january 1986.
Go and Nina around the table. zx spectrum is the black box next to the TV. At this time it already had the metal case with a mechanical keyboard (bought in Slovenia, by mail, installed by Rile). It lay on the little cassette recorder, which we didn't use for anything else. I pretty much gave up on trying to use the tape recorder as a storage device, it was taking up the whole chair, had to use an adapter cable, and it was complicated to change tapes - you'd have to rewind first (and if you didn't change tapes, you had to rewind a lot to find a file, and had to keep track what's where on the tape). Its sound was better, and thus the accuracy, but then every owner of such a configuration would know how to "adjust the azimuth of the magnetic head" with a tiny screwdriver. I'd borrow one from her sewing machine, as Bagat had the best, long lasting and ergonomic, screwdrivers.
There's also a bunch of mugshots from this time, as we all needed to change documents sooner or later - our passports, driver's licences and/or IDs would be expiring this year, so we sacrificed a roll of film for that.
I stubbornly rode the bicycle to work, summer winter. I'd often take her yellow one, because it was lower. Once it happened that, at the beginning of our street, where the bus stops, I suddenly braked, because I just remembered to buy newspapers at the kiosk. The buses have thoroughly polished the ice, in waves, so the bike suddenly took a direction of its own. I had good reflexes and stretched out my legs immediately, landed with both soles on the pavement and didn't fall, but the bike under me did, and rubbed the upper bar of its frame on my left shin. Over time, this left shin (rarely the right one) accrued a varied pattern of scratches and little cuts, mostly from the building site.
The staff at school got so used to me being always on a bicycle, that once when I took the škodilak (because I needed to go pick something after work), someone said "folks, there'll be a war - Sredljević came by car!".
Around this time, it seems, I sent another one of my SF stories to Sirius, printed probably on that Seikosha in MPSŠC, which would have taken summer day til noon. It wasn't published, but Milivoj Pašiček put this into his editorial in one of the following issues...
It seems that SIRIUS will be also overrun by compiutors. Some readers have sent us their stories on printer rolas, and Gradivoj Sredljević 'threatens' to send his next one recorded on - tape! Well, if Arthur C. Clarke could send his "2010" to his publisher on a microchip, why wouldn't you be able to do that?!...
(I had forgotten this one completely, then it reappeared in 1999, then forgot that too and found it again in 2024...)
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Sredljević, MPSŠC, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Rista Stančulov (Rile), SF stories, škodilak, ZX Spectrum, in serbian
21-XI-2020 - 30-VI-2024