20-VI-2004.
Go came to spend a few days with us. I guess Ricardo went to visit his parents too, in DC, namely Alexandria. We drove her by the new house, to at least take a look on the outside - we still don't have the keys. Made a few shots along the way and there too.
The ads for chick filet (or whichever spelling they used, we called it Čika File, uncle Feeleh) are getting really funny.
The new garage, a block from the one where we used to leave the car before I learned to find a spot closer to the aparmtment, was being built... and then burned. Luckily, it's mostly concrete. Still, it charred the signs on the street, three lanes and a wide sidewalk away.
In the bathroom, between the bedrooms, the ceiling above the bathtub was rotten, because of the constant drip from above. The landlord (who seemed like a special kind of scum, whenever we had dealings with him) fixed it by installing this flimsy lowered ceiling, which at least stopped pieces of mortar falling. For a while.
Now that too suffered damage from the leakage and now there were more pieces falling. Eventually nobody got hurt, the upper bathtub never came to visit, and this wasn't fixed during the girls' stay. The guy also never returned the 750$ deposit.
Also, both guinea pigs, Mrvica and Mića are with us now, for the summer.
Writing to my parents on everything about the house. As for paperwork, these guys are worse than ours back home. There's hundreds of different procedures to go through, insurance for this and that, this guy passes a paper to that guy, he to the next and so on. There's even a title insurance - in case someone comes up with a false title, and takes us to court, claiming ownership, this insurance covers the cost of the trial. Then there's mandatory flood insurance (mandated by the CU), because there's a creek nearby and we're whole 20m beyond the hundred year flood line, so in case there's high water down the James and Elisabeth and Potomac at the same time and so on and so on. Everybody's trying to cover their asses at our expense*. We even had to sign a waiver about lead - house was built in 1977, lead paint was forbidden in 1978, so we had to acknowledge the possibility that there's some of it in the house and to practically promise we won't sue anyone for it.
Brick is decoration here, not building material, there's only the façade brick, none of the cheap kind. We have it easy, just dig three shovels deep anywhere and you'll find first class clay; over here it's a redland, if you keep digging you'll find gravel and stone, but no clay. Which is why they make everything of wood.
And it's not that the rents are high and houses cheap, it's that we grabbed this at a very low price. A regular house would be 100K$ and above in a black area or 500K$ and above on the coast. And the monthly depends mostly on how long is the loan; 30 years is typical, whereby you pay one more house in interest.
Nina is getting ready to fly home. She'll be taking the Agfa, so we'd spend the time without too many shots, only what the crummy webcam catches from the desk. On 22nd, she packed and we took her to the Dulles airport in DC. The rain was awful, I could barely see the car in front of me. At least I knew the route by heart, and exactly the place where I'd have to take a left lane to exit left from I-95 to I-66, which would get me to the airport.
I see on the photo that I have a wrist watch. Well, the only time I need it is when I'm on airports - I think I bought this one last year, or the one before, when I flew to Houston. It cost about 5$ and ran fine until the battery ran out in, let's say, 2009. In 2010 I bought another one, which even had hands but also the digital display, and these never matched - the mechanics would show one time and the digits another. At some point I was messing with its buttons, trying to set the time, and accidentally turned its alarm on. For years I could hear it from the drawer, each day at 13:00. It beeped around nine, at first, but once I managed to, at least, move it for later; never found out how to turn it off. Its battery finally died in 2021 or so. That one cost 7$.
The airport was crowded, as usual. Nina was carrying, among other things, a skateboard for Boba. When it was her turn to check in, the clerk asked for british transit visa. But she doesn't need one, she's got a green card. Nope, doesn't have the physical card, it hasn't arrived yet, but there's the stamp in the passport saying she has one. Turns out, by clerk's interpretation, that the Brits don't give a damn about the stamp, green card or american passport or else no, she can't fly. The Brits demand a „direct airport transit“ visa. All the terrorists they catch this way wouldn't fill a van, but at least regular folks suffer.
We summoned all our dimes and quarters that we had and called Axioma, our tourist agency (run by yugos, of course, probably Serbs from Chicago), to switch flights to some friendlier one, but no, this was probably the last flight for the day, they couldn't find any seats on any flight where the layover would be in some friendlier country, so the travel was off. I tnihk we made four or five calls to check whether they found anything, but no, didn't work.
Nina was very unhappy, cried a bit, and we went home.
Four days later, on 25th, after we paid some 160$ extra, they found her a flight, this time over Amsterdam. Fucken English, the arrogant bastards. We took her to the airport again, and it was a bright sunny day, and everything went fine. When we returned home, we found her green card in the mailbox. We then remembered that we passed the mail van on the parking as we were leaving - had we waited for ten minutes more, she would have had it.
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* which fuck do they give whether we suffer flood damage, or any other? We own the house, as we pay taxes for all of it, not just the paid part, so we own the whole of the damage too. But no, they count on us getting, in case of damages, into financial trouble with the repairs etc, and then THEY RUN THE RISK of us being unable to keep up with payments. From the have nots, take. So much of it turns out more expensive when you take a loan. At least we didn't have to take loan insurance, which is mandated (by whom?) until you pay off 20% of the price. Thanks to what I made from Gary and other tezga, we covered that and avoided that cost.
Mentions: Agfa, Dobrivoj Gunaroši (Boba), Gary Brandywine, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Mrvica, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), tezga, yugo, in serbian
6-X-2022 - 18-II-2026