26-VII-2017.

The 8th batch of apricot brandy. Just when we started pouring the mush over that lower bell, which is supposed to keep the thick above itself and the thin beneath, she wondered - what if we tried without it? Bigger stills have the mixer, which is a flat chain sweeping the bottom, powered by a crank, and this one has this lower, almost flat, bell. Well, without it, we run pretty much the same risk - it may char on the bottom, or it may not. So what the hell, we just took it out and... wow. The inside of the kettle was actually cleaner than when we started. Some of the char got dissolved by alcohol or acids (we do pour baking soda to neutralize the acids to an extent - but not all the way, some acidity is required for the taste), no new charring occurred.

Mića, initially misnamed Milica, came again to keep us company. He's from the first litter of johana's kittens from 2011. Got used to our presence again. The cats don't really memorize their masters (aka staff), once they change home you need to get them to know you (i.e. bribe them with food - which she did quite fine, he ate from her hand). There's also Arambaša, the one of the 2015's ten who wasn't a tabby. And Mrcana 2 - the petty tabby, about half the size of those two, so the name is appropriate ("mrcina" - dead body, big lazy creature, "macana" - one of terms of endearment for a kitty).

One of these days we saw the roadwork guys widen the pavement in the street behind Springfield, which is one of the two streets on the shortest way to Čankovo. If there was one between them, that would be the one, so it's either the left one or the right one to detour through. The left one was not recommended for a number of years, because what narrow pavement there was has been destroyed by the guy on the corner, with his trucks. He's got some combination of agricultural stuff and machinery sales and transportation, so he eventually spat some money to widen and repave those 80m of ex-road, which was then great for a year or two. Then the route became quite popular and its crossing with a major thoroughfare became a dangerous spot - given any stretch of good road will make some idiots put the pedal to the metal. So instead of installing a traffic light, which requires a year of study, paperwork, waiting for ministry of transportation to give money etc, they made double speed bumps, the outer one being a meter wide. So we're now taking the one on the right side.

(... 2 words...)

That one is one of those paved for elections 1996, just about one lane wide, so if two vehicles meet, one or both have to veer to the shoulder. Then it was made wider and repaved and even got nice low curbstones for elections 2014... only one block. The remaining three blocks remained as they were, even though there were three more elections since. Now these guys didn't actually repave nor widen the lane; they poured and loosely tamped the recycled asphalt from somewhere else and put it here to smooth the shoulders. Which is just as good as it gets without actually rebuilding the road - we still have to move to the shoulder when passing another vehicle, but the shoulder is now even and not full of holes. We'll see how this holds when the rain finally falls, which it didn't for quite a while. The temperatures are close to 40, and stay so for weeks. We had a brief respite two weeks ago, when it was below 30 for a few days, but now it's back. Just like two years ago, or in 2011.

In other news, Lena and Milan are at some conference in Prague, where they held a brief presentation each. Watching her on youtube... pretty much the same air of self-assuredness and I-know-what-I'm-talking-about attitude as when she was presenting her matricular work seven years ago.

At Firriver, still unravelling the mess at some university clinic in Belgium, a big one. I mean, a big clinic and a big mess. As happens with almost every conversion, most of the bullshit in the data after conversion can be neatly traced to the bullshit in the source data. It's just that nobody looked at that for years, and the unraked shit kind of loses the smell. Conversion IS a rake... so cases like this happen:

in Patienten, there are 22 cases where relation was added on 2nd run of conversion. In the few cases I checked (out of 58 total), the situation is like this:

- one female related to one male; that male has a duplicate record, both records contain relationship to the same female

- one female related to one male and vice versa; another female related to the same male. no relationship dates available (multiple cases).

And this is just the patients, which is lookup, somewhere early in the process. Once we get to actual cycles, lab results, the things will get nasty. By the time we get to the freezer, aka cryo storage, it will be just fucking ugly.

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Mentions: Čankovo, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, Milan Nastić, Springfield, in serbian