Postal Service ain’t what it used to be
When my mother was in Europe back in the eighties, she exchanged air-mail letters with ny father back home, maybe five or six in the four weeks she was there. Two, three day service, basically.
My landlord Sergey in Ljubljana gave me a post card to send home. I have it to him on the 4th of October. OK, he only mailed it later, because the cancellation is dated the 14th of October.
It arrived here today.
Malica at Gostilna Gezove Jame
“Malica” translates to “brunch”. Gostilna Gezove Jame‘s special on the day Paul dragged us there was pasulj, a Serbian bean soup with smoked sausage. Really good, and extremely affordable.
Whether you pay 1 Euro for your 50:50 wine and sparkling water spritzer, or whether you buy a liter bottle each wine and sparkling water, it works out to a Euro a spritzer :-) Beer sells for maybe a Euro, maybe €1.09 in the supermarket, so €2.20 is fair. And €5.90 for a large bowl of soup/stew with bread on the side is not bad at all.
You also get a free chaser each — or maybe that was just Paul’s good looks.
Rustic Homes and Gardens
Our little place is never going to feature on Instagram.
But I finished the improvised stair handhold (the beams with the angled cuts are salvaged from when we increased head clearance last time we were here). Some sanding required.
This little bugger caused us a lot of pain. Leaked into the main house, messed up the floor and some of the skirting board, caused some swelling in the chipboard of one of our cheap cupboards, hella mess.
Hopefully it won’t happen again… but it will.
OK, our Instagram claim to fame will be the sunsets, not the interior decorating.
First-World Problems
Slovenia has a lot to be said for it. No loadshedding, no long queues at the traffic department…
However.
Last time we were here the internet (Telemach starter pack with four-day free trial, throw away, buy another starter pack) worked fine. But since then they changed something.
Things that work better in South Africa: the internet and electronic banking.
Grendel.si
A long time ago, Bob Hoover (no, not that one) needed a way to get home after delivering a car, and negotiations happened, and he bought a VW Microbus (sight unseen) with the idea of fixing it up and driving it home.
Things went badly downhill from there*.
But he ended up driving it home**.
What feels like a long time ago, we bought a T4 kombi in Slovenia, abused it hauling bricks and tiles and planks and stuff from Varaždin and other places, drove it to Prague and back and then to Budapest and back (7l/100km all the way!) and parked it for a few months at the end of that holiday. Said few months turned into two years and quite a bit of change. Armed with temporary plates and jumper leads, we went to get it… and it started up immediately, no jumpers needed.
Things went badly downhill from there.
You see, Bob’s Grendel had a badly seized back brake drum after being parked in a field for a number of years. He had a hella time getting that sorted out.
Our Grendel had developed a bad case of completely rusted and seized back brake disks while being parked in a dry barn for a couple years. I have no idea why. What I do know is it took a rather long pipe and some delicate (hah! Surely I jest) hammer-and-chisel just to get the wheelnuts off, and a lot more hammer work to remove the calipers.
And the driver’s side (this is Europe), up against the wall where a dog couldn’t piss on it even, was worse. So that wasn’t it. Also the resident dog is female. And the barn was locked.
So I got onto the interwebs and found a “local” website, being autodoc.si — .si is Slovenia, right? Nope, they’re in Germany and the parts get dispatched from Poland. My order placed on the fifth eventually landed on the twelfth. The internet is a lie.
Anyway, parts arrived — calipers, disks and pads — for a total of 149.81 Euro (buying new calipers was easier than buying a caliper windback tool or doing it with a G-clamp and a vice grip, both of which I would have had to buy in any case).
Fitted those, much swearing and abuse of tools specifically bought to solve the problem at hand (six point sockets and a breaker bar) and I had the new brakes fitted, and the kombi was on the road.
Unlike Bob’s tale, our story takes a downhill turn from here. We drove back to Ljutomer and left the kombi with Boštjan Kralj at the local (Renault) service station. Problem is by now we had less than a week left in the country, and in addition to re-doing the front brakes and replacing the exhaust pipe, they also reckoned that we would need to replace all the metal brake pipe lines under the chassis. All stuff that I can do, easily, but by now I had learned that parts take a week to 10 days to arrive, this was Monday, and our tickets were for Friday.
Combine that with also needing a place to park the kombi*** until Pieter returns next year (assuming no further Covid crazy) and it made sense to sell the kombi to one of the dudes at the garage. He got a damn good deal out of it, but there’s going to be a lot of soaking stuff in WD-40 and maybe even applying the blue-tip wrench here and there.
It was good while it lasted. Farewell, PartyBus.
* Go here, fast forward to page 212, spend a few days reading. Or read all of it. Bob wrote well.
** And the fsck up to Alaska the next year. It’s all in the Sermons. Go. Read.
***There happens to be one garage for sale in Ljutomer. They want 6000 Euro. That’s about 2000 Euro more than it’s worth, i.e. not a good investment.
Artificial Dumbfsckery
The good: Here I am in Slovenia after an absence of more than two years. Yay!
The unexplicable: Rather than not doing anything, Facebook’s script kiddies wrote code to extract my IP address, feed it through a database to determine my location, and decided to translate my notifications to Slovenian, undoubtedly to show me and the world how brilliant they are.
Look dudes, dropping R10k on a return ticket to Ljubljana does not make one suddenly speak Slovenian.
Boo.
Larry Correia nails it
2021-08-23
So to take everyone’s minds off the worst foreign policy disaster in most of our lifetimes, the Potato in Chief today urged employers to mandate that all their employees be vaccinated (and I suppose fire them if they don’t comply).
Look, I am vaccinated. I like vaccines. I’ve rarely commented on the vax thing because it’s your health decisions and none of my damned business (though I have commented on masks because I think they’re pointless and stupid, but if you want to wear one fine, just leave me alone when I don’t) but as far as employers mandating what their employees do as far as their personal health decisions? Fuck off and die. It’s none of your damned business.
It’s disgusting how the same assholes who are all My Body My Choice when it comes to ending the life of a baby are totally cool with Your Body Our Choice when it comes to a health topic that’s currently got them whipped into a frenzy. These fuckers are not particularly good at moral consistency.
It’s the same vapid useless assholes who were all “Punch a Nazi” last year, who’ve gone Full Gestapo over Covid now.
Ironically, these same smug assholes keep acting like this is a partisan thing, and the only people who aren’t getting vaccinated are “Magats” who just want to “make Joe Biden fail” (saw that on another author’s page this morning, and that author deleted the thread rather than fight with the bullies, because he’s not suited for fighting with all the morons on the internet like I am, which I can respect).
Except in reality vaccine hesitancy is a bipartisan issue, all the surveys show it is across the board, and it’s really telling when even in one of the bluest cities in America, New York’s vaccine passports are inordinately fucking over blacks and hispanics (and even their percentage of white people who are vaccinated is surprisingly low).
These same motherfuckers who see racism behind every tree, who think black people are too stupid to get IDs to vote, are totally cool with not letting minorities go shopping or have jobs. I wish that dosage of hypocrisy was lethal.
Holy shit I hate American leftism. It is the stupidest bumblefuck religion masquerading as a philosophy ever. If I put the shit they do now in a book a few years ago, I’d have been told it was too unrealistic. Nope. Just wait a couple of years and the stupidest thing you can think of they’ll be gas lighting all of us that it’s always been that way and we just never noticed.
Also, if we wanted to watch Joe Biden fail, all we’d have to do is pay attention to current events. The dumbest motherfuckers in the world (the US news media) have even clued in on how bad things are this week, which is pretty telling, because those assholes can spin anything.
The real reason so many people are hesitant to do what the “experts” are telling them to do is because said experts have fucked up quite literally everything, lie continually about every topic, and never ever get held accountable for it. Regular America has lost faith in every single entity that’s supposed to keep them informed, and those entities deserve it, because they fucking suck.
But that’s okay. I’m sure if you smug fucks yell at the general populace some more, they’ll come around. If you tell them they’re stupid a few hundred more times, they’ll suddenly change their minds and start agreeing with you.
Oh wait… My bad. I was talking like leftists actually care about positive outcomes. Silly me. They don’t. They only care about being smug bullies and acting superior to everyone else (which considering what miserable failures at life they usually are you can see why they jump at the opportunity while they have it).
They don’t actually give a shit about diseases, they just like being able to boss people around. If they actually cared about diseases they’d personally act like it, but instead they’re all having dinner parties where only the help are masked, or birthday celebrations with their 500 closest friends, or going to giant concerts, (and don’t forget BLM protests are safe!) but you’re not allowed to have a job or go to church, you dirty proles. It’s okay, it’s because they’re more sophisticated than you are.
But anyways, spare me your stupid arguments either pro or anti vax in the comments. If I see any more virtue signaling bullshit from either side I’m gonna barf. Just shut the fuck up already. Nobody cares. Everybody has made their decisions already. And we’re all aware that you’ve made this topic your entire personality, and wish you’d pick a new key on the keyboard to bang away at for a while because you’re fucking boring.
Mountain Zebra National Park
Tanya and I are trying out national parks which are not the Kruger. Last year we went to Camdeboo (on our way to Kruger), this year we decided to give the Mountain Zebra park a try. It’s a bit further away, next to Cradock, pretty much on the other side of the Valley of Desolation. Also, they have lions and cheetah, which Camdeboo lacks.
Along the way I played with my Canon 100D’s HDR feature (it takes three pictures bracketing two F stops either way, then later you combine them in Lightroom or some such) — this is the road from Nieu-Bethesda.
Breakfast in Cradock. It was National Woman’s Day, so Tanya’s latte was on the house.
A mountain zebra is the shaggy pony edition of a payama donkey. When the park was started, there were only about 60 of them left (the quagga had already been hunted to extinction a century before that), these days there are more than 5000.
Our first day was windy and overcast, but it got better.
Rock Kestrel.
Yellow mongoose. They’re cute.
Tanya and I both called this a plover, but according to the SASOL book it’s a double-banded Courser which is a dry country wader (if such a thing is possible) with crepuscular habits (which sounds terrible but just means they forage at dusk and dawn).
This one had a chick which was almost impossible to photograph.
We suspect that people have been feeding the ground squirrels — they come running straight up to the car and strike this pose.
More yellow mongoose.
There are differing opinions on why it’s called a Secretary bird. I tend to agree with Wikipedia (check this thing’s skeleton while you’re there), the feathers do look like the pen stuck behind a secretary’s ear. But maybe that’s too colonialist for the bird on South Africa’s coat of arms, so some claim that it’s Arabic for “hunting bird”. Either way, I wouldn’t mess with it.
Bat-eared foxes.
We also saw hartbees, kudu, eland, reedbuck, buffalo, porcupine… but let’s talk about cheetah.
The Mountain Zebra National Park has an activity “Drive out with your guide to search for the elusive Mountain Zebra National Park cheetahs. When signal from a collared cheetah is found, you will have the opportunity to get closer on foot.” Having now done this, I strongly suspect the guide fairly quickly figures out where the cheetah is, then takes you the long way around to find it — so as to give you value for money.
See? Cheetah. Right there.
(Yea, it was kind of underwhelming).
So after checking out on Wednesday, we decided to stay in the park a bit longer, so I drove up the Kranskop loop, around the Rooiplaat loop and down the link road to the dam where we had seen the zebras before (close to the E tip of the compass rose on the official map). Sat there drinking coffee, eating ham&cheese sarmies that Tanya had made earlier, didn’t see much, decided to leave. As I pulled out I looked over my shoulder… hmmm. What’s that?
Positioned the car, Tanya going click click, and I noticed…
…another one pop up.
After a while they started moving and I repositioned on the other side of a particularly pesky bush. By then #2 had moved to the other side so for a while we thought there might be three of them. They moved away, I guessed where they were going to go and drove around.
Got it a bit wrong, went too far (the lookout point at the dam is on the far side of Tanya’s head from here, and they’re headed straight for the dam).
Tanya’s shooting the 600mm off a window stedilens (an overpriced essential), I’m shooting a 300mm handheld. These two pics are 600mm uncropped.
Walk walk walk… flop. Yea, they’re cats.
Byeee!
Good times.