01-X-2012.
Got into the saxo and went to the main green market. Bought another wood grinder, the kind that's screwed under a workbench, so that just its head peeks above the top, where there's a ruler which would lead the piece sliding at an exactly set distance from its axis, and thus achieve a straight and uniform groove, rounded edge or whatever.
The workbench was already ready. (... 31 word...) The top board was the drawing board that those furniture makers by the swimming pool made for Go, back in 1998 when she enlisted into architecture. Screwing the grinder to hang underneath was no problem at all, got it all working on first try.
This machine did a lot of work in the following months - a shelf was made, slats were rounded, lots of it. And we bought various cutting bits for the grinders, many of which actually were used, at least sometimes.
Now that we were already on the [green] market, we solved one more problem. Cigarettes. The state, encouraged by experiences from the west, whenever it itches for more money, increases the tax or excise tax. The trouble is that it's doing so for decades, and the share of it in the price of cigarette is above half for quite a long time, maybe even three quarters. Well, we aren't a bottomless barrel either... you carry yourself to 15:00 (v. house dictionary). We found some smugglers on the [green] market, bought tobacco and paper. Not too shabby, too bad I left the tozna in Americah.
The tobacco we found was a bit sharper, not to roll your own.. Maybe we'd get used to it over time, but we'd need two toznas. So the next day she went to the kiosk and bought ready paper shells with filter, and a gadget to shove the tobacco into them. Bought the tabakeras (cigarette boxes), with a latex string holder, for 18 or 20 cigarettes, and some smaller ones for 14. These boxes would last 7-8 years, actually they didn't fall apart or get bent, it's the latex that would loosen, so when you open it the cigarettes start falling out.
The gadget is as simple as beans, it presses the tobacco just enough that it can go into the paper, then that paper is hooked on one end, pressed with a piece of rubber to the tube and then dragged over the tobacco. About half a minute apiece. That's where we got lucky, our cost of cigarettes began to vary, but remained in principle five to nine times less than at the kiosk.
For extra points, over time we realized that a homemade cigarette lasts even three times longer than the commercial one. It occurred sometimes that I'd drive to the garden, light one while waiting at the first light, pass the other three lights and reach the next village, which is some 10 to 12km, and extinguish* it only then (and at no other time, never before, never again...). As we measured it back then in Richmond, a Marlboro burns out in three minutes, because what they guarantee that it won't extinguish itself actually means there are tiny grains of phosporus or some such, you can see little spark where the fire touches the not-yet-lit tobacco. These now we measured at about ten minutes, and if the tobacco is moister, even longer.
So we built up a rhythm of going to the [green] market about once a month. The trouble was that the handful of dealers there weren't there exactly each time, and sometimes the žardinjerija would come by and they'd instantly disperse. They kept their wares hidden anyway, allegedly selling only the paper and those gadgets, and if you ask about the tobacco, they first try to make you, are you a cop or not. The bigger problem was that even when you find one, you don't know what's he got, we met better and worse tobacco, until the time we found one guy who said „here's my mobile number, call me when you need it, it's uncomfortable here on the market“. There we got lucky, we stuck to the guy for years to come and go.
In the Feds there's a bunch of versions all with today's date, all about „medical records“, later called „progress notes“, both wrong but what to do when there's no „upitnik“ in english. Actually there is, it's questionnaire, but that's french and nobody knows how is it pronounced nor how exactly [is it] spelled. So, three days ago I was inserting the so-called „demo slice“, for lack of better term, which displayed the name, surname, sex, gender (yup, these already differed... later I heard that SFBC accumulated more tens of rows in there, wish I knew how did they know which was which), alerts (don't know which color), and GPTAL (back then I knew the meaning of each letter, it's the count of gravidities, various kinds of cessations thereof, and live births), all in one frame which appears in the headline of several forms... Inserting that should be an easy thing, but the questionnaire form was complicated already as it were, not to mention the hand knit resizing code, which would take another five years to become able to remember how it was left, and would meanwhile revert to default on each launch of the form.
Actually I did solve that problem once, perhaps next year, but the solution got lost because Jan messed with it in parallel with me, and overrode my solution - such a versioning snafu still happened from time to time - and then a few months later added some more stuff which made that solution impossible now. The thing annoyed me all the time, as I had to scroll a lot when testing stuff in it, because it would revert to default size every time... until it reached my becunting levels, and I rewrote the resizing from scratch.
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* while writing this I realized I don't know a proper english for this, extinguish is latin. So I asked on burundi for a better one, and got „put out“... yeah right, I like that, now how to memorize it... Right, „Cat people“, „gasoline and I were putting out fire“, that should work.
Mentions: 15-VII-2024., burundi, Feds, Gorana Sredljević (Go), homemade, house dictionary, Jan Brenkelen, saxo, SFBC, tozna, žardinjerija, in serbian
19-VII-2024 - 28-X-2025