Day 2 of the Active Solution conference trip to Italy. Actual knowledge activities occurred today.

We are staying at a beautiful hotel in Castel Gandolfo, half an hour from Rome.

The theme of the conference is “AI”, which had me bucking and rearing in advance – I am rather fed up with being force-fed AI everywhere all of the time – but I managed to find an angle that felt productive and promising rather than insulting and distressing.

We worked in pairs or small groups in whatever part of the hotel we like, so there were plenty of people sitting on the terrace looking out over Lago Albano.

Late afternoon we were bussed to Santa Benedetta wineyard where we got a wine tasting and a lesson in pasta-making.

I’ve made pasta at home, but only from a recipe with fixed weights and measurements. Here I learned what the dough is supposed to feel like when there’s enough flour in it – noticeably softer than what I’ve been making until now. What I’ve made before hasn’t been bad, but this was better.

The recipe here was actually backwards compared to my previous one. My previous one started with an egg and a quantity of flour, worked those into each other, and then added water until the dough “goes together”.

This one starts with an egg and other liquids, and then works in flour until the dough is good. So instead of adjusting the water at the end, it adjusts the flour.

Another difference was that the liquid was a small splash of olive oil added, and an even smaller of white wine, instead of water.

We also had a pesto-making competition. My main revelations were that a lot of people like a lot of raw garlic in their pesto, and some of them have no common sense or intuition when it comes to food preparation.

Dinner was served on vibrant floral porcelain, with hand-crocheted doilies in between the service plate and the food plate.

And yes, the primo was based on our own pasta, with an asparagus cream. I think they cooked each batch of pasta separately, because they were of varying thicknesses and textures, but for serving it all got mixed up. It was rather interesting to feel the differences: some light and fluffy, others more dense.

The days feel like summer here already, but the night was chilly.

Rome isn’t far – I’m pretty sure that the sea of lights in the background is all Rome. The glowing hilltop structure on the right is the papal palace of Castel Gandolfo – mostly a museum, but also serving as the pope’s summer residence.

A three-day conference trip with Active Solution. Half of today was travel, and half was sightseeing in Tivoli, outside of Rome. I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.

First: lunch, at a very picturesque restaurant in the middle of Tivoli, under a pergola of wisteria.

The restaurant was established sometime in the 18th century and has seen many illustrious guests throughout the years…

… including not one but two visits from Swedish royalty. In 1918, the queen of Sweden was Victoria of Baden. Wikipedia tells me she was sickly, not on good terms with her husband the King of Sweden, and lived the last ten years of her life in Rome.

Look left and you see Roman ruins; look right and you see Renaissance buildings. I wonder what it might feel like to live in a place so steeped in ancient history.

The restaurant was called Sibylla. Tivoli/Tibur was the seat of a sibyl, a prophetess of ancient Greece.

Lunch was followed by a brief visit the Villa Gregoriana, a park centred at the river ravine in the middle of the town. Our time there was so short that I don’t quite understand why we even went there – it wasn’t enough to get a real impression of anything.

Then we went to see the Villa d’Este, where we actually had a good solid hour to walk around.

Villa d’Este is a Renaissance “villa” (read: palace) of Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este. It started out as a monastery, and some of the serene simplicity of that background is still present.

Inside, of course, it’s all opulent frescoes and tapestries. No luxurious furniture, though: later generations were unable to bear the cost of maintaining the palace, and its contents were sold and/or looted, while the palace itself fell into disrepair.

Behind the villa, there’s a large garden. Whole city quarters were razed to make space for it.

The main highlights of the gardens are its numerous fountains, pools, waterfalls and other water features.

This shawl is coming out very nice, and I’m rather ready to be done with it. It’s a triangular construction that starts at one corner and ends at the opposite edge. Initially it feels like it knits up so fast, but then the rows get longer and longer, and it really feels like the progress stalls towards the end.

I’m so used to being able to combine knitting with another activity – maybe watch a knitting podcast on Youtube – but with this yarn it’s not so easy, I need to actually look at what I’m doing. At the same time the pattern doesn’t require much concentration. It’s rather perfect for knitting club, actually, where I can look at the knitting but still talk and listen to other people at the same time.

I am aware of my ageing these days. Physically I’m past my peak, and now I need to make an effort to stave off decline.

I do work out, but I also make conscious choices to fit in some exercise in my everyday life. Strength, mobility, balance, conditioning. I want to put off the old lady stage – “oh, I can’t do that, what if I fall” – for as long as possible.

Always take the stairs. Always walk, no electric scooters for me.

Also: put on and take off my shoes while standing on one leg. Great balance training.

The cold season, the season of thick sweaters, is over, and now they all need to be washed and put away for the summer. It’s going to take me a while.

It’s not the washing that takes time but the drying. My thickest knits take at least two days to dry fully.

There’s room for two sweaters on the dining table. I guess I could spread another one out elsewhere, but the next limiting factor is bath towels. A sweater straight out of water is going to be dripping, no matter how hard you squeeze the water out of it. The way to get most of the water out is to spread the sweater on a thick bath towel, roll them both up, then add more pressure by standing and treading on it. Afterwards the sweater will be much dryer and the bath towel will be soaked. So I’ve got two sweaters drying on the dining table, and two bath towels drying in the laundry room, so that they can be ready for the next two sweaters.

Last season I did a lot of digging around the elder bush, under which there was an anemone patch. At that time of year, the anemones were not easy to detect, and I was worried that I had maybe dug them all up. Relieved to see that I managed to spare most of them. Maybe the patch is a bit smaller than it used to be, but hopefully they can spread again.

I knew that I had to clean the house today. It’s never going to happen on a weekday, and I’m away next weekend, and there’s no way it can wait another two weeks – there are dust bunnies gathering in the corners.

And still I put it off all day. I didn’t even do anything particularly pleasurable – just kind of wasted the whole day away, quite aware all of the time what I was doing. Procrastinating in the most unrewarding way possible. I ended up cleaning at night, in lamplight. Which didn’t make the process more enjoyable at all.

For what? Why? I don’t get it. It’s not like someone else was telling me that I ought to clean. It was my decision to clean, and for my own benefit. Still somehow my brain found it better to put it off.

Kulturnatt Stockholm – Stockholm Culture Night.

Sensus, the umbrella organization for study circles under whose aegis our embroidery club takes place, participated in the project with a packed programme. Concerts, talks, workshops… including an embroidery exhibition and workshop that we were invited to contribute to. Members from our small club and two others hung our works in the small workshop room where we have our usual Thursday sessions.

One of the other clubs had themed embroideries only, on the theme of “sunrise”. The other had “wandering embroideries” on a couple of themes – a number of people all start work on same-themed, same-sized pieces of same-colour fabric, and then hand them over to the next person in a circular manner, until everyone has worked on every piece.

Our contribution to the exhibit was a mixed bag, which I rather like as a concept. Many embroidery exhibitions are intricate and figurative, which can certainly be impressive and interesting and beautiful, but I wouldn’t want interested newcomers to get the impression that that is the only thing that embroidery can be. I myself don’t much enjoy making those kinds of pieces. We had some figurative works, but also abstract ones, as well as clothes and accessories embellished with embroidery.

We were supposed to hang up our name signs, for a personal touch, and I had forgotten mine at home. We had plenty of materials that we’d collected for the evening’s workshop, so I sat down and made a new one, in the hour that I had between finishing hanging and before the exhibition officially opened.

I didn’t hang around while the exhibition and workshop were actually open. I heard afterwards that there were so many visitors that at times there weren’t enough seats for everyone who wanted to try it out, so I guess it wasn’t a bad thing that I wasn’t there, taking up another seat.

Instead I partook in the event offerings myself. First: K.A. Almgren silk mill, a historical silk weaving factory. The factory has its original jacquard looms from the 1860s – the roots of punch card computer programming. There’s an exhibition about the history of the factory and the people who have worked in it, as well as plenty of examples of fabulous patterned silk fabrics.

The original looms are in full working condition, and at least one person is still employed and working there as a weaver to keep the knowledge alive.

The punch card patterns for some of the more intricate fabrics could be hundreds and hundreds of cards long, each card corresponding to one weft thread.

Afterwards I walked to the shop and exhibition room of Konsthantverkarna, a crafts collective. Their current exhibition is Marie Eklund’s They’re spoon-spoons, silly!, a collection of hand-carved spoons, one crazier than the other.

Titeln anspelar på ett citat av David Bowie ”They’re shoe-shoes, silly”, vilket var hans svar på frågan om det är herrskor, damskor eller bisexuella skor han hade på sig. Marie Eklund får ofta frågan vad det är hon sysslar med egentligen. Är skedarna brukbara? Hållbara? Slöjd? Skräp? Konst? Dyra? Till för vem? För vad? Varför då? They’re spoon-spoons, silly!

The title is a play on a quote by David Bowie: “They’re shoe-shoes, silly”, which was his response when asked whether he was wearing men’s shoes, women’s shoes, or bisexual shoes. Marie Eklund is often asked what she’s doing. Are the spoons usable? Durable? Crafts? Rubbish? Art? Expensive? For whom? For what? They’re spoon-spoons, silly!

The car hit a nice number on the odometer. I’m not quite sure how long a car can last, but I hope to get many more kilometres out of it. Sometimes I think that I should replace it with a smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient car – but with how little I drive, it would probably take me well over a decade to make back the money that a newer car would cost.

The Viburnum has been flowering throughout most of the winter and now spring as well.