31-I-2011.
I can't possibly remember how we came to rent that apartment, whether via supply or demand side, was it me running into Pasa or Lena ran into one of her daughters. Either way, they graduated, and are going for a year long stay abroad (one in the US, one in UK), and are loathe to abandon the apartment, so it would be nice if Lena would spend the semester up to the admission exam. Not that it was too inconvenient so far, she managed, she'd find places to spend the night, or would catch the last bus and come home. But now the preparatory course is winding up, and the professor is also quite satisfied with her work and tries to pass as much of knowledge and skills to her as possible, he feels the potential in her, it inspires him etc etc. Okay, we got the message, let's talk and if it's okay, we'll take it.
And so Pasa and Šule came one evening to talk it out - I guess friday or saturday. I knew him by word of mouth, perhaps we even met once, he was pals with Pop (who sends his greetings and we could meet somewhere). We sat around the table, I asked „who drinks, who drives?“ to which he said „we all drink, we all drive“. Ooookaay... how about a drink of our youth? What, a kokta? Nope, a vinjak... Ouch, don't. Though, I didn't consume it much either, had one at Mika Fišer's when I was downtown with Lena, so I got a liter, just in case I feel like having another. So I took out a brandy, dad's or what came with the house in Čankovo, fuckit it's a loza, but why not. And everything okay great super, this is exactly how I envisioned reconnecting to my generation... and then suddenly Pasa starts her political pitch, she's an activist at the community level, even a local MP, in DP at the time. Big balls, I was an MP once, so what.
In our house anything goes, except smoking ban and advertising/propaganda. That goes too, actually, but you can only blame yourself for what you get in return. So my dear opens barrage fire, „you're the right person to ask then, who and with what rights signed the contract for municipality to join the UCLE - in their plans we're slated for depopulation, at least two villages are to vanish once Carska bara expands into a national park... and we even pay for all that. Did you ever read what's in Agenda 21 for us here? Who ever had the rights to sign something like that?“. Within two minutes they suddenly had to go somewhere urgently, barely finished (the second?) drink. We agreed on rent, move on 31st.
On twonyninth (a saturday!) I messed with ConnEngine and the phones bizobject. It turned out I'll have to do a lot of it by hand, those classes can't do any serious data munging, and here we have no less than technicolor shit, because of how that dutch doctor set the connection between patients and their phones in 2004. Each phone number has its record in phones table, which is fine and as should be, but then each patient has fields with keys to those records. What's the catch? The phone type (whether it's home, mobile, fax, pager, nearest relative, emergency etc) is written in the phone record, but it doesn't matter - the actual type is decided by the name of the phone field in the patient's record. These fields aren't phone1, phone2 etc, they're phHome, phMobile, phFax etc etc. Which didn't age well - some have three cell phones or three work phones and no landline now. Today there's no obstacle, George and I added whatever was needed into the phones table, the trouble is the patient's record, which simply has no field for 2nd home or 2nd mobile. Those fields are completely unnecessary, but we keep them because there are hundreds of reports out in the field where they are mentioned, and we can't even reach all of the reports, not to mention fix them.
So in the portal we have an arbitrary set of phone records for a patient - may have five landlines and nothing else, we don't care - and we'll write back into Feds only as much as will fit in those fields. The bizPhone is the piece of code which writes that, and it seemed quite a complicated thing to make, but in the end the code came out short and neat. It just took a while until I invented the trick. And such a trick which works in all five contexts where we have such fields (patients, doctros, insurers, guarantors and something called CARD that nobody uses).
On that 31st, after lunch, Šule came with his bear*, picked us up and drove off to Belgrade. Snow everywhere, it's all white, it's cloudy, it's not me driving, a beauty, I made dozen shots along the way. Then it took me a half an hour to tweak the tone curve in Gimp to get this (and half a dozen like).
The apartment is on the near end of Belgrade, somewhere between the new cemetery and Vuk. The town part of the ride was less than fifteen minutes. It's actually a garsonjera**, not larger than a hotel room. The hardwood is quite worn out and ugly, but the rest is okay, the girls obviously did their best to make it look decent, they're both in some artsy callings. He had some other errand to run in the city, so he left quickly and Lena made herself at home. Then we went to busodrome, partly on foot, partly by bus.
The view through the window isn't for humans exactly, because it's covered by heavy old shutters which can't move anymore, but it didn't stop me from sticking out the Fujica under it and knitting this panoramix. Cute view, with that path winding down the slope, in the snug space between the buildings. And then it's all under snow, so every beast leaves a trace.
Don't remember where we ate, perhaps in a brzožder (v. house dictionary) somewhere in Ruzveltova (Roosevelt's st.). Lena seems to enjoy how she perfectly knows her ways through the city, she knows where everything is, how the transport works, which line drives where. She later told us how she enjoys this freedom - just eight months ago she needed to ask permission to get a chit to go to pee, and a written request from parents, a day in advance, to use a different bus. Now she can go wherever whenever she wants, no supervision.
Made a bunch of shots along the way to the busodrome - the walk to the city bus, in the bus, on the station. The station is a wonder - didn't change much the last six years, but the iron columns and the roof support is now painted bright red, just like the next bus on the left. A miracle that can't be seen anywhere in the US. Even when they paint something red, which they rarely do and even then it's only the fire equipment, it's never this bright red, it's always somewhat subdued.
The bus home doesn't circumnavigate the Kalemegdan fortress anymore, too slow and probably has trouble making the whole route in 90 minutes, so it goes through downtown, by Beograđanka (the sole black skyscraper) and Taš (the Tašmajdan park) and 29th November (now renamed to, I think, Despota Stevana, they rechristened a lot), where I made another dozen of good shots, having the luck to sit by a quite clean window, which wasn't even fogging.
The vinjak stayed undrunk in the end. It took a few years for two thirds of it to go, nobody ever wanted a second glass. Then we needed the bottle for something, and poured it into some smaller one, which then got lost.
The january electricity bill was 28000, because there's a three tier tarriff, the first 800KWh cost some regular price, then the next 800 cost double, and above that it's four or six times. Now there it is, not that it'd bankrupt us, I make that much in two days, but I don't like to pay a racket. We'll prepare something else for the next winter.
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* mečka, a female bear, nickname for any Mercedes car
** from french garçon, lad, i.e. a student's flat, minimal.
Mentions: ConnEngine, Čankovo, Feds, Fujica, George Whiteley, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), kokta, loza, Marko Popović (Pop), Radovan Fišer (Mika Fišer), Spasenija Višnjić (Pasa), vinjak, in serbian