Daily Slow Chat

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1. Nice morning in Rome, warm and sunny.

   Feels a bit strange to be back in Italy after 3 months away.It’s good to speak some Italian again, and also to get a decent coffee 😉

   The Roman maritozzo doesn’t really do it for me as a breakfast though…

2. The nights here are always colder, which is nice. Even on the hottest days. It will be 25 by mid afternoon . Typical summer temperature fluctuation. Not too hot not too cold. I like it.

3. [Home grown tomatoes are so good you guys 😭](https://imgur.com/a/0cx2PQH) I have no idea what they have done to poor commercially grown tomatoes, but they’re not even identifiable as the same vegetable as the deliciousness that grows in abundance in my garden right now. These last hot days were a blessing.

    I went to a living history/reenactment event yesterday. These are always so much fun. We don’t really have them back home, not like this, at least. This one was more 15th century, so there were many Landsknecht walking around (it was very warm, though, poor guys). I think this is the most ridiculous period in fashion history. Even their armour have imitation slash-and-puffs.  

   If you were to reenact a period of history, which country and time would you choose? I think I might go with early 19th century/Regency. I just love the dresses so much

   ETA [Here’s an okra blossom for those who have never seen one!](https://i.imgur.com/G1lfSh0.jpg)

4. A while back I read a fascinating history-article, about one of those little weird mysteries. And it just keeps me wondering ‘what the hell happened?’ Apparently, around 300AD, the whole of the mid- and south of the Netherlands got depopulated. Villages and forts where abandoned. People just left for elsewhere, most likely further south, France, Italy. Not a few, but en masse, just about everyone, in the span of just a couple of years. Historians know it happened, but just not why. People migrate all the time, but just not this massively, in such a short time. Lots of theories abound: climate change, with the associated floodings, crop failures. Bad management of farm-lands, leading to lack of food. The decaying Roman empire just packing up and going home, causing the local economy to collapse. Or the Roman empire issueing a move order, forcing everybody to leave for the stronger parts of the remaining Roman empire. No one knows for sure. And then, after a 100 years or so, peope come back, often to the same abandoned villages, to carry on as if nothing had happened.

   Don’t know why I’m telling this, but it’s just one of those things that get stuck in the back of my mind. If only I had a time machine.

5. ITER, the tokamak fusion energy experiment, was supposed to come online next year, but a decade-long delay was announced a little while back.

   The news of plasma energy gain at the national ignition laboratory more than a year ago seems to have prompted a lot of money flowing into fusion power startups. Some of those startups are promising electricity generation in a decade (bold claims considering ITER doesn’t even aim to generate energy). Sometimes, I wonder who has the money to invest in ventures that’ll most likely fail while blowing away mountains of money.

6. I am so happy to be done with the week from hell.

   The family orchard was bursting, which means it’s harvest time. Quetsche plums, peaches (shitty pêche-de-vigne), shitty hard pears, and apples. Why the shitty fruits? They’re hard and tasteless, but my in-laws are fruit tree hoarders and will keep absolutely anything that sprouts out of the soil, regardless of utility, practicality, or amount of labour it demands.

   So we’ve spent the whole week collecting fruit from the ground, perched up on ladders, climbing branches, and fighting wasps. The quetsches have been shoved in a barrel to be destilled in a few months, and we did the same with the shitty peaches and pears (against my mil’s protests of “we could use them for pies!” – madame, there’s 50Kg of them, we don’t want to be fed 300 pies of shitty fruits. She’s an angel, but she’s also delusional).

   We’re still processing and sorting the apples to take them to the pressing facility for making apple juice, and that’s actually exciting! Artisanal apple juice is so delicious. Did you know you need 180Kg of apples to get 100L of non-filtered juice? It’s a lot of work, but we all agree that it’s all worth it. The old apple trees are beautiful and majestic, but it’s a horrible way to grow apples for harvest, labour-wise. We’re growing the new apple trees as a hedge on dwarf stock, because we don’t hate the future generations.

   Meanwhile, in our “spare time” (haha) we’ve been extracting this season’s honey and prepping pots for a large local yearly fair. We do the weekly local market, which is very low on effort, but this is on a 20x scale and it means a lot of work – a lot of physical work! Parading and lifting 25Kg honey buckets around gets old very fast…

   So I’m looking forward for next week, when all the apples are processed and the honey is potted and we can all chill for a while.

7. There were so many people out in the city this weekend. Especially friday night. Every bus and tram was stuffed, streets were filled with people, every bar had a crowd. I don’t even think anything was happening in the city, nothing major anyway. It’s just that people know this was probably the last good weekend of the year. Nice weather, relatively warm. There’s something unique about the mood in the city on those weekends. It’s so restless. The city is often restless in the summertime, but the last weekend of summer is always extra.