21-VII-2011.
In the first hour of the day there was a lot of skyping between David, Jan and Suez, as the latter is going for a vacation, so had to do a handover of all the current cases - Hummersex, TBD and one clinic in Scotland. Lots of text, luckily not related to me in any way. And some vacation... he tied his skype account to his mobile, so anyone trying for a voice call will get redirected and it will ring in his pocket. Some vacation.
Morning, at work, trying once again to get those passwords to go through intact. After lots of experimenting, found that they have to be defined as binary on my side - and, amazingly, there's a function to do just that, called CreateBinary(). Of course I couldn't find it right away, first because I didn't know it existed (fox has hundreds of functions), but once I did, it started working fine. A few days later Jan added a NoCpTrans clause to his metadata in whichever places it was necessary, and we're on the horse.
Exchanged some email with Željko, about fox and SQL, of course. Though I think he's pushing postgres wherever he can.
Afternoon, had some reason to go to the city, with the car (and alone - must have had a reason, I still go on bicycle if alone), and since it was mom's birthday, wanted to buy some baklava and boza in Prleski cakeshop, but it was closed. Possibly going out of business, or on a vacation. So I dropped by "Bio špajz" (bio pantry, but their bags always have a misprint - one batch said "_špajiz", the other "spajz") and bought some stuff. Not exactly small cakes, but rather chocolade cubes filled with banana cream etc.
Took those to mom's, pulled her ears up (customary hare, meaning "may you grow up big"), had a coffee. Some neighbor was there too, IIRC. Of course, the meddlesome hag had to poke, „well for a while I tought you weren't talking, but...“. „Well such talks are usually about money, or rather how to manage what there is; since we don't have that problem, we can do like this“.
Coming home I noticed I didn't bring my keys, and she didn't return yet, so I was locked out for a while. I sat on the terrace, tried to take a nap, which didn't work, then took the shovel and drove a couple of wheelbarrows of clay into the pit which Vlasta's made us dig under the bottom of basement stairs. Made a couple of voice notes on my phone:
"Reading this stuff I noticed that it's about extrauterine fertilization... and being accidentally acquainted with the area, I surprised myself by knowing the meaning of every TLA mentioned in the text".
On 23rd, the rasejani met in _pahuljica, another quasi ethno restaurant in Belgrade, which happens to be near Lena's apartment - just three blocks beyond the other end of the cemetery. It was announced on 30th, Škrba posted that „the ’after‘ 15th is coming near“, i.e. pLazić is around... so some 40 emails later we agreed on the place and time. Among other news from this correspondence, his daughter qualified for the anglistics, so she'll be a teacher or translator for english, his worries are over. Or so he thinks.
There were several suggestions, from Fantast (Dunđerski's castle, dozen kilometers beyond Bečej), lakes by Bela Crkva (but no good restaurant near water), and a few other outliers which are just too far for everyone. Eventually Zlotvor suggested _pahuljica and that was it. It has parking, has shade, light breeze at all times, perfect.
In the end there weren't too many of us - the folks from Dubai canceled a few days in advance, Kunta had a sudden change of vacation plan to include the whole weekend, so it was, on one side of the table, Škrba, she, Lena, me, pLazić. End of table, Škrba's wife. Other side, Zlotvor, his wife, Stinge, M.A. and his wife.
The notable event is that we heard a full account, from Stinge, about how he and Škrba went to check the famous geographic anomaly, where the gravity pulls you up the road. It's actually a trick of perspective, where it looks like the road's lower end is the higher one and vice versa. So he came with a laser level and a few other instruments, just to check. There was a side story with a „higher nurse“ (which she pronounced uppercase, with implied threats), who sounded ominous and probably tried to scare them scientific types away from debunking the story on which her tavern/hotel made money. The scarier part of the story was how Škrba broke the oil pan of his car on the way out - they took the other road, not returning the same way - and how they sat there in the dead dark of the night, waiting for help (they did get out, eventually), when suddenly a man on a white horse just slowly rode by, without a word. The whole story was then written, in detail, on suština.
I made a video, Fujica did well enough, partly recording his telling, then had trouble trying to share it over sGradlj.com - thin on space, wasted up my quota on what folks from ppp downloaded of the 01-V-2011. pics and video - so put it on yoochoob, and everyone was happy.
Mentions: 01-V-2011., David Berton, Dragojlo Kuntić (Kunta), fox, Fujica, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), _pahuljica, pLazić, ppp, Prleski, rasejani, sGradlj.com, Stinge, Suez Lima, suština, _špajiz, Vlasta Čkuljić, Željko Popov, in serbian