There is the idea that the way to fight against heat is to add air conditioning to every single building. This would be true, if we were in Dubai and the temperature never went below 20°c at night, but in Europe it very often does. This means that a mosquito net is more interesting than air conditioning, and far cheaper.

Air conditioning is great when you deal with heat for weeks or months, without the opportunity to get rid of that heat at night. In Europe, nights are usually cool enough to lower the temperature inside buildings. As I write this I have the balcony door opened fully, trying to vent residual heat from this Minergie building.

Densification, also called urbanisation, is a double edged problem. The first problem is that bringing more people closer together you increase noise pollution. The more people live nearby, the more people need to learn to be quiet. The second cost is an inability to shelter from the heat on a hot summer’s day.

In Paris, Geneva, Nyon and London plenty of people have moved from villages and houses to apartments. The result of this migration from a multi-level house to a single floor apartment is that during a heatwave people are stuck in hot apartments with nowhere to flee.

In theory we will get a storm this afternoon and I am impatient for it. I am impatient for heavy rain to cool the roof and walls of this nightmare minergie building. As great as it is to have a cheap building to heat in winter, it is a deadly building in summer, especially when neighbours open their windows to aerate and let hot air in.

In normal buildings, if you open windows you get a draft, and that draft circulates air and it’s refreshing, and when you close windows that freshness lingers. In a minergie building, if you leave the window blinds open the sun heats every surface, and the air. The space heats up just like a car.

I ran five days out of seven this week. I ran Monday, twice and then once several days. Most of the runs were easy and early, for two reasons. The first is that we’re in a canicule so pushing hard doesn’t make sense. The second reason is that there are fewer social rides organised.

Today I ran four times around the Lac de Divonne, to meet the distance required by Runna. I didn’t actually run 13km not because of pacing but because of heat. We’re in a heat wave and Runna doesn’t have the intelligence to see the heat and say “stay healthy” and “don’t overdo it”. For Runna it has a program, and that’s what you have to do. Heat doesn’t matter, gradient doesn’t matter.

I was very sad to see that tomorrow’s evening storm is cancelled due to lack of interest. I am very interested in rain falling heavily from the sky. I want it to drench and cool the minergie building within which I live. I want the cool air to help make this building I live in liveable again.

This morning I woke at 6am or so, to go for a group run at 0800 with Décathlon Chavannes and the conditions were good. It was around 23°c and felt like 25°c, so nice and fresh. We ran, and during the run the temperature rose a little. When we got to the forest it felt nice to be sheltered somewhere nice and cool. Evapotranspiration is fantastic for cooling down humans during a heat wave. It’s especially good that we could end the run in the shade.

Monday we went for a run in the Canicule heat. For the most part we skirted woods where we could, and stopped twice at the same fountain to drink, splash ourselves, and recover from the heat. In so doing we cooled ourselves and stayed hydrated.

After the run we went to the Plage De Promenthoux for l’apéro, which was mainly chips and a drink or two. We also stood in the water for a group photo. “That’s a lot of shells” I thought. The bottom of the water was sandy with a few stones. It was obviously around 21°c.

Today as I was looking through apps I noticed that Bluesky had been offloaded and that I had not used the app in weeks, possibly even months. The reason for this is simple. Social media went from being a social conversation between individuals towards a monologue from Influencers to normal people, and that one sided monologue is of no interest to me.

I never went to Twitter, Instagram or other network thinking, “I wonder what random strangers are doing today.” I always use social media to connect with human beings, not influencers. I want to connect, converse, and with time meet in person.

Yesterday when I was looking at Photoprism, and synching from one drive to two other drives, and a second instance I noticed that for some reason I only had the last two months of photos. I eventually noticed that the photos are now living in run/media/… rather than /media/… and it is for this reason that Photoprism could see recent photos but not the entire library.

media/username/library still mounts, but the proper mount point is run/media/username/library moving forward. That’s why I could see recent photos but not photos from before the OS update.

For several weeks I have run with the Ochsner Sport Runday Monday Signy group. Last night the run began at the Abériaux parking before heading towards Gland and skimming the Domaine Impérial before then heading back through some woods towards the parking, before then stopping by a plage for a swim and apéro, before heading home and sleeping.

The course was around 8.8 kilometres long going along the woods and a water fountain where we could get fresh water, before running along the road, turning left, and then right, and then into the woods, before making our way towards the edge of the woods and crossing towards the Aérodrome de Prangins, before running along, and then turning back towards the same woods, and making our way back to the water fountain. We then picked up swimming stuff and went to the plage.

We are heading into a Level Four heatwave for the next few days and now people will realise that replacing gardens with parkings, and individual villas with apartment houses was a mistake. Now is when people will realise that tarmac gets hot during the day, and radiates heat at night.

Now is the moment that Nyon, and surrounding villages will realise that densification is a mistake, because, by removing grass, and trees, you remove dew catching grass, and shade producing trees.