27-IX-2026.
Spoke with Nina yesterday, briefly. Linda is overly dramatic these days, she's got no clue where that came from, we even less. Saw a bit of Sanda as well. She went for some like date, with a guy from this spring, with whom she was in delayed connection - they were alternating in being busy elsewhere. But it also occurred that he went for a walk and got caught in a seven eleven during an outpour, so he called her to explain why he vanished from the chat, being so stuck, major force, can't move and the rain has no intention to stop. So she got in the car and picked him up. It was two in the morning.
Regular trip to Beglrade, all in order. Brought seventy eggs, and picked sixteen of them juices in squeezebags, that you suck out (or squeeze out, the kids get the trick right away). We got there alright, and I even found a decent parking slot, next to a motorbike this time. The number of slots is somewhat reduced, they're digging over the playground, no construction going on, just renewing it.
The other reason for the lack of slots was the field day of blok 21. There were kids and parents everywhere, clamor, joy, neighbors just having fun together, girlies playing volleyball (with basketball ball!) which veers away every then and now and they only shout „can ball?“, and someone returns it to them, even we did once, while we sat out the one cigarette beffore going up.
Tanja was delighted with her new dress, and insisted on wearing exactly that one when we went to (the other) playground. We didn't visit no supermarket nor lunch, just play. Weaning her off diapers was partially a success, she didn't pee in [her!] pants, still doesn't have the feel for the other event, it seems she notices it belatedly. But she had good fun, found company, all as it should be. She even more loves to climb the gear. And wasn't complaining much when we declared it over and took her home, the outing was long enough.
The little Filip is progressing nicely. He still hasn't mastered his eyes together, when he looks into something close then far, still doesn't converge, but easy does it, it will come. He's already over four kilos, grabs your finger and holds it, loves to sleep, on mom if possible. Even as we went with Tanja to the playground, he was hung in the kengur (aka cangaroo sling) while she walked Api. This was shot while we drove home.
Arrived to home by dark, now it began a bit before Perlez. Night lenghtens. Got in, munched, did the shots, napped. Go called a bit later than usual. The Amazon is still fulfilling her wishes, now it was the knit gloves with shortened fingers that Anita liked so much, and Neša wanted them too, appeared the next day. Enth time already. She took a copper pitcher for water, then another one - and the second one is just bad, the handle is loose on the bottom and the lid is hard to take out, and the handle on it is not wrought from the same piece of metal as on the first one, it's a brass button tightened with a screw, and it's already blackened around the screw. Of course, two metals touching in humid air, galvanic oxydation. Looks good before use.
Stanley says Žolt's busines is sheer sorrow, there's maybe one intervention a day, but then his side business is swimming. He got an ex five, hit on one side, at a junkyard, for 1500$, and already sold stuff off it for 10000$. There's two firms owned by one lady, one is towing and other the junkyard. She got the tranny out first. I asked why was the car junked in the first place. Eh, he said, you can't believe how often it happens that owners, hearing the estimated cost and duration of repairs, just say „keep it“, they don't want the hassle. So if chopping it for parts can bring as much, why not. And then it's not really a junkyard, it's more an asylum for abandoned cars.
Tried the first of this year's cherry, second time. Confirmed the first impression, its taste is cherry, and what little apricot was in it is, well, just spice, doesn't surface out, just complements it from behind. Good it was, three and a half shots (less than three regular) sufficed.
Monday, 28th. Started distilling the pear, this time seriously. Yields below average, so we decided to lower the bar to 47%, not noticeably much. Ran two batches and filled the third to light up in the morning. I managed to screw up a few details during the work - first attached the wrong hose to the faucet, the old one was at hand and the new one on the floor, blind spot in [my] head, completely forgot we switched to the new hose. And then when I took off the lid from the still I knocked down the thermometer, it rolled away under the condenser. Looked at it later, kaputt, fell apart.
There we sherlocked the history of the thermometer which came with the still, v. 12-IV-2014., repeatedly failing to remember when it disappeared. The shot in case was the reason I thought it reached us once, whan dad was on the cemetary already, and vanished later, but no, she remembered seeing it somewhere in the old house, lying in something liquid and corrorded by its components, so if we ever find it it's a waste. It's two weeks now since I began planning to go to Tišma and buy exactly the right sized one.
Lena called i the afternoon, because Tanja wanted to see deda and baba. Said, she took Filip to a checkup, and the guy said „you should have four of them, doing so well and easy“.
Wensday... fixed one small bug in the mrz pludger... whoa, how I fumbled it. No damage, though, except waste of time. When I'm inserting more music, I do it via stevka. In the twocommander I select files to add, control see, then in the mrz control vee, it reads the stevka, which is formatted as a list of filepaths, scans the list and... whoopsie, if any of it is not music, it breaks and does nothing. What happened: for each file I check whether it's usable or not. It is if it's a music file (mrz aka mp3, ogg, flac and a couple more), is not if anything else (folder, image, text, anything else).The check returns empty if okay, comment if not. And I did nothing with the result. Now I only added „if comment, skip“. Lo it works all of a sudden.
The remaining thing was the two global keys, to play/pause and play next, which I had in all players so far, so why not in my own. Dived into a search and the first solution I found was to invent two fake menu entries and hook them to these keys. Did that before, so why not.
And it worked but wasn't global. Works only while the app has focus. Well, something accomplished, but not what I wanted. The following three days I tried another couple of things. One worked perfectly on the condition that the app runs as root, but then it's invisible to the system - the sound system doesn't register it, so the sound doesn't reach the sound card, let alone speakers. The other one also worked perfectly but only once, before it started playing. It was holding up the keyboard and pausing the app until I'd press a key, and then refused to start the timer (to refresh the slider and the stopwatch) because it's a „can't start a timer from a daemon thread“. Few others I only read but didn't find much hope there.
Now it came to my mind that I forgot to celebrate two decennials when they happened, after waiting for them... In august it was ten years since I liberated the zmajček from Windowses and moved to linux, and in september since I bought the eos70. It shot its 58000th shot this weekend in Belgrade. Well, my average is down because in the last two and a half years, since we two are alone, I shoot less. And even when something's happening I often forget to wield it. Most of it I already shot a hundred times. I'm rather waiting to go anywhere. Aiming for a whole month now to go somewhere by bike, needed to pump its tires first. There, did that last week, and still didn't go anywhere.
At least we make rakija, three stills on friday, three on saturday. The visits on my site go mad... first it barely nudged, then on friday there were a few hours with speed of 30000 a day, then slumped again. Fourth on fifth, speed of 6000.
On sunday, the one remaining gray kitten died, took a while to consume its ninth. Lena sent a short video, Filip in the stroller... recognized mom in his sight, and gave a nice baby smile. Now converges eyes better, we knew it'll come. The yield of rakija is still below average, mere two and a half liters per batch, which is actually the standard 10%, it's that we got used to better. For one, we put less sugar (5% instead of 7), for two we didn't use pectolytic enzime, for three it's a bit late. And it's going slow, because the mush in the barrel cools overnight, and it's not the same to start with it at 25° and at 7, it takes a while to warm up. Today, though, 10 liters from three stills, that's more like it. At least during the breaks, which are frequent (ever since we automated the stoking and cooling, there's barely anything else to do but to be there at times when the strength needs to be measured), I cleaned up the basement just enough to make the valves of the heating reachable, so to make the heating operational for the season.
We meant to go to Mere afterwards, running out of sour[, aka mineral, water], but Nina didn't call yesterday, might today. We were supposed to meet Lena, Milan and the kids at Trofej, they have the alpacas so Tanja could see them, but she couldn't make reservations. Instead they went to a farm owned by agricultural faculty, where they have the same kind of local zoo - „Tanja must have spent a whole hour feeding and petting goats and sheep. Filip slept all the time, woke him up eventually to at least see where it was that we visited 😂“.
Borče called about the next day, and I told him that we will not, we're declaring electoral silence, see you on 3rd of november (not 26th of october, who knows what that day will be like). I didn't want to explain, which he accepted. I said we voted both for it, so we're a 50% majority, which he amended to 75%.
In the evening, at regular time, Go called. Saw her much better, new camera on the laptop's top, and the sound is better, not using laptop's microphone, camera has its own. And it was visible later on screenshots, the jpeg compression doesn't squeeze them to 80-90K, it's 120-130 now, there's that much more uncompressible detail. Then Nina called and we added her to the chat, she held a kuking šou. Stanley showed us a short video of the latest ex five beemer, the exy headlight one... well the dashboard is a tablet of, brother to brother, twelve if not all of sixteen inches...I said imagine yourself fixing it and falling asleep, and then waking up screaming oh no I'm back at the IT! Seems I hit the spot with that, because he went on recounting the number of times he had nightmares of not having done backups yet at the office, and didn't do them in a while, there's a few to do, and now lemme do just this one, nobody will notice, and then he never gets around to do that one, and so indefinitely. There Nina chimed in with „gimme physical button and the drawn ones you can keep“. I agreed right there, „the advantage of physical buttons is that when there's a software upgrade to your car, they stay where they were“. We didn't see her kids, just Sanda once walked by.
Later, while sipping cherry, it crossed her mind to, as our money in Hungary keeps getting harder to access, we simply buy an apartment in Szeged for the amount we have, and thus spend the remainder, and then keep reaping the rent - from, wdIk, students.
She checked it the next day and nope, none of that, expensive and too complicated, plus it would entail relearning the hungariand legalese language. Thanks muchly, did that 32 years ago, and that was over a good lunch and beer, while I was still fond of it. Wouldn't have the patience for it nowadays. In the evening she went to bed around half one, and some [time] after one here she comes, sleeping doesn't work. There were two shots in the bottle left, so I pourde the 2024. aricot, still good, not much left in the cask, so two more shots of that. Don't know when we went to bed, eyeballingly half four.
The rakija goes weirdly - six liters from two stills yesterday, flimsy. Today it started nicely, 64/62. No explanation, it's from the same barrel, continuing from yesterday. The broken thermometer actually works, despite my aiming to get on the bike and go buy a new one. I even took out the nonius to measure the casing in the lid (8mm diameter, about 40mm deep, 13mm the wider diameter on the entry). That is whok knows how I measured it, the nonius was dry, oil evaporated. I put one drop of šivanol, waiting for it to permeat the groove. Meanwhile, using the old thermometer, such as it is. Maybe we can just fix it with gluegun so the pod doesn't turn nor fall (nope, she said the glue melts at still's temperature, won't work). Let's do this still and a half, or whatever is left, and then put down the tent and collect our gear.
Around five in the afternoon we declared the season over, the pear is distilled. Total of 135 liters, pear 45,5. Not bad at all, a liter of pear costs about 350 dinars, can't buy bad wine for that money. And specially considering our principle that we get the supplies from our homemade productions on any items that can't be bought at all, or not in that quality.
Mentions: 12-IV-2014., Anita Jennifer Berger (Anita), Api, eos70, Filip Nastić, Gorana Sredljević (Go), homemade, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Mališa Borkovski (Borče), Milan Nastić, mrz pladžer, Nenad Berger (Neša), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), rakija, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Stanley Berger, šivanol, Tanja Nastić, zmajček, in serbian
28-IX-2026 - 13-X-2026