24-I-2020.

Working on this Byo project most of the day, some final touches before I start migrating the news into the new project for Gary.

In the evening, we took a cab to downtown, the square on our side of main street. There were a few messages and calls back and forth so we agreed with Bilja that she should start going to the bridge from her side. Which worked perfectly, we met mid bridge. She had just flipflops on bare feet, and the temperature was nearly freezing (yes, unseasonably warm). She visited her mom every day about twice, and got blisters from her boots. Ahem, yes, american way of life does that to you, you forget the elegance of walking. She brought some flowers with Ferrero chocolate balls and carried it all the way to Lesnina in one hand, and asked me to pull the sleeve on her other hand to warm up. About halfway she changed hands.

When we got at Dragana's, Borko was already there. The surprise was complete - she had no clue that we'd bring Bilja along.

We tried to sit on the sofas for a minute, but that's too unwieldy - I never got the hang of what's wrong there, but it always feels much better in her kitchen, where we moved immediately. I brought a bottle of last year's tutifruti to taste. I had one of that, she stayed with it all evening, Borko also tried some, Dragana and I hit on her apricot (not the one we gave her last friday). The table was full of various cold stuff (the domestic sausage from "my Hungarians, must be from Čurda, I buy from them for years"), cheese, gibanica with potluck add-ons (i.e. leftovers of any cheese, ham, whatever she found in the fridge), nuts... full, indeed.

The conversation went on and on, zigzagging in unpredictable directions. My dear even managed to insert the flat-earther spark, which took it into predictable directions. We have played that several times; the unexpected effect was that they all noticed how we end each other's sentences, being amazed how we think alike or behave like a well oiled mechanism. Well, they're all widowers for a number of years, even though Dragana technically isn't, the technicallity being the lack of marriage, but she keeps the paintings, by her deceased boyfriend of 20 years' staž, on the kitchen wall.

One of the highlights was the mention of panta, of whom Dragana and Bilja never heard, and the rest of us knew the lyrics, songs, heck, knew the guy in person and have bought his book. The point "yes he sings with bad pitch at times, but it's the exact same bad pitch in same places, same ways, same as it was 40 years ago, he got it to an art" was made several times.

Then around 23:00 Dragana and Bilja wanted to exchange Viber addresses. Which didn't work, because Bilja was offline - the house network was password locked, there was no public network, and she didn't have a data plan on her local SIM card. Which took the efforts of the whole consilium to find out - three programmers, yes, but Borko and I never used Viber; I reasoned along the similarity with Skype, but the text of its messages is, of course, different, the same things are called differently and same terms mean something else... Then it came down to retyping Bilja's phone number into Dragana's phone but Bilja was already laughing so much that she couldn't read more than two digits before bursting into laugh. By the time she'd recover enough to read the next two, one of the phones would dark out. I had to take a shot of my nokla's screen, enlarge it on the preview on eos70, then dictate from that. The "everyone laughing and getting nothing done" phase lasted at least 20 minutes - probably more, I just stopped making more pictures, there's only so much I can get of girls wiping tears from their eyes :).

We drank a lot but it was only Dragana who had some symptoms (mild dispute with gravity); given her lack of gravitas, as she's again at her usual 50kg or thereabouts, she'd be the obvious target. We ran out of her apricot brandy and she went to refill the crystal bottle; we ran out of cigarettes and then almost ran out of hers.

We finally split at about 1:30; took a cab, dropped Bilja at the same square and went home. And then poured one more of tutifruti for good sleep. This was the 2nd frendz parti.

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Mentions: 18-VIII-2021., Biljana Lajković (Bilja), Byo (Byo), Čurda, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), eos70, frendz parti, Gary Brandywine, gibanica, Lesnina, Mališa Borkovski (Borko), nokla, panta, staž, in serbian