09-V-2000.
On 1st, to aman: „Here's this translation... am I disturbing the style too much if I insert a comma here and there? Even with that I wonder if it's readable at all, he's almost like he was a sports reporter before this, some sentences are even missing the base verb... I'd say he writes it veeeeery on the run. At least he writes; my head is so full of things but in vain are technique and style if I never put them on disk :).„
The main headline was almost „Nobody was murdered today“ but it blew it, some Skole, a krimos of some repute, gone.
Dad complained how the internet is a chauvinist and won't accept my emails to him when written in cyrillic. There's no way to explain to him that it's not the internet - the message got delivered, right? - it's the fucking Outlook express, pardon all of my Frenches, it's not any ordinary Outlook out there, it's exactly the m$ Outlook, don't fall for fakes and substitutes, and whoever installed whichever windowses over what I left there, without any regional settings, all is still set to american.
Three days ago (actually no, it was on 29th of april, but I'm too lazy to move the text) we bought some furniture again, table and chairs for the terrace. Not quite camper chairs, not the deck chairs, somewhere in between, with removable and washable padding. If not in color, it's not graphite gray either, such as was pushed everywhere a few years later. Found this in Kroger, 150$, and it felt strange that they didn't ask „paper or plastic?“ at the register (i.e. in which type of bags to pack it). The floor manager himself helped us shove the tabletop in front of rear seats. It's not a satellite dish, but isn't much smaller either.
Then we assembled it at leisure and sat on the terrace. True, this is also made in PRC, chinese junk, but at least looks solid (n.b. it sailed past 20 year mark nicely). Now it would be nice to buy a barbecue... Sitting there, the squirrels run around, forest, pines and oaks 20m high or more. Once we even saw a hawk diving to catch one, but she was faster.
As I wrote to Pali on 30th, „...dunno why we need the sunshade, the terrace has a roof and we're in a forest. The thing regularly costs 260$ but they were cleaning out last year's stuff, so discount. Bought also a barbecue, the smallest one that works not on gas but on charcoal and has a lid. Phenolmenal, and with dark german beer... I'll almost dig it out of my memory what was the thing we forgot, wait, phew, on tip of my tongue... ah, yes, how to live :)“. (this I quoted from his reply, and while most of it was okay, he's using Outlook express, fuck m$, it ate each č and ć while leaving ž and š; ditto for second quote below)
The shot was made with the silly little Seiko camera from Zero, I see I borrowed it again. I've more or less arrested the camera for my own use, and loaned it back to Zero when needed. There's actually a break, last two weeks of april I have no photos.
The good side of the camera is that it's a digital thingy, and I'm getting out of the habitual thinking about the cost of each shot, how many shots left, do I have a spare... my only worry is whether the battery will hold and whether there's still room on the card. Once I get home, download the shots, recharge just in case - and it's ready for another series, at practically no cost.
So when there was some show at Lena's school, I shot a dozen at least, thinking how relaxed I got, in some kind of photographer's paradise. It will take me years to get into the habit fully and shoot perhaps 200 shots in a day, when I feel like it.
I was standing by the rear wall, she on one side, three black girls on the other, each cute and fuckappealing... but screw the works, you still don't raise the average. Our blacks were always more beautiful than yours, original african and not like these crampuses of yours, with worst of italian, scottish or whichever features mixed in their faces. So I concentrated on photography.
Seeing the school show is the same masturpiss as it always was. Everyone has some bit of fun - the kids for doing something as a collective and getting a whiff of showbiz; the teachers for being the scene masters and wannabe Pygmalions while still doing their regular jobs, the parents and others for watching their own kids under the spotlights. Still, same old same old, there's no difference between this and what we were doing 30 years ago. Even the content is still somewhat related to each country's revolution. Tough luck, these school shows still have a way to find me.
Thanks to the useful tip we got from our bosnian neighbors (the only useful thing we ever got from them - and Go and Nina did their kids' homework several times and I helped them with few things too, IIRC filling some forms or explaining how some things work around here), we found a good replacement for a farmers' market. A shop, "4 seasons", which we called kvatro stađone* henceforth, basically a large shed with a freezer cabin sized perhaps 5x8 m, where they had vegetables, cheese and other stuff grown in the area and bought from local farmers, not shipped from South America.
Not that everything's excellent, the tomatoes were still not right, but I got used to loose peanuts, fried in the shell (probably hot air), no oil no salt. The prices were somewhat lower than in groceries, but it was all a lot fresher, not artificially held looking nice. And many things were made by small shops, things that nobody sane could keep doing like that if they were to produce thousands. Almost a boutique. „...they only lacked horseradish, but them pineapples, kiwis, mangoes, 3-4 kinds of tomatoes... go run away**. If you mean to lose weight, you have a phenomenal and incredible choice of food that you can avoid :)“.
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* that's how we write italian, quattro stagione is perhaps phonetic enough but not good enough - why do they have three ways to write a k, and for đ they have to write gi or ge?
** our local expression, „idi begaj“... „get out of here“ more or less.
Mentions: aman bre, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Pali Bodor, Zero Distance (Zero), in serbian