18-VIII-2004.
Dad said in email „I see you're slowly finalizing the work on the house“.
„Finalizing? Good laugh. Yesterday we bought the lower kitchen cabinets (sink frame, one for the corner, one to go between sink and stove). I already assembled one, two more to do today. And then the big assembly - the sink, faucet, trash compactor, drain, and cross fingers for me to stop the drip by the third try. And the upper bathroom is untouched - we just removed some of the plastic and the paint from around the closet, which covered the mirror tiles where the doorknob broke one so someone decided to paint it over to hide the crack. We only need to replace the tub, crapper, basin, some walls and redo some of the floor, because the crapper leaked a little and it oozed down the tube into the kitchen.“
„The temperature inside was 24 today, quite decent when compared with 29-30 we had when we moved in. And the outer unit, where it dumps out the heat, doesn't blow warm air, it blows hot now, so we use it for emergency drying of clothes. Dries a shorts in 15 minutes, better than a blowdryer.“
„Today Čarli washes...* [hurricane Charlie, weakened already] washed all the birdshit off the car :). I used to park under the big tree, in vacant house's patio, good against overheating the cabin, but I get signatories.“
(the tree is actually north of my parking lot, so not much shade there, only some around noon)
Yesterday* the work on the upper bathroom had the destruction phase completed. Or so I thought - there will also be a section of the floor which had to be taken out, but that's later. For now, I managed to remove the old bathtub. All the old tiling is gone, including the mirror tiles around the closet (the missing door on the left edge of the picture).
For taking off the tiles I used the miraculous tool which I found by accident, at Lowe's or in Glotz, the vekšmajzl. Most of the tiles went off easily, I'd just pry it under a suitable corner, knocked the tool slightly with a hammer and it would fall off. Some required serious hits, but those were rare - most of them were badly glued. The mirror tiles went off much easier, as they weren't glued by surface. Instead, there were four bits of some dense sponge soaked with decal glue. It held, truth be said, and were easy to detach, by just gently prying them and slowly moving away from the wall. In the end, only two or three shattered, not counting the two which were hit by the doorknob, long time ago. The previous owner probably didn't even know there was glass there, because his predecessor had painted them over with some ugly krmkast (v. house dictionary) paint. Most of the bathroom tiles also came off intact, perhaps over 80% as I said, and then we took them out and threw them away. That is not the white, that's not white at all.
The tub was one of the few things that worked right, except it couldn't be stoppered. Instead of a real stopper, it had the mechanism, which is, just like the rest of the house, from 1977. I'll also remove all the sheetrock from the bathroom (except around the closet and the door to the bedroom), because it was all wobbly and crumbling. I'll put the better, cemented and reinforced with synthetic mesh.
We didn't quite know what to do with the old tub and crapper, but then she got the idea to make them into flowerpots. Except no flowers, she'll plant tomatoes and cucumbers. Next year, though, too late now.
This starling was clearly posing. It stood on our fence for some ten minutes, so splayed. And don't tell me that its young are called chicken or chicks. They must be starlinglings, I'll accept nothing less.
Today I published Ajthat on my sGradlj.com, in the SF stories section. IOW, I'm giving up on hope of ever rounding this up as a novel, so I simply designated it as finished. It doesn't have a structure of a novel, anyway, although there's enough stuff in it - doesn't have a plot around which it would revolve, and it's not even a collection of stories, though there are a few, but of very unequal length, and even then most of it does not revolve around the named characters. At some 230K or so (of HTML that I've generated by one of my VFP scripts) it should be enough. I've added the stuff I wrote during the power outage caused by hurricane Isabel, and rounded up a few more things - didn't finish translating the jump pages, though, which I noticed almost five years later.
This was perhaps prompted ten days ago, when I got the scanned Sirius from Škrba and actually added the front page, contents page and the first paragraph to the site, exercising what bragging rights I had.
And sGradlj.com was officially registered two days ago, which is why I bother with these at all. I've become a dot com.
Nina emailed her schedule - flew in today. She bought some milka chocolate and a kilo of vegeta, plus whatever meds dad sent. That was just antibioitics, which we can't buy OTC here, only by prescription, which means 85$ for hello, then some. We picked her up at ORF but made no photos of it.
Among her impressions of differences between here and there:
Yesterday afternoon we went in search of a new piglet, and along the way she just spotted how much bigger the cars are here, and there's not so many moves when you want to start or leave the car. She said she was watching them turning the alarm off, then dismantling that claw off the steering, then inserting the radio, and only then buckling up and finally turning the key. None of that here - buckle up, lower the handbrake, go. The advantage of small cars - I'm no thief bait, and there's not so many thieves compared to the number of cars. She says at home a Corolla is considered a larger car.
Told the rasejani that my new email is at sGradlj.com. Go chimed in with „while you're at it, remove the links to my old sites, which are gone, and put the new one. I'm not .org.anized anymore, now I too am .com.atose“.
Today she launched a bit of japanese cuisine, made her first experimental sushi. I tried it back then when Brlja was first time here (but he didn't dare risk, ordered something in the „c'mon bro, gimme something concrete“, codeword for roast pork), and my recount of the event didn't overjoy them. Now since both Nina and Lena learn japanese, she bought a japanese cookbook and... even the girls like it.
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* „Čar limuna“ [the magic of lemon] aka Čarli (Charlie), a dish washing liquid. The sentence was in their TV ad back in the seventies. Actually the best such liquid altogether.
** can't explain this fuckup, this shot is of 7th november, and the story belongs into 08-XI-2004..
Mentions: 08-XI-2004., Gorana Sredljević (Go), Goran Staković (Brlja), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), rasejani, SF stories, sGradlj, sGradlj.com, vegeta, vekšmajzl, in serbian