Yesterday I took a picture of brilliantly yellow Colza with the Jura looking dark due to storm clouds overhead. If you walk at this time of year you will see a lot of cola. At the moment it is brilliantly yellow and at it’s prime. Later on, the colza will be passed its prime, and at this moment it will lose all of its petals, and become green, before drying up and becoming brown.
Recently I noticed that Audible is great for dummies. To be more specific I noticed that if you are an Audible paying subscriber you have access to dozens of Audible For Dummies books available within the subscription. They have books on goat keeping, bee keeping, ham radio and more available for us to listen to for “free” within the subscriptions that we have. This is great, not because we ever finish For Dummies books, but because we can read them for cheaper than usual.
I have had the same scooter for about 37,000 kilometres and yesterday I finally decided to sell it off, after years of frequent use. I sold it off because whereas the usual service was about 270 CHF the quote for the latest service was 500 CHF. This wouldn’t be so bad as you don’t change brakes every year. It’s bad because the scooter is old. For at least two or three years I felt that it had less power than before.
Today I saw a link to Stats Hunters on the Google App so I clicked through on a laptop, once I was sitting at a computer. This is an app that looks at Strava data and gives you a summary of how many activities you’ve done as well as how far you have travelled. According to the data this Strava add on can access I have 2753 logged activities with a total distance of 25,l404 kilometres.
Now that I know that I can treat Netflix as an international film festival I do. Last night I watched the first episode of Crash Landing on You. A South Korean film about a woman CEO who goes for a parapente flight, gets caught in a storm, and dropped in North Korea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXMjTXL2Vks
The premise of this television show is interesting because it’s based on a true incident with a South Korean celebrity, but also because this is something we think about much less, especially in Europe, since most borders ceased to be watched.
Today is Earth Day, as Google, Moleskine and other companies are reminding us of. Earth Day is an opportunity to think about how to reduce our carbon footprint and ecological impact. Sigg recently began to sell aluminium water bottles that are made entirely from recycled aluminium. Instead of encouraging us to recycle our old bottles, they have skipped a step, and now make their bottles from recycled aluminium directly. It takes five uses of a recycled Sigg water bottle for the carbon footprint to be offset.
I have been reading and watching videos about coffee brewing. In the process I kept seeing cold brew coffee come up again and again and it made me curious to try. When listening to podcasts about thru-hiking I heard people speak about cold soaking food, rather than cooking it. The idea is that you prepare your meal an hour or more ahead of the time you want to eat it, and you let water and time prepare the food for consumption.
What do you hear and smell when you go for a walk in Vaud at this time of year? You hear the sound of cowbells and you hear the sound of cows mooing. I like the sound of cow bells
https://youtu.be/63O0JqNuo2Q
A few days ago I could hear mooing from a distance. As I looked across, at an old train station, now used as a house or office I could hear mooing so I crossed the train lines to see where the cows were.
Europe wants to bring back top predators like lynx, bears and wolves. In the US national parks brought back certain wild animals and it helped to control the population of elk and other herbivores, and to control the biosphere. The challenge, with Europe, is that it is tiny, compared to the wide open American spaces, and it’s densely populated. Wild animals can roam thousands of kilometres for food and more. Europe is thousands of kilometres wide, with plenty of people, especially in Northern Italy, Switzerland etc.
Today I came across the concept of Soft Hiking. Unlike Hot girl Hiking soft hiking is about just going out for a walk. It’s about getting moving, no matter your level of ability, or fitness. it’s about getting into the habit of not sitting around. They write about looking at nature, stopping for a snack or to sit on a bench, to enjoy being outdoors rather than indoors. https://metro.co.uk/2023/04/17/forget-hot-girl-walks-soft-hiking-is-now-trending-on-tiktok-18624769/
I am part of the problem.