Bouquetins grazing
I walked 16.9km and got this video of bouqetins grazing
Normally at this time of year, as the snow melts and the temperatures increase the opportunity for spring and summer sports returns. These sports are via ferrata, outdoor climbing, hiking and more. This year is different because although today is Friday no plans have been made for the next two days. There is a excellent chance that I will either hike or cycle alone. Usually I avoid cycling on Saturdays because that is the day when people are anxiously driving between their homes and their shops.
Walking feels like the safer option on such days. It’s usually on Sundays that I like to go for a bike ride, to range a little further than when I am on foot, and to enjoy different sensations. During this pandemic my favourite route is not possible because it crosses the Franco Swiss Border in two places and I prefer to avoid crossing the border unless it is essential.
At the moment the prospect of everyone being vaccinated, and of everyone being able to meet in groups of ten to fifteen to do via ferrata, hike or climb seems unlikely. It would seem that this is another year of relatively solitary sports. Hiking and cycling are good solitary sports because we often go at our own speeds anyway. These are also sports with almost no carbon footprint. You just walk out of your house and enjoy.
Scuba Diving, Climbing, Via Ferrata and other sports sometimes require a two or more hour drive to go to and come back from the activity location. With cycling and local hiking you burn no petrol, except for the rubber soles of your shoes but those wear out quite slowly. We’re speaking grams, rather than litres.
During my walks I often visit the old phone boxes that have been converted into libraries. I browse through the books. Some villages have a good selection of free access books. No one has thought to block access to them during the pandemic.
If I wrote a blog post for every walk or bike ride at the moment it would either be a clockwise or an anti-clockwise loop that always begins and ends in the same place. The main change are the crops, the animals and people I see, and the weather.
Yesterday I did meet someone in the physical world, for a walk, and I came to the conclusion that I much prefer to meet people for bike rides. The problem with walking with people during a pandemic is that you don’t have the freedom to walk into a field or patch of grass as you’re walking “with a person” rather than alone. You’re also working on set paths.
I like to walk along roads and other paths, and I like to change route as soon as I see people come the other way, or to climb up an embankment, or to choose a path between two fields. When I walked in Geneva yestreday I decided to take off my mask because I thought that there would be an opportunity to always be two or more metres from people but this wasn’t the case. If I was alone I would have put the mask on. In this context I didn’t feel as free to do so.
Cycling, during a pandemic, in contrast is excellent. The first reason for this is simple. You’re going at 20 to 30 kilometres per hour so whatever you breathe in or out is going to be diluted into the turbulence that is behind you. The second reason is that you’re on a road or path and the pedestrians you encounter are close for just a second or two, not even two breaths.
The other advantage is that you’re on some type of agricultural or normal road and there are usually not that many people on the same path so it provides us with greater freedom. People are cautious of bikes, but not of other pedestrians. Being on a bike makes us safe.
During my walks I often see people on bikes. Today I was surprised to see three women riding alone. Usually it’s two or three guys at a time, riding together and talking. It makes a nice change. Having said this the conditions today were unpleasant for cycling, a cold strong wind. These are the right conditions to make cycling cold and tiring.
I hope that Sunday will be good for cycling.
How far will we cycle in pandemic solitude? We will have to see.
Today I walked a 15-kilometre loop because I saw people walking two abreast and decided to retrace my steps a short distance before trying a new bifurcation. By the end of this walk, my legs were starting to get tired. I walked non stop for over two hours before a quick stop at a petrol station to get some drinks before heading home.
Before going on my walk I finished the CSS course on Linkedin Learning before starting another one on HTML. It’s not that I need to learn about HTML so much as I have a desire to complement what I already know.
After passive learning I re-worked some more pages on the HTML part of my website, adding CSS to two or three pages. As a result of what I have learned over the last two or three weeks doing the same thing as I did for the index page for another directory took half an hour or less. What I learned is sticking in my memory. I still cut and paste, but the process is much faster.
Links from HTML Essential Training by Jen Simmons
The more I look up and learn, the more ideas I have for how to modernise my website. For ages I wanted to keep my website as a museum of what the web used to be but as I made pages mobile friendly that desire to keep things the same has altered and now I want to modernise it.
From a visitor point of view this may be a waste of time, as certain parts of the website have little to no traffic. This doesn’t matter, because in the grand scheme of things every page I modernise gives me experience in dealing with CSS, Javascript, navigation design and more. I may be slow on the first pages but as I work my way through the website my efficiency will go up, and with that so will my employability.
We constantly need to learn skills and working on a website, rather than browsing social media, is a great way of doing so. As I looked through Flickr galleries I saw that some people have images of people re-enacting Roman soldiers and other people have images of Rome as it looks today. I could easily breath life back into that part of the website by contacting people and getting permission to share their images.
I’m glad I am working on my website as a project again. It is effectively filling my time, encouraging me to learn more, and getting me ready for a line of work I enjoy.
See you tomorrow.
Today I went for a cold walk in the wind. The wind was blowing from west to East so for at least half of the walk I had it in my face. This was a good day to wear a cagoule and to wear the face mask, even when people were not around. The windchill made walking unpleasant and I even considered skipping my daily walk but didn’t. I am disciplined enough to walk, even when it is unpleasant. This weather is frustrating because we have the cold, without any of the beauty. It would be nice to have this cold, with snow and ice, rather than just ice.
Last night I installed Linux Mint on an EEEPC quite easily. I downloaded a 32bit OS, flashed the ROM to a USB key, booted the OS from the SD card, and then installed the OS. So far I have done very little. The eeepc feels slow. It is an old machine, and even when it was young, a few years ago, it felt slow. It would be nice to install Linux on a newer machine, to take more advantage of the OS. I actually like Linux but most computers are either windows or macOS.
I should re-work my website so that it is KaiOS friendly. For now the top bar navigation and images are not friendly for the OS, especially not on a phone such as the one I am playing with. I find that it refuses to load the blog section of the website, and it struggles with the drop down menus. I should turn that feature off for tiny screens, and just let people scroll down to the relevant content. I have an opportunity to think differently.
I think the old WML format, Wireless Markup Language would be better suited, than the modern multi-display farce.
Today as I walked I could see clear evidence that Switzerland is now dry. As you walk by the side of the road you see that it is yellow, and that there is no growth. Crops are withering away and water gauges are now filling with dust, rather than rain.
We now go for weeks without rain. If I wanted to pick up the soil it would crumble in my hands and blow away as dust. I see that one of the local rivers is drying up again.
La Suisse bientot à court d’eau
Malgré la pluie, la forêt valaisanne est déjà en danger d’incendie