09-VI-2003.
Nina is on dean's honour roll, of course she is, with a 4,0 average, on 0 to 4 scale.
(wrote to Škrba an other day [really, is it possible that there are only two days in english: today and the other one?])
Treated the ladies with a walker... which is just about the cheapest instrument of torture, aka gym apparatus. Since there's nowhere to walk here, and it's third week of rain in a row, with humidity not budging a bit below 90%, even if there was, we wouldn't be venturing outside. And we did intend to take something, provided it wasn't too bulky. Though we avoid buying larger things before the move (as we'll have to haul it all into the truck and then out of it - and we're on the upper floor above the raised ground floor here, and will be on the raised ground floor there), but ajde (i.e. žajdž*, as Novim would say, whom greet for me)
Let's see the stuff that piled up. Behind the light, the better bookshelf (called bookcase, still don't understand why), from Burt, the television set is in it. Left, behind me, the huge two-part couch, Rick. The light on the desk is still from the desk set we bought for the girls in september of 1999, except now I have a tube tangle bulb, aka CFL, which is too long for the lampshade, so I improvised an extension for it, from old seedees. The ransparent box with cut out cover is probably from Kroger's cream foam rolls (šamrolne, at home), which we somehow liked („reeks of calories“), now a receptacle for peanut shells (the effects of which I'm taking down, look at me there, pretending to walk). On the desk, to the right, is the IP phone, which works through the Linksys's router, must use that special one, and it's practically a threedigit extension in Orion's internal phone network. There's also the official mobile, and the landline phone (a walker, on the yellow notepad, though that notepad I used for Gary, for work there was the blue one from the toilet). There's the headset too, though not the excellent Jensen's, those were eaten by the vacuum cleaner, the brush rolled up the cable and yanked it off, this is some generic shit.
Um, no, the headset came with the IP phone, as I wrote to dad, „last few weeks we were coming up to speed with this internet phone. What a contraption, it has 30 lamps, 50 buttons and a small screen (6 rows of 16 letters), plus this headset with the microphone so hands be free“.
(more correspondence, a propose him reshooting my first SF stories from the old Siri[no j!]us and sent me by email)
The Agfa shows the bacteries on the elsydee, and you roughly see how many bars is it, but that's not helping you much, because when it's down to a half, you have two more shots without flash and that's it to you. I found out that proper nickel-manganese (or whatever they mix in instead of cadmium) manage two years and a half. That is they may do longer but then they don't hold juice for more than twentysome shots per one charge. I found recently in Njolmart [juski again, nj=w] in Richmond a pack of four eaches with a charger for 0,13$ cheaper than the same pack without a charger. What it was - a monthsome ago they took the price down by five dollars, and sold all of it except this one pack. Then they refilled at the regular price, and this one was still there. Now I have two chargers :).
Is your vizier, i.e. the screenlet, welded to the housing along with the lens? Mine is, but had before that one tiny box form Zero (the first shots I had sent) which had it on a joint, so you could swivel the lense for about 270 degrees relative to its body. Regardless, even like this you can thread the shooter into impossible places and snap it from there. If it succeeds it succeeds, if it doesn't, it had cost nothing. Once you understand that... you've replaced your head.
Seventh, Richmond. We bought a baker gadget for the girls as well, and baked a bread right away and made sandwiches out of it. Went to a movie, except Go and Ricardo, because they already saw the movie (Matrix 2). Just like any other sequel out there, this one is bigger, better, more expensive and emptier. The dialogs are stretched thin here and there, there are a few unimportant and too long lines of narative, and one incredible chase with fight, which is a plain raw show off with technique and look what we can do now... and serves no purpose but lasts too long. On top of it all, the movie itself is preceded by advertisements for 8-9 other movies (can't really know how many of them there were, because they start them while the audience from the previous show is still exiting), and the time when the movie will actually begin is not really known. Considering the price per capita was 7,75$ (we didn't take a cheaper one for Lena because we didn't want to stay outside a second longer than necessary, the humidity was around 95%), for that much money they really could say when the movie really begins*. I estimate the total duration of ads (topped with one for the movie [theatre] itself, a dragged out animation with more inserted ads for kokAkola, pepsIkola and popcorn) lasted some 12-15 minutes. One guy somewhere sued the movie [theatre] for failing to start the show on scheduled time - don't know how that lawsuit ended.
In other news, trabant put together six months without visiting a majstor. To knock on wood. But dad says it'll have to [go to] Piksi's, the door locks have become a problem, which he said he'll acquire and then nothing. And I remember that, you just drive and then the door opens. You stop, then can't close them. But Piksi was busy renewing the tags on his own trabant, so the neighbor from the vineyard took care of it instead of him. Doesn't know how long will the fix hold, but if it loosens, the guy is always at hand. Dad, by the way, had a haircut at Beštara's, which would be his wife's shop, but he appeared too.
And Lena learned the capitals of all fifty states, took her whole weekend, as there was a test on it on monday, with a reward. She knew them all, and the prize for five best was a pizza each, from Papa John's at that (these guys are #2 or #3 among pizza delivery chains, after Pizza Hut and Domino's, but actually better than them). The rewards weren't official, it's possibly out of teacher's pocket (or was there a sponsor), and it was „Megan, what would you like on your pizza“. When it was her turn, Lena, of course, said „mushrooms“, and brought more than half of it home. The slices were out for grabs, and hers wasn't too popular. She said „they don't know what's good“.
We bought some special paper to print and transfer on tee shirts. You print it in the ink spitter, just reversed, and then transfer to cloth by ironing it. We expected it would transfer just the ink, but no, the whole emulsion layer was transfered off the paper. It's glossy and impermeable. We just said screw this business, too bad about the shirt - and dumped it.
In Lena's school there was the annual show, end of elementary (five grades... then there's the three year of so-called middle, which she'll attend there, after the move). Show as shows goe, I'll suffer the few remaining yeara and finally get rid of that. This menace followed me over three fronts - as a student, as a professor, and as a parent, sometimes two at once. It was fun in the elementary, behind the scenes; it became a problem when you are expected to watch and pretend to like it. And the american ones aren't any better than ours, the same quasipatriotic kitsch, same internal competition of teachers over deciding the dramaturgy and scene movements, same shit altogether.
And then they had those various honor societies, who also dole out all sorts of diplomas. She won up to three of them - for „academic excellence“ (the state of being excellent, as a noun, sounds even more ridiculous in serbian), „award for wellness related fitness“ (I tried to translate both nouns, even more ridiculous) and on top of it, „citizenship“ from the Daughters of american revolution. True, „citizenship“ in this context means all the virtues adorning a proper citizen... they listed a bunch of those, made her into a better Amer than Amers. Reminded me of the joke about lunatic asylum, when a loonie has a toothbrush on a leash, and the shrinks ask „is it a dog on the leash?“, „where do you see a dog - it's a toothbrush“ - „ah, okay“. When they were far enough, the guy whispers „how we fooled them, Fido!“. These Daughters of american revolution, by structure and goals, seem like a Subnor** :)
There's also a diploma, allegedly signed by Đorđe Nj Buš (yup, juski nj=w again, but there was a better typo on B92, š and đ are neighbors on the keyboard, Buđ - mildew), what with some medal (with name engraved), a badge... no kidding.
What meant more to us was that teachers were approaching us. The „fearsome“ Giesendanner, mathematician, said he was so enchanted with her the whole year, that his dream would be a class full of her. Her class teacher said she almost shed a tear. And the principal (not actually smaller the Lena, the picture shows that it's because of her heels) asked did we read what Leno wrote for the „buddy reader“ programme. That's when fifth graders help the second graders with reading, by writing a story and then reading it together with them. Well, the story (written in first person, from a guinea pig's point of view) amazed her, said she could sell that story just like that, she knows the kids' books and this is much better than most, Lena knows it with words. And two years before this she let her into fourth grade almost on a dare, may it not be too hard etc. Lena's comment: „it was too easy“.
That Giesendanner guy, by the way, is a real small genius, a colleague who really loves his job, the kind of which you meat five in a lifetime, tops. Lena was equally enchanted with him, there was some story about him almost every week. When he tried to convey a feeling for big numbers to them, he invented an ingenious gimmick: „did you ever see a million?“. And brought a sheet of mosquito netting, to have them count the holes.
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* hajde - c'mon, let's [go, do it], let it be - is often abbr. to 'ajde, and then to 'ajd'... then someone used the ` - counter apostrophe, which is ž in juski. The rest is history.
** Savez udruženja boraca narodnooslobodilačkog rata - league of people-liberation war fighters' associations, i.e. veterans' unions, who were influential long past their best-by date
Mentions: Agfa, Gary Brandywine, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), juski, majstor, Milovan Sebešćen (Beštara), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Orionware (Orion), Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Rick Netter, SF stories, trabant, Zero Distance (Zero), in serbian
12-II-2026 - 2-IV-2026