27-III-2011.
Talked with Go in the morning - around her midnight - and she's not in the same location anymore. She just moved in to live with Stanley. Ricardo just wasn't interested in being married, having discovered a couple of years ago that he was gay, and developed a relationship with some guy in Vancouver.
Stanley looks like a decent guy, fun to speak with. He's the hardware/network guru at Daffy Duck (ie. WB Games). and he's got this huge house all to himself. He's got a lady tennant presently, and her tiny pooch, but she'd be moving out soon.
I made a few shots of them (smoking!) in skype. Then a couple of hours later made more of those with Nina and Raja - or maybe the shots were in the afternoon (timestamps weren't preserved), we talked again in the evening (the skype logs say around 20:00 but that's not possible, and besides there's too much light coming through her east-facing window, so probably her morning and our noon.
Now as I was writing this, she saw the pictures and we reconstructed the timing. She left the hospital at around ten (eastern), after the doctor said it was okay (grudgingly, they'd love to charge her another day). She remembers that this was the last time she wore that shirt, with a big butterfly sticker all over her breast, because it was sheer plastic and she was sweating like mad while they've sutured her tear.
So this was probably around our sunset - and then I sent a few of the screenshots to my folks, and that's among the last dozen emails I wrote to them. Now we could talk whenever we wanted, so email was only for urgent image transfers. For everything else, get on a bicycle and carry a thumbdrive.
In the evening we went to a party. Boba is 18 now.
We caught a bus to there. The tavern is near their place, one of those that aren't always open, not enough traffic for that, but rather you hire it when you need it for a party, and then the owner hires the servers and kitchen. And it's prettied up to look ancient, what with supporting wooden beams, arches and fake beams, while it's actually all new. We were sat by the cocklestove furnace, which was stoked up to the max, so I soon discarded the jacket, then the sweater, then put on the jacket again to protect me from the heat blast.
We shared the table with oma, Višnja, the parents of Boba's girlfriend (another Višnja), a neighbor [woman], and an old guy, a programmer of the first generation, who used to work on the legendary CER computer in vodotoranj, which was all transistors and bundles of twisted pairs. Heard a bunch of nice stories from him, too bad I had no recording of that. The neighbor girl was just a dear face, and her husband was wielding a largish video camera. He edited it all later into a feature CD, too bad we never got a copy.
This Višnja is really cute, all blonde and blue eyed, serene faced, and her parents are nice folks.
At the main table sat Boba, Silvija, Višnja's son, and the inner gang. Arpi was sitting with us at times, took turns to sit with everybody, playing the perfect host. They had a band, portable, with one guy on synths doing everything, and a pair of singers, male and female. They were hitting it on turbo folk (v. narodnjaci), what else could I expect.
For shooting I took Lena's Fujica, it's small and fits into a pocket. Not knowing how strong would its flash be and how would it deal with the weak light there, I set it to shoot couples - one shot with flash, then the same shot without. Turned out okay, not gloriously, but one can see what one needs to see.
We managed to get ourselves somewhat done, and the stove helped. Too bad we never got that CD, because the guy came really near with the lens, when the singer [male] came to see if we'd have a song to ask. This was the first time in my life and elsewhere that I paid the piper... nothing much, perhaps an euro or two, and asked for „Kad čujem tambure“ (when I hear the tambours), which is a wine song. When the stanza with „mister professor sat on the window“, this guy got a good long shot of me and the singer tearing our throats at the microphone.
And that was it, I guess someone called us a cab. This all helped us settle our minds into our new status, to get into being, officially now, a grandmother and a grandfather.
Mentions: Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), Dobrivoj Gunaroši (Boba), Fujica, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), narodnjaci, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oma, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Ryu (Raja), Silvija Umljanić, Stanley Berger, Višnja, vodotoranj, in serbian