Whilst the connection is unstable and slow I decided to take the phone and Qik some landscapes from La Dole in Switzerland. Here are a few streams. As more people enjoy streaming live video from interesting locations so this will become a more common site.
What I hope to do next is go to some of the higher peaks and stream from there too. Overtime we could have a nice collection of footage.
When rain becomes a treat you get used to looking at rivers that are running drier and drier with every passing day. The river pictured below is so low that you see the river bed in many parts. It’s a meter or more below it’s usual level. Imagine being a weather forecaster during a drought. Today it will be dry and sunny, as it has been for a few seasons.
In periods of heavy rain the water reaches to the tree roots currently covered in moss. At the moment they are high and dry. In another part of Switzerland some people decided to empty a pool into a local river. It didn’t explain why or how. The water was chlorinated and it caused fish in the river to die and they will now be fined.
One of the consequences of the lack of rain is that branches and logs that fall into a river bed have a tendency to accumulate for months at a time. When the rains finally come they serve as a means of transporting all that wood down the river until it gets blocked. As in the example below we see that two or more logs that got jammed across the river blocked smaller branches and detritus from getting by. They piled up and now we have the natural wood dam/mess.
Over my walks I have looked at corn, out of curiousity and for a long time everything looks normal, until one day you come across the condition we see below. This is called Corn Smut apparantly. scroll down that page. There are plenty of interesting names for corn ailments.
When you go on your daily walks look around you. See what unusual things you spot, and document or take note of them when you do. Nature is interesting. Keep attentive.
I thought that when I bought two cycling water bottles and two normal day bottles I would be done, but then I found a nalgene bottle for a reasonable price, and then someone mentioned drinking from a steel container, rather than aluminium so I was distracted and tempted. I did tell myself that this would replace my habit of drinking other types of drinks. I thought “Stop with these drinks for three weeks per bottle and you amortise the cost”.
It goes deeper than that. If I stop drinking the two drinks I normally drink, then I will save money within three weeks, and not have to spend it again for weeks at a time. It may be materialist to want more water bottles than I can use in a week, but at least it’s a lot less plastic to be recycled on Monday afternoons. I don’t mind recycling. I just hate that there are set times when it is possible. I hate that it has to be scheduled, rather than spontaneous.
If I have less aluminium and PET then my trips to recycle are diminished. In reality my goal is just to switch the budget from one luxury to another, without having a new expense. If I find that I am happy with the new system then that is all the better.
Temptation 1 – to replace the half litre bottle that I use daily, because it’s easier to clean
Temptation 2 – to replace the 1l bottle I have used for over ten years, because it is easier to clean, and because it should be easier to carry.
If we were not in a pandemic, and if we were not in a society where people still do not wear their masks properly, and where people respect the 2 meter safety distance then I would go and look at the products in person, and probably lose interest. It’s because we’re in a long protracted pandemic that I am growing curious about such things. It is a coping mechanism. As dull and boring as it may sound.
A few years ago I looked at mobile phones, new watches, climbing gear etc. Now I’m looking at water bottles. I like water bottles. It is something that you use every day, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
Rows of Corn
Have you ever considered that we always look at rows of corn from the same angle. We always look at them along the line of plantation so all we see is a wall of corn. Today during the walk I saw that some corn had been cut to reveal the seed rows of corn and it’s interesting to see the cistern like rows of columns of corn plants.
It’s interesting to see that corridor down which animals and other small creatures can run along. You never think of how distinct it is. You always associate corn fields with a jumble of corn, like a forest of trees. Unlike in old films and cartoons this is highly organised, so walking in one direction is easy, but not perpendicularly.
We walk daily to look into the distance, to have fresh air, and to think about things. We take our daily walk because it’s a habit. We take our daily walk because it is a way of travelling from one place to another, without necessarily changing location.
Today is day 100 of writing a blog post every day. Every day I have tried to find inspiration to write and every day I have succeeded. The posts go unread, but the challenge is not to be read. The challenge is to be consistent. I have managed that challenge.
We are in a pandemic so I do not travel to via ferrata, hikes in the mountains or activities. There are no conferences, so I do not go to large events. My ideas and inspiration come from what I read, see, hear or feel. As we meet very few people we also converse less. Ideas are harder to share and discuss.
I question whether, when the pandemic is over, I will have the motivation to try to resume a social life. At the moment, because we’re in a pandemic, I feel that the answer is, “definitely not.” This is a self defense mechanism, and a way of commenting on the one and a half years of pandemic.
We have to be solitary to cope with pandemic solitude, but we also have to be that way inclined to be in that situation.
Switzerland is a land of mountains, rivers, and lakes. it’s a great place for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, walking, and sailing. Those are all sports I’ve done. When I was several years younger we had a day’s racketing: Racketting is walking with rackets attached to your feet across the trees up in the mountains. It’s fun, although occasionally tiring sport.
At one point we took a break for lunch. During this time a few of us were jumping over a young tree and someone was taking photographs. Within a period of weeks, one of those photographs was blown up to poster format and used in several shopping centres. it was also used for the cover of a local tourism magazine.
The picture was of a younger me in a ski suit with rackets attached to my feet. Many people have seen that photograph and I was a cover boy for at least one issue of the local magazine. Recently that picture was in a shopping center much closer to where I live and we recuperated it. It’s now sitting on my desk at home.
I’m thinking about going raquetting if there’s enough snow for it to be worthwhile. I haven’t done that sport for many years and I think it’d be interesting. It’s simple. No need to drive to where the snow is good, Thirty minutes and I’d be where I may be able to raquet.
If there’s snow that’s what I may spend a few hours doing.
I like the social media and I spend a lot of time with them. Occasionally i meet the people involved in real life and so the social media are no longer quite as interesting, although of course I still have fun with them. One of the things I’ve been thinking is the term social media girlfriend.
What would require for a person to be a social media girlfriend? What does it require in the physical world? Conversation for a start. It would entail many conversations and discusssions, so far Twitter and seesmic both provide that. I wake up in the morning, hardly able to open my eyes yet I open up the laptop and type “good morning world” to which i get a good morning back.
There are currently two social media girls that wish me a good morning. Melissah in Australia is one of them. Maggieconv in the US is the second. The three of us are in different timezones but we wish each other good meals, nice evenings, good mornings and sweet dreams. We’re friends in the same sense that flat mates may be but with one big difference. We are not within the same physical space. We’re separated by distance, over a thousand kilometers when we’re lucky, over 20,000 when we’re not.
That’s unimportant. It’s the idea that we share our daily lives through text messaging, data access on phones, websites, blogs and even facebook. To some people this is an abstract idea. Why would you want to meet people online in such a way. Well in fact chatrooms were like this a decade ago. IRC is like that today. There’s one major difference. We’re not anonymous. We know how the people look, we know how they sound. We know when they’re happy and we know when things are going well. We also know when they’re going badly.
If both physical and virtual friends are both inhabiting the same spaces nowadays then what discounts those whom we don’t know from another context? If I meet you at the cinema and we become friends then everyone would accept that. Online though people wouldn’t. Of course that is changing. For me the distinction is fading since I have met so many of these people in real life, occasionally quite a few at once.
Anyway part of the reason for this post is that I was called a flirt online, told that half my seesmic videos answering one girl’s posts were flirts. It kicked off a conversation about flirting and that’s fun. we’re using the social media and we’re flirting. That’s a great idea. The idea that we’re flirting with people across a new medium. That’s where the idea of a social media girlfriend came into place. I saw two friends flirting across both seesmic and Twitter and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to come out with the idea.
Anyway to cut a long story short I was meaning to type @melissah but started to write @maggieconv instead. Would she be more likely to be a social media girlfriend? We added each other on Facebook so there’s a chance she c0uld be a social media girlfriend.
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