On the 5th of January 2014

It was a fairly cold and uninspiring winter Sunday, so I spent most of that day at home.

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Most but not all. At one point, around noon ...

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... I had to do some stuff and visit some people in the village of Marchana, about 25 or 30 kilometers from where I live. While there, I decided to take a quick stop at the local cemetery and visit the final resting place of my grandparents from my father's side. The cemetery is situated at the edge of the village and the oaks shown in this picture were photographed there, less than a hundred meters from the graves. In the same area, just across the street from the trees ...

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... I came across an interesting scene on the lawn in front of one of the neighboring houses. A young man was cutting a pig assisted, or supervised, by an older lady.

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Some hours earlier, pretty early in the morning, I took a series of selfies in my bathroom mirror. I used the biggest stainless steel pot in the house and the only hairdryer I have to create an ultracool futuristic or extraterrestrial soldier out of my ordinary me. Today, while preparing this post, I added a bit of vivid color to some of the self-portraits in the hope to make them more eye-catchy & intriguing.

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When I was a kid, among quite a few sticker albums that I got bored with way before completing them, there was one that I genuinely adored for years. At one point I started cutting the images out of the album and sticking them in a thick notebook where I added more elaborate text copied from various natural history books I had at home, so the thing got soon destroyed. A year or two later, the notebook somehow got lost, so my unreliable memory was the only place in which traces of that album were still present.

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I still remembered the name of the album, which was "Mammals", but to whoever I mentioned it later in life, no one seemed to know what I was talking about. At moments it felt like having a false memory, a dream mistaken for reality.

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In the summer of 2013, two friends from Serbia came to visit and spend a week or two by the sea. We regularly drank beer and smoked weed in my garden at night, and at some point, I mentioned the album with many well-painted small pictures of animals, specifically mammals. Soon I forgot about that conversation ...

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... but those good friends of mine didn't ...

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... so around Christmas that year, I received a large yellow envelope, and in that envelope was the album. I couldn't believe it. But it was real.

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They found it on the Internet and bought it for me. The album was almost completed. Only three stickers are still missing. I never got so close to completing the whole thing as a kid. This means that I saw many more mammals at the end of 2014 than I could ever remember seeing back then in the early eighties when I first bought the album and started collecting the stickers.

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Today, while preparing this post, I spent some time searching the internet for some information I didn't bother to find before. For example, I found out that the thing was first published in 1978. One thing I knew even as a kid, is the name of the brand that published the album. Panini. It was established in 1961 in Modena, Italy. Manny cool things made for kids had that name and logo back then, at least here where I live and throughout Yugoslavia.

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I saw quite a few sticker albums from the early to mid-eighties, but this one stood out from the rest for its art style and the overall quality of the pictures. The text was very basic, far from being interesting and well-written.

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Everything was so vibrant and colorful.

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In this set of nine photographs, you can see some of the stickers from my favorite pages of the album, the ones dedicated to marsupials. My fascination with marsupials started in 1980 while watching an episode of "Life on Earth", a series of documentaries with David Attembourgh. The whole series was great, but the story about marsupials, their isolation in Australia, and what looks like a parallel world with the marsupial equivalents of placental mammals, that stuff was absolutely fascinating to me.

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On the 5th of January 2014, I was chatting via Facebook with a friend from Italy that I haven't seen since the early nineties, and I mentioned the sticker album Mammals. Since I had the album now, I photographed some of the stickers to show him what they look like. That's how the story about Mammals became part of today's post.

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Here you can see another series of quick morning self-portraits taken in the bathroom mirror. My third eye is wide open in these shots.

The morning scene, shown in this and the following six pictures ...

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... was photographed in the living room. More or less at the same time, also early in the morning ...

... this slug was crawling across my yard in search of some shady humid place in which to spend the rest of the day.

This leaf, fallen from the Celtis australis tree that still grows in front of my house, looked a bit like a fossil.

Here you can see an animated GIF created using photos from the living room taken in the afternoon.

Also in the afternoon, I took a walk along the shore in the area called Vizula, near the harbor of my hometown. In this photograph, you can see a seabird floating on the calm, shallow water of the bay. The name of the species is Mergus merganser.

In the evening, an hour after sunset, I met with some friends and we walked to the harbor, always here in Medulin - my hometown.

They had plenty of small but loud crackers, so we added a bit of noise to the sleepy winter atmosphere. After that ...

... we drove ten kilometers to the city of Pula, to see the last movie of the Hobbit trilogy on the big screen. It was a 3D movie. Here you can see the only shot I took while watching it.

AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.