01-I-2000.
An email from Pali: "At midnight at the square they played that thing from Odyssey 2001... them up monkeys and we below a heap of bones (and skin)...".
The night when it was all supposed to go to hell, and all the programmers who made their weight in gold, fixing the Y2K bug in the previous months, would have to run for their lives, or discover that all that money isn't worth anything in the new catastrophy world. Except it didn't happen.
Did some coding for myself during the day - did something for one of the page generators for my website, probably hosted at geocities at the time. Soon thereafter discovered that geocities started inserting ads (or self-ads) above my pages, and moved the website to the space my provider, ahem, provided. That'd be earthlink - though I don't remember whether that was then, while we were running earthlink's dial-up from that house in the forest, or later, when we ditched adelphia and took earthlink's DSL.
Received a few replies from various people whom I wished a HNY the day before. Peja sent a message from his cell phone - probably the first such message I ever got, though it was called a GSM message then. It was all uppercase, but it came.
In the afternoon, we (Nina, Lena and I) went with Ford and his daughter to DC, Reagan airport, to doček Brlja, who was arriving in the evening. The airport was eerily empty, very few people. The ride was boring, save for the strong whiff of skunk trail in a couple of places along the way.
Equally unbearable was the torture that the automatic shift did to the engine on the up-and-down part of the hills near A-burg, as Ford kept it on cruise control, at around 50 or 60 mph, and it would downshift only when almost at top of the hill, and then upshift as soon as it would over the top, then had to downshift downhill because it would be going too fast, then upshifted on the way up. The sound from the engine was promising... something to please any majstor's ears, few hundred bucks for labor alone, in near future. I drove that route a lot, in the following years, and prided myself in how the car went smoothly and silently, while still roughly sticking to the speed limit. But I was driving stick, not automatic.
We came to the airport a tad too early, so we sat and had a drink - I had a Guiness, as I see on the picture.
Brlja came through gate 17, as I managed to snapshoot. Wasn't particularly confused, but rather composed and mindful of his surroundings, obviously trying not to be much surprised with anything and specially not to blurt out anything stupid. Must have felt somewhat ridiculous on a nearly empty airport, having crossed the ocean on that, allegedly fateful, day of 1st of january 2000. Something to tell the children.
Mentions: Allan Robin (Ford), Annenburg (A-burg), doček, Goran Staković (Brlja), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), majstor, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Pali Bodor, Vladimir Pejin (Peja), in serbian