14-XI-2024.
The week when more or less nothing happened. On ninth and tenth we disttilled the quince, slowly and at ease. We didn't get much, just 6,2 liters, out of 50kg of quince and 15kg of apples. The first still started really weakly, at bare 55% (at least 64% would be normal), which we then didn't cut off but ran all the way and redistilled in the next one. Compared with what we hoped for, we married well („kako smo se nadali, dobro smo se udali“) - the fruitpicking took us less than three hours, went really fast, and this is three weeks later than the forelast year, and the fruit wasn't as small as we feared [it would be], what rain fell near the end of ripening did help it. It was just too late, it didn't get enough sunshine, didn't produce as much sugar. We added the leftovers from the window in Johan's room aka pantry, a deci or two of this and that, including a whole bottle of tribulus from Jović (19-VIII-2012.), and the last two deci of vinjak (31-I-2011.), forgotten in some beer bottle, altogether about one liter.
The first morning we had a nice fog, real november[ian], but it cleared during the day, and I even made lots of cat shots, to send to grandkids. For the second day barely half a still was left, yet it made a whole liter. Then I packed the still, but by the time I talked myself into it (because I had a hefty catnap after a good lunch, third day beans, some prebranac from Mere, really good), it was already late, so I left the condenser for the next day. Turned out that I did it as late as thirteenth*, I had a bout of feeling chilled a bit often, didn't feel like going out, and the fallen leaves have clogged its release valve from inside. On thirteenth I took a length of wire and poked through the valve, and a jet of water spurted out. Incredible how one thin leaf can jam 35 liters of water... And we thought we'd have o simply topple it.
Stanley got some clunker of a van, and they started moving. He already rolled a few rounds, takes half an hour to unload, Anita rides shotgun, the van has only two seats, it's all stripped down in the back, even the wall siding is absent. We didn't talk the regular two hours, just one and a half, because they wanted to make another round before dark. Then we concluded that five months have passed, we may try the cherry now. And I was right - the first sip was a bit weird, but after third it just slid. Strange is the cherry, smells a bit as if a bit rotten**, which is actually expected, the gnjiling and alcoholic fermentation are practically the same process, but in a cherry that taste is something special... and good. It was just as good on tuesday as well, we got merry. And a bit at odds, again about rockenroll, it's a jewish conspiracy, their project to destroy the culture, its contribution is zero. Ah well when you posit such an apodictic statement, I will not respond, because now all of a sudden, at this stage in my drinks, to pull from my memory a list of things of which I rarely even think, things taken for granted, I won't remember, so rather say nothing. Just so you know I disagree but don't need to tell you every time.
During one such sitting, a couple of weeks ago, dishwashing came up for discussion. Well, I said, what I imagined early on that those cracks in the skin on my fingers (which went away the day we landed on the american side of the puddle) were caused by dishwasher fluid so I stopped, it doesn't mean I swore I'll never. It's that I don't know where you keep things anymore. Well no, I'll put them back, just leave them on the rack to dry. Ah okay. And then I really got into doing it... later in the evening, while she'd sit in the yellow room and watch something on gugolj, if there's a frying pan. Because she's loathe to scrub it properly, and I noticed I found it oddly satisfying to do that, I guess from the still, I like to see the clear metal appear after a good rub. Did that three times so far, and the pancake pan is already looking better for it. And I'll get the others, as they appear.
Spoke with Lena on tuesday, at the regular time. Tanja is becoming livelier by each day, the legs aren't resting, she almost crawls. Of the hands she's almost in full control, she manages to grab them soft chewies and stick them into [her] mouth, teeth coming soon. And she rounded up nicely, even has dimples on [her] knees.
Just when we concluded that the twins have almost forgotten us, they called us maybe twice in the last months, Linda called. Started with complaints over some game which she can't run on the teevee, only on a tablet, but she wanted to play it with Sanda and they don't know how to network the tablets... Almost cried, and within these fortyfive minutes ended up with a big smile :). Baba and deda still know how to amuse them. Violet got.
Tenth to thirteenth I was cleaning up... the phonotheque. While Strawberry and other players tend do extract whatever they can from the filename, in cases when ID3 tags are not in the file. But I stubbornly decided to put this in order for once. There are some files from 25 years ago, there's all kinds in there, and out of 23000 some 2000 was without tags. So I dived into it. Four days.
On fourteenth, Nina called the way she used to before, while driving to work. In those twenty minutes we exchange the news. Sounds a bit uncanny how her phone cancels the noise, or the headset does, we hear none of the car or traffic sounds, unly in the end when she pulled the hand [brake], that I heard and recognized. The news is that Mark is coming now for the weekend, and staying... for a while, there are five options at least, the current one is until march.
On fifteenth, busy all day. In the morning she poked beneath the [kitchen] sink, the drain was clogged, and it turned out that it also unclogged where it shouldn't, holes on the flex hose, drips. Drove to Tišma and bouthg a new [one], and that's where we entangled ourselves in the assembly, can't make heads or tails of what goes where, it can be put together in several ways. Made it eventually, starts, goes.
At 14:50 Zvezdana called, said coming right away. Okay will wait for you on the street, so you don't fall into the water meter pit, the cover fell in last year... She came with her deck hand to the gate, a small semivan, the rear door won't open, the handle fell apart, needs a poke in the right place... I saw half an hour of fiddling was afoot and it would be best to open my trunk and get the tools... and, wait, what about the side door? Can use that? Heh, look, yes. So the guy took it out, with me holding the rear end, but nope, it's unwieldy, can't do, ran out of breath before we reached the door. So he stood by the stairs, I got up and pulled it up on his shoulder, he brought it in, laid it on the table. I sat to breathe it out, left her outside to talk it with them, and then we went on to chop it. Wow yeah, haven't seen this in a while, half a hog on the table, [trade] union style, just 49kg for some 16600 roughly, half free half for nothing. And we didn't lose much of the skill and anatomy knowledge - we lobbed off the limbs right away - she the trotters, I the ham and shoulder (sans t-bone, though, that'll go separately). It took the longers to strip the skin from the bacon, we need it for the white sausage. We didn't bother to buy guts for it, she simply simmered all that skin, liver, whatever she pulled off the head, various odds and ends, strained it in the end, added garlic, salt, pepper and laid it into a plek. We left it overnight to cool off and set, and the next day for dinner had that and čvarci. The čvarci, though, weren't exactly by regulation, weren't crunchy and didn't have the proper color, but then we got 20 liters of lard. When she melted the second batch, she laid the čvarci into another plek and rebaked them in the oven. Got the proper color and two more liters of lard.
The cleaver from Lidl proved to be no cleaver at all, it's an asian wide knife, and since we used it as an axe - hammered it to cut the bones (I the ribs, then she split the spine while I took a nap) - two pieces of the blade fell of its edge, semicircular, about 8mm in diameter, and the metal broke inside the handle. Well, what can one expect from a 2000 dinar piece, a real cleaver costs 100€. We'd be better off with the axe from the basement.
Later we saw who was the supplier for this half - none other but promes. Well look at that.
In parallel with this, she laid a few liters of winter salad into rasol (salt water) - cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, onions and whatever else she found, and plans another round (with beet, cabbage, kohlrabi and whatever else). The freezer is full, winter may begin.
On sunday (17th) we meant to go see Lena around one and munch something in the brzožder in Stajićevo, but the circumstances averted that. First, when I meant to call them to [make an] order, I saw my phone dudded up. While I was rebooting it, I felt I needed a sitting on the throne. When I got out, she said „hey, the bread just cooled off enough, let's eat and then go“. Ah, the white sausage, čvarci and fresh bread, none better. Sunday lunch. So we arrived around three, nice weather so I found at least that one parking slot to thread the Joda into. Took the tote from the trunk(... 35 words...).
Tanja is, of course, prettier each time and shows some newly acquired skill - this time she can catch and hold, and also found her legs. In two weeks I count on the toe thumb finding its way into the mouth. Just like last few times, first five seconds in baba's arms she spent deliberatting whether to cry or not, and then next five it was a yes until Lena took her, and ten minutes later she was in baba's lap. We tired her really well, she slept for a full hour afterwards, she had to wake her up. Said Stojan put it into [his] head to avoid appearing when we're present, so we don't compete for the child't company. Well, what can we say, a rookie, stage fright, one needs to understand. It's not that this is our seventh grandchild, it's the tenth baby we entertain, we know all the tricks.
Upon return, again the congestion came out to meet us, our side of the road was sparse. We swung by Mere, bought lots of stuff - dry meats, dry fruit, jars of beet, očakovskiy kvass (the only one that tastes like kvass, the others pull to unalcoholic beer) but they had no cheese. They had ripe young cheese, that was good, but none of the harder [ones]. There are two-three things which look like it, but the manufacturer's declaration begins with „product...“, well shove it up your asses whole chunk at once. At least they don't try to pass it as cheese. For that, we went to Lidl, perhaps eighth time this year, and bought some four kinds, and raw beet for the rasol.
Around 22:00, just as we are used to, Go and Stanley called, in good mood, having scheduled just this one break to speak with us (only hour and a half, not the four hours which was the norm when we talked bi-weekly), until Anitawakes up. The move is running its pace, the big bookshelf is already empty and part of the garden, many things are in boxes. We commented the election results as well, so I explained what „big tank requires a big monkey“ [from Kusturica's „Underground“, where there's a real tank with gun and ammo, and a real monkey which gets inside and runs it]... By then the girl woke up, and they had to cut the talk short, had just enough time to shove another batch of things (some boxes, a dashboard plate and few beemer seats) and run another round before dark.
And then we two entertained, the poor man's way, which turned out differently from how we imagined, yet longer and better. We use terry cloth blankets and the quilt on top of it to cover ourselves for three nights now. The quilt used to be enough, but now it feels thinned out, or we got older. Or the heating in the yellow room is weaker than it was upstairs. Whichever, we had a good night's sleep. She woke up early, at some untime, I around noon.
The trouble in the mrz which annoyed me - gStreamer reports an error which then needs to be dispatched by hand, it draws a modal dialog which then waits for someone to click okay, and plays no music until then - got solved by one Richard Townsend frin the weeaxe forum. The guy found how to turn that off. I pasted his line into my code and lo and behold, even the files which reported an error now work. I also redirected all the screen print into a log, so in it I can later find which files caused errors so to look later, at ease, which files gave me shit. Now only everything else...
Finished that in the afternoon, and then we were ready to go. Borče offered, just when we were about to go, to pick us as well, as he'll pick Dragana anyway, but no, you won't spoil our walk. This time I gave up on the tote and put the bottles (the usual liter and a half of the brandy, same apple as last time, and a kilo of wine which someone brought) into a backpack. Easier to carry it so, guess the load is distributed better, and I breathed easier than last time. I even felt somehow lightfooted, a miracle. There was a good fog, I shot a dozen along the way, even this scene with a cabbie who had a bit of a fender bender in this intersection, probably just mirrors touching, „let's take shots then move on the side“. True, most of the shots were shaken, more or less, but caught the atmosphere.
We arrived a few minutes before them, sat on the staircase to the fifth floor, passed unnoticed so I managed to sneak a few shots of them approaching. The drinks flowed smoothly, each had two shots of rakija (he probably three, being always faster), and then the usuall buzz talk went on. There was a cute accident, Dragana showed us a meme, with „prima balerina“ caption, with a real one receiving it from behind („primiti“ - to receive, so „receives the ballerina“). Borče liked that and asked to get a copy, and when she sent it, she accidentally tapped the parastos org. committee as a recipient as well, which now includes some fifty people. Only one reacted, within ten minutes...
The atmosphere heated up somewhat when it came to politics, because Dragana launched another relativizator talk about while it's true that the gov't is no good, the opposition is even worse - yup, the fake parties which were partly cooked up by the regime and partly voluntary candidates to join it at next kneading and marry into the system. There I unglued somewhat and fired a few salvos, I can't keep mum at the regime killing its own children, they are murderers... and then she went parroting the regime tricks about the experts having said what they had to say (well so they did, but did you get what they really said or only the parts the regime extracted from it...) and... it took some fifteen minutes until we vented the steam. Even before one the mood was for splitting, but then let's have another glass of wine (and we all did, another rare occurrence).
Came home at one thirty, the fog dispersed. Smoked one, hit the hay. I fell asleep nicely and... woke up at four thirty. And the sleep won't come back to eyes. Gave up, got up, got dressed, luckily had enough cigarettes from last night, made coffee, sat to see why isn't the mrz pludger playing - aha, it stopped at the end of a song and wouldn't budge. Clicked on next, nope. Clicked again, yup. Ouch, how to untangle that one, not now, some other time, long is the winter. I rather took out the card from the eos70 and did the last night's shots, including the attached here. And wrote these four paragraphs. In other news, Mark arrived in one piece, they already swung by the old house, posted shots from it.
The next three days we also ate sarma, excellent. She made more pickles, this time with beet, in color, and one batch of noodles. I fixed a few more things in the mrz, had it finally playing all night between 21st and 22nd, what else to ask for. So far it would stop on a song, there's all kinds of crap in there, and wouldn't budge. Now, true, it happens that it gets into a loop and doesn't start the next song, keeps reading negative time from that bad one, so it keeps jumping to the next song repeatedly until it somehow hooks on one, guess one that loads quick enough. I'll solve that somehow.
The weather is finally november[ly], almost freezing, there was some ground frost on twentieth. On twenty first, cold and sunny, so I got on my bike and went to pay the electricity bill, now that we've finally acquired one from the old house with the new account number. The power bills are in chaos since june, they hired some private firm to read the meters, which they were quite able to do beforehand, and pay it miserably and these guys do an even more miserable job, so for many the bill was made eyeballingly, people complained... But they were getting late for more than a year. Other bills arrive by mid month, the due date is twentieth, there's a crowd by the pay shops on nineteenth, but these guys got automated a lot, all these bills have a queuer code printed on them, they need not retype anything to a virman or whatever they may have now, it goes fast now. Only the power bill comes by the end of the month... Well now we gathered them for all three houses so I went to pay them, but zip, she said their internet was out, can't send. I left them the envelope with the bills and money, do it when you can. Visited the serekeš at the supermarket by the community [centre], to see if they finally filled it. The machine is spanking new, and while it did work the last three weeks, it was empty. Now I see they replaced the app on it, much more ship shape, almost elegant.
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* can't say „did it only on thirteenth“, I never said „I did it every day“ to have to counter it with „no, not every day, only on thirteenth“
** no word for 'gnjilo', which is the first stage of rot, where the fruit was squished or dented and goes somewhat brown, changes taste, still edible and already beginning fermentation. Stopped while translating it from serbian, to create an entry in the untranslatables department on sGradlj.com. The Gugao gives me 'rotten' as translation, wrong, completely wrong.
Mentions: 31-I-2011., 19-VIII-2012., Anita Jennifer Berger (Anita), čvarci, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), eos70, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gugao, gugolj, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Joda, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Mališa Borkovski (Borče), Mark Anderson, maturski parastos (parastos), mrz pladžer, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), plek, promes, rakija, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), sarma, serekeš, sGradlj.com, Stanley Berger, Stojan Nastić, Tanja Nastić, vinjak, Violet, virman, Zvezdana, in serbian
14-XI-2024 - 16-IX-2025