a few minutes while it works, then check the result, and repeat the process some twenty times until I get something. This one I did today (22nd of april 2024) in Hugin, by varying the method of projection and moving the point of view, done in three minutes.
Time for another inventory. Two yellow notebooks, one for Gary, the other one for UniJewel. The old scanner, no clue why it would be there, and I actually don't even remember we had two, but there it is on this shot. The house phone, with three units, this one was called „DOLE“ (down), the second was I guess in the kitchen, third upstairs in Lena's room. I see I plugged earbuds into it, because it occurred often that I'd need both hands while talking with David, he was prone to staying half an hour on the line.
The cakes of seedees, music and movies for which there is no room on the disk. More carrying bags for seedees heaped up in the corner, there must be a whole cake of them. Installation seedees for something (probably the other scanner), the tozna. Peanuts (just three or four, I don't bring more, else it would again happen that I eat half a kilo of them and gain a whole kilo of weight. The aitchpee's printer, still works. The ashtray* from Ricardo. Someone at UA replies to me... now let me find it.
"Expell one third, convert one third, and kill the rest - that will solve the problem" - or something like that. The plan was put in action in Europe in XX century, and it was just a matter of converting to other flavor of christianity.
And how many nations in Africa, South America have been forcibly converted?
Basically all of them. Can't think of any exceptions. That includes North America too.
Of the apps which ran at the time of this shot I recognize TotalCmd, thunderbird, firefox, winamp, and absolutely none of the remaining five. Of the available ones below, even less than that. There's audacity (sound kneader), Nero (for frying seedees), something to process the photos, something for videos (editor or player?)... further on, one whistles (v. house dictionary), no idea what the remaining twenty were. In the bottom left I see AOL's chatterbox, which David and I used for conversations - if the camera didn't work, the microphone did, and for most of the things just text sufficed. We tried a thimbleful of these chatteries, including something called skype and something from Gugao, but they weren't ready for the spotlight yet. This worked. We switched to it when he noticed the size of phone bills he was making.
The headset on the new scanner strongly resemble the Jensen's I had, but about those I clearly remember how I chewed them with the vacuuum cleaner two years ago, the cable was torn, no salvation there. This is, as I see, permanently plugged into Jovica (Jayvysea). The machine is basically the zmajček, but masked in the box which Ricardo procured. The cover screws are on that lid, because I was in the phase when [I thought that] Murphy should be intercepted - whenever I closed the box, I had to open it within two days. So better keep it open, at least I get to see when it needs cleaning. I see I got two breners (burners, but we keep using the german word, same as the gas torch used to burn off the bristle off a slaughtered pig), wish I knew why. Possibly one was a deevydee reader and the other a seedy burner. The speakers are from Go's stereo line, which she ain't using ever since they bought a 5.1 something from Lodgytek (five speakers, one bass cannon). On the right speaker there's the little web camera from two years ago. Still not finding any use for it, except taking a random shot from time to time. The software chatterboxen can't find a way to use it.
On UA, after remembering how Lena is happy now as she's beginning to understand french (learning at school), in a thread which meandered from the question „in which language do you (day)dream“, where Alex Firlongue asked:
French - I have a hard time with those latin like languages. Don't they know where the verbs go?:)
They do, and have much more liberty than you do. The structure of English sentence is too rigid, there's only about 4-5 ways you can toss the words around and still make sense, and you get about 2-3 different meanings that way. Any other ordering of words doesn't make sense in English. In English, any other ordering of words doesn't make sense. Any other ordering of words, in English, doesn't make sense. Doesn't in English any other ordering of words make sense (now this would be a question, right?). Ordering of words, any other, doesn't make in English sense (now this would be a completely OK sentence in Serbian, with "ordering" pulled up front for emphasis). Other ordering of words, any, in English sense doesn't make (this is a bit more literary like, but still completely OK in our grammar).
As you see, with liberty comes responsibility. In many other languages you can pretty much toss your words around, and out of 200 combinations which still make sense grammatically, you get about 150 which do make sense (semantically), and you get about 20-30 different shades of meaning - among them, a few with a mockery of the original meaning, doubt over original meaning, or just plain opposite to it. So yes, we need to know where our verbs go... and what they do in each of the possible places.
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* in serbian, pepeo - ash, pepeljara - ashtray. But I actually wrote pepeljuga - a cinderella, our regular slang.
Mentions: David Krakovski, Gary Brandywine, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Gugao, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Smiljka Grajin (Miljka), stambena zadruga, TotalCmd, tozna, UbiquAgora (UA), UniJewel, zmajček, in serbian