20-I-2014.
The first half of january was calm, not much of a fuss. She made soap, homemade, quite a quantity at that, will last us a year or three. We aren't quite satisfied with its shape, the mold was wooden, made of planks, and had to chop the ingot into bars. This will be resolved later, when the silicon molds for mufljuzi (muffins, v. house dictionary) appear on shelves, then they'll give the shape and size exactly fitting a palm, and easier to take out of the mold.
We entertained Neša, Lena was often here, we brought dad to lunch twice - on fifth and for christmas, had even a česnica, the whole bundle.
On eighteenth we went to Belgrade, the turkish one, to find this guy Toza and sign the sale contract with him, over that moped. Lucky to have the geepyess, I never would have found the place otherwise, what backstreets it led me through, even if now I drove the same route again I wouldn't recognize anything. But we got there, everything fine. The guy looks like a combo of Mika Antić, Moma Kapor and a typical voždovac bum, just ten years older than us. He and the baba (relatively youthful both) live in a basement flat, though it's not completely underground, it's on a slope, so if they have a half window up front, they probably have whole [ones] in the back. The rest of the house - ground floor and the [uppeer] floor - I guess they rent out or their children live there. So we wrote the contract, signed it, and there he offered to take me to the nearby cops to have the contract verified. Seeing how Neša was already restless, and me not feeling like driving twice more through those streets, I said a contract is a contract is a contract - remembered how dad sold both škodilaks with contracts written on the spot, in a tavern by the car market, on merchant's paper, and everything was fine, so I said no need to verify.
So we all four (Go, Neša and we) drove to Lena on Vidikovac* (she lives with Zlija, but he was away), just picked her up and drove back to Košutnjak, had a nice walk over it, then sat somewhere to lunch, with a good view of everything - from the new bridge on Ada to Kalemegdan and Zemun. We ate some spaghetti, guess they weren't bad, but that was not the memorable part. The more important part was a series of shots with the faces Neša was making, this is when lots of what will be typical of him later first emerged. As if he graduated from freshly-learned-to-walk baby into a real toddler.
Then we returned Lena to the apartment, Zlija was already there, so we sat with them for a while. He handed us a kilo of rakija from his granddad in Croatia, and a couple of sausages from him, don't know which was better.
The thing with the contract (is a contract is a contract) turned out to be a bar tab [made] without the barman. We can't drive the moped until we register it, and it can't be registered without a verified contract, and it's verified by cops in presence and with signatures of both buyer and seller. The clerk said that only if I got a statement from the Grocka municipality that the vehicle was unregistered there, then... Well, your mother, what use are then those serial numbers of chassis and engine, on which you insist for seventy years at least, if you can't even query yourself to check, do you have any system at all? But you'd rather have me hit the pedal for 120km to Grocka, to take my chances with yet another paper pusher, same as this one? Thanks, I'll rather have it as a garden decoration, it's really a nice piece, I won't register it and you're not getting a dime on the fees and fuel tax, all to 15:00.
So the moped remained standing as a monument to bureaucracy.
Yesterday we (two) went to Klincaid (Go and Neša stayed at home) to check on the garden and get the milk. Zeki actually came to us first, probably sat in his wheelchair at the gate, to grab any victim to chat with and possibly exchange fresh gossip, he acquired the habit now that he couldn't walk, and then noticed the saxo and rolled to us. Then we pushed him to his place, bad pavement but just some 100m, not too hard. No shots - what little I made came from the nokla while there was light. The milk debt is now 610,8 liters.
This on UT:
>I have been looking at a lot of windows 7 PCs lately and they all have the write cash turned on.
Where did you buy such a PC? I want that!
My obsolete old PC forces me to do it the old fashion way, very roundabout. First I have to write code, send app to customer, repeat until they like it, write invoice, send invoice, customer writes some cash to my bank, then I write to that same bank to see if it arrived (at least this phase is somewhat automated), then I walk out and visit an ATM (to which I also write some instructions) and only then I see some cash.
Future sucks...
On homefront, called that chimney sweep guy, he's coming this wednesday. Winter is yet to start, so no fuss. The chimney got a nice layer of tar inside, and this weekend the brush got stuck inside one of the pipes. There are limits to what an amateur can do, time to get a professional.
(... 33 words...)
Lena is about to sign the contract with her so-called employer. She is actually self-employed, in a one-man-band enterprise of her own (known as agency here, as such were opened mostly by real estate or software folks), which then gets contracted. Article 11, the non-competing one, is the reason nobody yet signed it (there are several other folks in the office, already under different contracts or no contracts at all, doing business the same way). Now in the version she got it is limited to specifically the business they're in (managing of multiple wordpress sites, developing tools to such management), which it wasn't before. Exactly the kind of change I did to the contract with UniJewel ten years ago, which was accepted so.
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* 'vidik' is a sight of a landscape, so it's akin to a bellevue, a vantage point
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), homemade, house dictionary, Ilija Ćirilov (Zlija), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jovan Dimijan (Zeki), Klincaid, Nenad Berger (Neša), nokla, rakija, saxo, škodilak, UniJewel, in serbian
25-I-2014 - 7-IV-2026