Borče called in the evening to announce the tomorrow's frendz parti, but I said nope, no can do, Nina is going home to scout the lands, we stay home alone with the kids until second of february, so nada until then.
The plan is to drive her and twins on tuesday morning to the american embassy, so she can make them new passports, and then she'd stay to night at Lena and Milan, and we'd drive them home. Raja will probably sleep it over, and Violet has no problem staying alone for a few hours, she's rambling the house all night and waits for others to wake up, then sleeps in the afternoon.
Nina will fly to South Dakota to mee that Mark guy, be a whole week with him, then see how will that go. He's a tad younger than her, has a son from one of previous marriages, perhaps a little older than Raja. Her layovers are in Amsterdam and Minneapolis, with some good eight hours wait in Amsterdam, which she actually planned for, because it's winter and who knows how the things will go that day. Today they just had some fierce wind, blowing with breaks, so the traffic still sneaks through. We'll see.
Talked with Go and Stanley (freshly shaved from neck to nape) in the evening. He's hustling cars again, keeps a steady company of east Europeans, even one of his customers often drops by a tavern kept by a leaf of our forest, they even have rakija. Now how did he get rakija, export isn't profitable, and if you mean to be a manufacturer, the entry ticket costs a whole million, in various fees, accreditations, permits. Perhaps he gets the famous „Yebiga“ from that rock guitar player who went native here and decided to manufacture it there (found later that it's made here, though), which was a famous story a couple of years ago.
Around midnight we two celebrated our 51st anniversary with the remainder of this week's tutifruti, and... it turned obvious that we two are together for quite a long time. At least twice it happened that one of us said something, and then five seconds later we both, right on cue, fire the same quip on exactly the same line of thought. Convergence, or what. We laughed heartily both times.
Twonnysecond. The old man from whom we bought pears last fall, was buried today. We didn't attend, we talked with the man a total of one time for all these years, just about those pears, and Nina is also packing for the trip. After the lunch and a brief catnap I drove all four (Violet and Raja stayed at home - she asleep, he at the keyboard) downtown, so she'd buy what she'll need for the trip. At least we solved the matter of winter jacket - she got the one we bought in Sokobanja three years ago.
Twonnythird. We got up as we wound ourselves, got to the embassy. While waiting for them three to finish, a snow started, then turned into rain. Even there on Dedinje, where it's all old villas, it's becoming hard to park. We two waited for a while for the snow to pass and smoked a coupole, then tried to find a place to perhaps repark and have a coffee. But nope, in that area they sip coffee in their salons, the only cafe in the area was exactly where we parked, and that one's still not in operation, no furniture yet. Well we eventually saw them coming, and we neatly made it to Lena and Milan's, even my bladder didn't manage to create any emergency, though it kept sending me warnings for a whole hour already. Sanda and Linda stayed with baba in the car. I delivered what I had - Nina with her luggage, one hollow beef bone for the soup, and received the empty egg cartons we forgot to take home a five weeks ago.
Then it became complicated. We got home in good order, bought pljeske in Stajićevo (making a stop in Čenta to phone in the order, so we don't have to wait for the girl to serve all the turkish truckers first, this was it's ready when we get there), ate it - Raja and Violet just the meat, the twins the somuns, and we two the full sets of pljeska, somun, add-ons. And while I took my hour and a half nap, there comes Nina on telegram, said her card and drivers' [license] stayed in that bag with the passport paperwork. For a while we elaborated on variants. It already happened twice that I made two trips to Belgrade on the same day, so after a coffee I can do that the third time, but on the other side she actually doesn't need the drivers', she's got cash, some 800$ and Mark said he'll pay half her ticket, so that's another 400$, so no need. Then Lena remembered that on the return trip the airline could make a problem why she doesn't have a ticket back from Serbia, what if Serbia expels her after her default three months visa expires... so it'd be nice if she'd have the wherewithal to purchase such a ticket on the spot. On the third side, she can order a new card, once there, for the next day, so why not take that the next day there. It ended up with me not making the trip, just telling her the numbers on the card, which would suffice to just type into Delta's form if she needed to purchase a ticket.
4-VI-2024 - 5-VII-2026