11-IV-2003.
Announcing at Orion that I'll be of on friday, most of the day, led to this exchange:
>"Have no phone in the cell." Translation? No cell coverage??
If a phone in the kitchen is the kitchen phone
If a phone in the bathroom is the bathroom phone
...these American prisons even have cell phones :)
IOW, I have no cell phone.
We took off from A-burg to the coast, to look for an apartment where to move, come summer. There's an old joke about an old couple, when one of them says "if one of us dies first, I'll go live on the coast". We decided we'll just preempt the dying part. Nothing's keeping us in A-burg, I can do my work from anywhere where there's a decent internet and phone. OK, Lena should finish the school, but that ends in a month or two.
When we got there, after all of 160 miles and picking Go and Nina from Richmond along the way, the rain started right after the bridge tunnel. Had serious problems driving with the mist catching on so fast on the inside of the windshield - didn't know the local trick to turn the AC on to condensate moisture. This february, when Lena and I were mounting the new radio, I found why the ventilation switcher won't work - the end of the sheath got unhooked at the end, because the plastic in which it was embedded simply broke off, so I switched it to blow down to warm the legs, so there was no air to the windshield.
Eventually we got into a Day's inn near the end of the highway (there's actually a sign saying "road ends 300 ft"), not the one in 11th street, where we stayed two years ago. The ones on the coast are generally more expensive than the one one block away, and there's this and that missing in the rooms (no fridge, no mirko, no coffee maker... which come standard in the hotel rooms). So it is here, the more expensive the hotel, the less you get and the more extra charges. But, this being off season, it turned out even cheaper than then. The hotel was one of the few dozen lining up the boardwalk - only up to 41st street, the other half was residential, where the rich live.
The view of the boardwalk, from the 5th floor, is quite impressive, specially this wet version, and Agfa's reach is wide enough for a frame like this. All in all, it seems much more lively than A-burg, and we agreed we do want to move here. Not that we haven't been here before, but now we also took a look at it off season, and it's not so deserted and halfdead like Šibenik was in winter.
Got a pizza from the nearby Papa Joe's (never from Dominoes, I still hate the advertising they were repeating ad nauseam, with one of the Sesame street dolls).
As usual, when five of us occupy a hotel room, there's no cot and I sleep on the floor.
Mentions: Agfa, Annenburg (A-burg), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), mirko, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Orionware (Orion), in serbian