15-XI-1999.
Bought a bicycle at Walmart, plus a small one for Lena, total 144,13$. The idea being that it doesn't make much sense to drive just six blocks to work, and that I'm itching without a bike.
Though, in retrospect, it didn't turn out that way. The hills are a killer. With my mild heart condition, I can't really pedal against any slope, even when shifting all the way down.
At least I slapped my forehead and had a good laugh about it. In the ancient year 1978, when I returned from studies, granma bought me a bicycle and I took to reading its manual. Can't hurt, as no matter how strongly I can feel as if I knew everything about bicycles that I may need to, perhaps it contains some useful info I didn't know I might need. And in the text I found „do not lubricate the bicycle with edible oil“. Wow. What level of idiots were the intended audience for this? We do have, among bikers, a decent percentage of senile peasants or semiliterate fools, but that it would cross anyone's mind to lubricate it with edible oil... unimaginable.
And now, 20 years later, I read the manual again. Not in bad english (the bike was, of course, chinese), it's all clear and look here, it says „do not lubricate the bicycle with edible oil“. Well we were ahead of time back then, same warning as it is for the Amers.
Go is going out with Larry. I got the little digital Seiko camera from Zero and there's a bunch of photos of them around his motorbike. I guess it's her desire to ride a bike that put them together, not Greg's love for social projects and experimentation. We did gather that we, as a family, were his project and that he wanted to learn something from whatever happened with us, but of course we couldn't prove it, and no need to. The hints are everywhere.
Nina took the camera to school, so this is all hers.
Our first regular internet connection here started working yesterday. The downside is that it's a dial-up, at the whopping 54KBaud, the upside is that it's a local call, the modem is probably two blocks away, and we have flat rate for both local calls and net. The latter being free the first month, then 20$ per.
We became members (enmembered ourselves?) to a video club in Kroger. Nope, it's not an analog to a cine club, where movies were made - this is just a library which rents out video cassettes, and now disks as well. Why is it called a club is beyond me.
What Kroger never clearly stated was that the club was not theirs, they only rent some space in the supermarket, weren't even fenced out. When we took Kroger's shop card, they solemnly swore they won't pass our data to anyone, but club was not theirs, so soon we started receiving loads of ads in the mail, with the same typo in the name (not my intention, just a quirk of my handwriting, which the girl from the club misread), all about video cassettes, then SF books, guess they saw what we rented. And we didn't even have a veeaitchess recorder yet, not even a teevee, we did this for the deevydees, now that I have the gadget, to see that image quality.
Turned out they had five titles on disks altogether, of which at least two Disneys. Well fuckya. And, on top of that, they weren't in the original boxes (aka jewelry cases (!)), so they wouldn't be „lost“ and resold, but in their own, semitransparent [ones]. This is the time when they issued the Mac in such semitransparent plastic, and everywhere they started making old things in new skin, in semitransparent plastic, including pocket calculators, pencils, iron[ic/ing iron]s, and what not. The box had a sticker with the title printed, and another one with „be kind, rewind“. This was mild, later I heard of clubs where they'd check each returned cassette, and would charge you some rewinding fee if it wasn't rewound.
Later I'll have the time to slowly and in leisure be disappointed in the deevydee as a format, and that market in general - whenever they issue some new format, they always restart with the same titles over and over, in new format now, to make the enth round of selling (ergo charging for) the same old. And the quality... when I found a way to export individual frames int jpegs, lo and behold, the resolution was just about television grade, compressed to 55K per frame. How you broke the ceiling with the resolution, even a few bits better than veedgyeye.
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), Greg Reubenthal, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Larry Artois, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Zero Distance (Zero), in serbian
12-XI-2017 - 18-III-2026