When the weather is good and there is no wind it makes sense to go for a bike ride. The roads were quiet for the most part but a few cars still passed too close and too fast. The challenge is to find the quietest, least dangerous route.
I am still looking for a route where I never feel in danger. For now I find routes where I am comfortable, for the most part.
The view is not as good as sometimes. A few clouds but with the haze hiding the Alps today.
I have seen combine harvesters at work over the last two days. Yesterday I saw them harvesting colza, and today I saw them harvesting wheat. At the moment you see grapes that are still in a juvenile state, and apples that look a little more mature, growing on their respective plants.
When you walk every single day of the year, you see nature change. You see plants flower, the fruit or nuts grow, the harvest, and then the next crop, You see this all year long. At the moment as I walk by the vineyards I can see the grapes growing every day. They were tiny and unrecognisable and now we can see what they are, but we can see that they still need to grow more juicy and filled with fluid. There is no rush. They have three or four more months.
Despite the rains, the ground is dry again, so it is easy to walk without getting too muddy. The rivers, too, despite the flood warning for big lakes, are low again. The soil around here was not saturated.
Today I was at a petrol station and I could feel that someone was standing right behind me so I asked “pardon me, but could you step two meters back, and could you wear your face mask, as I gestured a mask on my own face. I said all of this automatically, without thought or consideration. It was a reflex. I’m old-fashioned. The limit is one metre, not two. I surprised myself with that reaction.
What’s of interest is that I was then thanked by the person at the petrol station because usually he’s the one that has to tell them to wear the mask, so I avoided him that unpleasant chore. I think that it might be the first time, this pandemic, that I say this. I haven’t been in such a situation as I tried to avoid people for the last 470+ days.
During a pandemic it makes sense to go to the mountains and it makes sense to walk where you have space to the left and right to keep social distancing. Today I saw the cows near St Cergue and they were all sitting and relaxing, chewing the cud, waiting for the tourist day to open.
I haven’t been to the mountains much over the last four years because of the pandemic, a broken arm and for one summer no car. I say this but I did go up, on a bike. I have been up at least three or four times this year. I’ve been up to St Cergue via the safe road, la Barillette via the normal road, once, and up the steep La Rippe climb twice. It’s not that I don’t go to the mountains, it is that I do go up and going up is the workout, not what I do once at the top.
I avoid the mountains during the pandemic because I can’t avoid people on narrow paths that go up a mountain. I’d rather walk where the paths are wide and where I can observe adequate social distancing. As we see the pandemic is far from over and we must actively avoid being disease vectors, and falling sick. I’m fully vaccinated but News shows that we should not be lulled into a false and flawed sense of security.
I miss going to the mountains to do group activities every weekend but for that to be possible we need to get the delta variant to be dealt with, and we need for people to vaccinate. Society has opened up, before people were vaccinated, and before 14 days of zero new infections had elapsed.
The situation is bad enough for Anne Levy to say, “I’m worried”, but whether she will act on it, or just play lip service is not certain. In the eyes of many people the Swiss government should act now, rather than wait.
The sooner the pandemic ends, the sooner I can revert to writing adventure blog posts.
With the weather system that we have had over Europe a lot of rain has fallen. So much rain has fallen that it has swollen rivers and flooded plenty of regions. In Switzerland, because almost everything is on a hill flooding might be noticed in some parts of certain cities, but in theory it is easy, within meters, to be safe from the flood.
Today in the port of Nyon you can see that the boats are much higher than usual. Normally they would be one to two meters lower than they are in these images. According to a conversation I overheard the lake rose by seven centimetres overnight, i.e. enough for the lake to be level with the access platforms.
In some images, you see that the petrol station is now partially immersed in the lake. I don’t think that there is a risk of pollution when it is at this specific level, but I am not certain. What is certain is that the lake is at an interesting level compared to usual. Flooding is occurring for properties that are close to the lake, or below lake level.
Some cantons have banned access to the water, probably due to silt, sediment and other detritus found in the water. In contrast, the water from the Léman, in so far as I could see, looked clean. This is positive. If properties are flooded by this water, they will find clean up and drying easier than if the opposite is true.
In Neuchatel, due to the waters rising so much, they intentionally flooded a parking. Les images de La Maladière inondée. I find such events interesting. It’s interesting to see how high the water can get. It’s interesting to see how people respond, and it’s interesting to see what curiousities result from the excess of water needing to be dealt with.
It would be interesting to see the Pont Des Machines in Geneva, to see how high it is, and to see whether all the sluices are open.
There is an article on Swiss Radio and Television that discusses the positive impact that the flooding has had on the water tables. For several years not only have we had warm weather but we have also gone with very little or no rain for months at a time.
During some weeks we were told “The water reserves are so low that we will soon need to switch to retrieving water from the lake rather than our reservoires. Underground water is great for when there’s a drought above ground, but the problem is that underground water is finite, and as a result if it is not replenished then it will eventually run out.
The fact that we have had so much rain over the last few days is excellent for the water tables, as I have tweeted or written here. As that water gets down to the water table, it will remain, until the next time it is needed.
Après plusieurs années de canicule, les eaux souterraines avaient, en certains points, fortement baissé, notamment dans le canton de Vaud.
Source: Les fortes précipitations ont un impact positif sur les nappes phréatiques
It’s easy to see the human tragedy of mass flooding, and people losing everything. We must also understand that nature has a way of balancing things out. That’s why this planet, and these latitudes, are inhabitable. It is normal, after a period of drought, for a lot of rain to fall, to replenish water tables, and then for another period of drought to come back.
This amount of rain has not fallen in seventy years. What makes this year unique is that it is spread across the whole of Switzerland.
Chaque ville a déjà connu des débuts d’été particulièrement arrosés. À Sion, ce fut l’année 2007. À Genève en 1997, à Lucerne en 1993. La particularité de cette année 2021, c’est l’étendue du phénomène. Toutes les stations montrent un pic des moyennes quotidiennes de précipitations.
Un niveau de précipitations inédit depuis 70 ans en ce début d’été
And for your intellectual curiosity, if you understand French. The phenomenon of the “Cold Drop”.
Les faibles températures et les violentes précipitations qui s’abattent sur la Suisse sont dues à un phénomène météorologique appelé “goutte froide”. Il désigne une poche d’air froid qui est abandonnée par la calotte du pôle Nord.
Cette masse est ensuite “étranglée” et “attaquée” de part et d’autre par un air plus chaud. Elle se met alors à tourner sur elle-même jusqu’à former une dépression, donnant lieu à des orages et de fortes pluies.
That’s it for today.
Switzerland and Europe are currently experiencing flooding. All the major Swiss lakes are close to breaking their banks. A few weeks ago, you could read about how Switzerland had been so dry that it had started to register on the aridity index. Now it’s flooded.
Some people are bored by the rain, and wishes that it would go away, but I don’t feel that way. We had years with very little rain, so to finally get some rain is welcome. At least now we know that all the hydroelectric dams will be full. We hope that all the water tables and reservoirs will have recovered as well.
Although this weather is bad and unpleasant, and it limits what we can do it is seasonal. This is the type of weather that is normal in Switzerland. This is precisely the weather that makes us grateful for nice days. That’s why I personally welcome it. I don’t want Switzerland to become an arid country. I like that we have rain, sunshine etc. I like that we have seasons.
The Sunflowers are out now, which is good, as it means that bees are able to get plenty of nectar to make honey. It also means that fields should be the usual yellow and green that we would expect at this time of year. Now is the time for people to take their token “this is me with a sunflower” images.
I looked at the landscape as I walked, and I did not see much evidence of flooding. Fields are not flooded. Walking paths are not flooded. Neither are fields. One river I checked was flowing at a relatively low level today. The rain around here has been gentle.
For a while, I have been thinking about creating my own WordPress themes, but I didn’t know where to start or how many hours it would take. I always assumed that it would take many hours and that I would have to create templates, style sheets and more for a number of pages. In reality, you need an index.php page and a stylesheet. Anything else is a bonus.
A shortcut is to find a theme that you like and to see which fields you want to modify and just modify that behaviour. Choosing to use another font requires one or two lines of code. With minimal effort, you can personalise a theme.
The course I watched is “WordPress: Building Child Themes” and within two hours you will see how to use CSS, functions and templates to change one or more aspects, using the themes that you select. Personalising your own theme, can take seconds rather than hours.
It also gives you an opportunity to learn with a small challenge, and as you grow more confident you can try more and more ambitious projects.
You have the Theme Developer Handbook to help you along.
What I would like to do is find a way to create themes by subject for pages so that I can make my website fully dynamic, and bring the static pages into the 21st century. This will require some trial and error, hence the value in playing and experimenting, until it works.
We are in a pandemic where the only disease vector is proximity to others, so in theory this is one of the easiest pandemics to overcome, and end. In practice people are like cats, and getting them to self-isolate is like herding cats. Paradoxically if people were as hard to herd as cats, then the pandemic would have ended over a year ago and today we’d be doing something more fun.
During this pandemic we see that the numbers take weeks to make their way back down but they bounce back up very fast. We have gone from 100 cases per day two weeks ago to four hundred today. If I see the number of cases rising this is a reason to be more, rather than less cautious. This is a reason to do less, rather than more. This is a reason to spend as little time as possible in risky situations.
L’Office fédéral de la santé publique a fait état mardi de 483 cas supplémentaires de coronavirus en 24 heures.
L’immunité collective face au Covid-19 atteint désormais 67% à Genève – rts.ch – Info
In the 00s (zeros/2000s) Foot and Mouth was active in England. As a precaution we had to walk in soapy water with our shoes to avoid spreading anything. We were also asked not to go to the New Forest to avoid spreading that virus to the ponies and other animals. Back in those days they were trying to contain an epidemic.
Fast forward two decades and we are in week 80 of this pandemic, depending on what you use as a starting point. This means that we have had eighty weeks to learn about, get to understand, and finally to respond to and reduce the threat.
During this pandemic we have seen people fail to change their habits from one year to the next. This failure to change habits prevents life from moving on. Everyone is busy sabotaging the pandemic’s recovery.
Last night a politician actually said “Sorry” for lifting restrictions too soon. Politicians should react this way. Politicians should apologise, when an entire nation has to live in self-isolation for over a year, because their policies failed to bring a pandemic to an end.
La taskforce scientifique de la Confédération a alerté mardi sur une probable augmentation des hospitalisations à venir. Depuis le début du mois de juillet, le nombre de cas de contaminations liées au variant Delta double chaque semaine. Les infections ont particulièrement augmenté chez les 26 à 34 ans, suivis des 16 à 24 ans.
L’immunité collective face au Covid-19 atteint désormais 67% à Genève – rts.ch – Info
Since the start of july the number of infections from the Delta variant has doubled, this affects those from 16-24 and 26-34 and they expect hospitalisations to start going up soon.
We’re in a paradoxical situation, beccause if we self-isolate we’re silly not to enjoy ourselves, like everyone else. If we do not self-isolate, and everyone else does not self-isolate then we are providing the virus with a fantastic opportunity to spread.
The challenge during this pandemic, is not to take precautions, and to take a break from normal habits, it is seeing that others throw caution to the wind, and that there is no end in sight, not because we don’t know how to beat this virus, but because politicians always find a way to get the virus to spread again, through their incompetence. So far one politician has said “sorry”. All of them should.
The title of this post is a joke, not a serious delusion of isolation. I saw that a few sunflowers had come out but that they were looking away, rather than towards me. They are looking at the morning sun and I was walking in the afternoon. They are still in the process of coming out.
Today I was asked if I wanted to go to a restaurant and I automatically said no. Given the data about the rising number of cases in Switzerland it makes no sense to go to towns or cities, and to eat in a crowded place, rather than to continue self-isolating. If I was okay with crowds at this stage in the pandemic I would have gone to the IFSC World cup. I am not fine with crowds, when the number of sick is rising.
One issue is that there seems to be no data for the Canton de Vaud for the last week or two. I don’t know whether that means that there are no cases, or that they have not been counted. Haute Savoie and Geneva are going up, so Vaud should follow.
The table above illustrates why it makes sense not to meet people in towns, cities, restaurants or other places. There is a chance that you could continue as normal, and be fine, but if enough people think that way then large crowds form, and what was safe, in small numbers, becomes a breeding ground for large numbers. At this point, it’s better to walk in the countryside and be ignored by sunflowers.
If I had been asked “Do you want to come over” then I would have said yes, without hesitation. I said no because in my opinion, and according to the data I see, it is not safe to risk spending time around crowds, for now.
When the pandemic ends I look forward to meeting new people to do new things, but for now the likelihood of this happening is low. Yesterday’s solo bike ride was good. I avoided the roads where traffic is aggressive as much as possible, and kept to the more rural, quieter paths. The weather was perfect yesterday.
Today, during the entire walk I felt that it would rain at any minute, but it didn’t. It stayed dry, and that’s good because I was not equipped for the rain.