The Casio GBD-200 and GW-B5600 both have negative displays but the GBD-200 has a display that is much easier to read in low light. The contrast is good enough to read at dusk with the GBD-200 but not the GW-B5600. When backlit both are easy to read.
I chose to wear the GBD-200 today, on a whim.
I will get back to proper blog posts soon.
For three years I was a fitness club member. I loved going to the gym up to three times a week when possible. I loved training so much that I bought apps and devices to track my progress. Any time that I could not spend three sessions a week at the gym I felt disappointed. That passion, when you are in full time work can be hard to keep active.
I tried going to the gym at 6am and I tried going after work but the habit never picked up. In Switzerland fitness memberships can vary from 700-900 CHF per year to over 1200 CHF per year depending on the membership perks you take. If you go to the gym 52 times a year that’s 23 CHF per session. If you go twice a week it’s reduced to just 11 CHF per week. If you go three times a week it’s 7 CHF per session.
In theory this is a reasonable price. It’s less than a week’s pay for most professionals. In practice you want to justify the expense. You want to go to the gym when you have time. This means weekends, evenings and on public holidays. I was often frustrated to have free time but for the gym to be closed.
I would love to see gyms that take your outdoor sporting passions in to account. Running and cycling are already somewhat covered in the lac Léman region of Switzerland. What I would like to see next are ski days, via ferrata excursions and canyoning within the club.
During week days and when the weather is bad you would train in the fitness centre. As soon as summer weekends and holidays would allow then as a fitness centre you would enjoy the great outdoors. I see through Glocals and facebook groups that the interest to do activities in groups is there. Fitness centres could attract a younger demographic to join.
I love physical fitness and I love exercise. If I lived in a city like London or Paris I’d be happy to sit in a gym and train. I’d have filtered air and less traffic to contend with. As I live in the Swiss countryside though I want to take full advantage of what nature has to offer. When I find a fitness club that offers discounted canyoning, waterskiing and other activities, and subsidised via ferrata and ski days then I will rejoin.
I’m writing for future generations now. As I looked at the stats for the most recent posts i see that readership is low. I’m tempted to start writing about something else as a result. In two or three weeks if we’re still seeing low numbers of new cases I might.
The biggest change since two days ago is that when I went to the shops I saw that InterDiscount and other places are open. Restaurants are open too. I saw some people in these places but without counting.
Inspiration to write usually comes from meeting people and having conversations but it’s at least 58 days since I met someone new and had a different conversation so it’s hard to explore new ideas.
The CSS front page I’ve been working on for the past three or four days is almost ready to be shared. I still need to tweak three or four things. I’m happy about this. When I replaced the time I spent on social media with playing with CSS I gave myself a great opportunity to learn two or three new skills. I was afraid that I would be confused and lost but so far I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve found it relatively easy.
The biggest challenge is getting the content to be desktop and mobile-friendly so every experiment I run has to look good on both. So far this has been a good experience. It’s something that I haven’t done, possibly since social media came along, and distracted us. It’s a shame that social media didn’t grow in quality of conversations but it has benefited my drive to learn something new.
We have to keep upskilling, and upskilling by working on a website is good, because we learn skills that others can see and assess within seconds. The more time I spend tweaking the first page the better it will look, and the more knowledge I will come away with.
See you tomorrow for day 59. We’re just two days away from two months without being within two meters of another person.
Today the Service Industriel de Nyon, SI Nyon, sent an e-mail saying that tap water is one thousand times more environmentally friendly than bottled water. Bottled water is sold at between 20 to 90 centimes per litre and tap water is sold at about 0.1 centimes per litre. It is 200 to 900 times cheaper.
Depuis maintenant cinq ans, ce déficit hydrique se répète et influence notablement le niveau de la nappe phréatique et le régime des sources. Les étiages enregistrés se sont avérés une fois de plus très bas durant l’été et l’automne. Ainsi, en 2020, les sources n’ont participé qu’à hauteur de 48% de la consommation. Les apports de la SAPAN se sont révélés très élevés (34%). La nappe phréatique a également été très sollicitée (18%).
SI Nyon: À propos de l’eau potable dans la région de Nyon | SI Nyon
In 2020 4 million metres cubed of drinking water were distributed via the network. thirty four percent of that water came from the lake, fourty eight from springs, and eighteen percent was taken from the water table. SI Nyon says the same thing as I do. They wrote “les étiages se sont avérés une fois de plus très bas durant l’été…”. Etiage is water level in French. I had to look it up. I don’t remember this word. In English it is baseflow, or drought flow: Baseflow – Wikipedia.
I have now played with three nanotube filters and each one of them has the same problem. If you run Swiss tap water through them, and then do not use them for a few weeks they get blocked. Hollow fibre might be good in soft water, but in hard water, as in Switzerland, you’re better off with the Katadyn Hiker Pro or similar technology. That’s why I have upgraded my water bottles to wide mouth options. I can use them to either carry dirty water, or fill them, without needing three hands.
Although the Katadyn Befree is 20 to 30 CHF less, if you need to replace them every year, then it makes sense to get the Hiker Pro, or higher end water filtration system. I tried backflushing the Sawyer squeeze but the flow is still bad. Filters that last for as long as you use them daily are great, if you’re hiking for months in a row, but filters that work consistently, despite occasional use, are better.
According to the WaterMinder app I drank over a barrel of fluids. I believe that to be around 159 litres. My current streak is 23 days of drinking an average of 2.62 litres per day. I am hydrated.
We are on day 573 of this pandemic and apparently people have not heard about the vaccination according to at least one individual. How? We’re in a pandemic. The entire world has stopped. How can you not have heard about the vaccine? How isolated are you? How disconnected?
I hope to be more inspired tomorrow. I might be in the pre-trip duldrums for the next two or three days.
Today I began playing with Garmin Coach. I decided to try one of the running programs. It’s the first of January, first day of the year, and I have already been for two walks and a run. The run was a calibration run so I ran too fast and too hard so I burned out on the first task. I ran at 16km/h and 230 steps per minute for a short burst before tiring and slowing a bit.
In the end I did not reach the 5 minute mark, but only by 45 seconds or so. With a different gradient I probably would have made the five minute mark, as well as with a more rational pace. I was tricked. I read that I was meant to do a hard run to the maximum of my ability so I tried.
When I got home I saw that it said “a moderate pace” so I think I pushed too hard for the first run. Now I feel physically tired. That’s due to the sound of fireworks for hours over the new year.
When you do a workout on the Garmin Instinct, without audio queues the watch asks “Do workout, you select yes, and it gives you the visual queues for when to warm up, run and rest. It then ends the workout but does not stop the track. This means that if you have to walk the rest of the way home, or to a car, you can, and it will be included in the workout.
That the watch displays workout information like this is practical because you don’t need to count “from 0 to 2 minutes I do this, then from 2 to 5 I do that, etc. You simply say yes to the workout and that’s enough. Next time I need to check audio queues from the watch, and another time, audio queues from the phone via earphones.
As I am just one workout in I have not formed a concrete opinion on the workout.
Have you considered brushing shoes and mindfulness? I ask because as I have played with the brush, to clear dirty mud off my shoes I have noticed that this is a time consuming task that always takes several minutes, if not half an hour to complete. People stigmatise leaving a muddy trail behind you indoors, but as the last few shoe cleanings have shown, cleaning shoes is more time consuming than cleaning up after muddy shoes, especially when the mud is dry.
People show scorn and derision when they see mud, and yet mud is not bad for health. It makes thing look messy, but we grow food in it. Animals eat straight from the ground, and we use it for huts, and more. Mud is even used in spas to improve skin health and more.
Cleaning mud off of shoes made me think of mindfulness and meditation because clearing mud is a time consuming process. You brush, and bits of mud fly off the shoe, and if its dry then you wear a mask, because a cloud of dust flies off the shoes, onto your clothes, into your eyes, and if you don’t have a mask, into your lungs. It’s important to take precautions.
Brushing works very well with wet mud, as long as you use enough force. When the mud is dry, that’s when the wooden skewer comes into play. That’s when you chisel at the dirt and mud, and loosen it, to fall on the ground, wheter outdoors or in the apartment. When that mud is loose, then you brush, and then with what’s left, you chisel again. You repeat the process until the shoes are clean.
That’s why I think that it should be used as a form of meditation. That’s why I think that, rather than cleaning shoes, to avoid the less intellectual members of society from complaining, you see it as an intellectual relaxation and mindfulness exercise.
I think cleaning muddy shoes is absurd. I think it’s absurd because within seconds of going for another walk they will be filled with mud again. It takes half an hour or more to clean shoes, but the mess that results from cleaning shoes, takes seconds. The notion that cleaners shouldn’t have to clean mud is absurd, because the entire raison d’êtres of cleaners, is to make things look clean.
In the past I used to clean the house before the cleaner came, so that her job would be easier. I have a base level of mess, and every week I had to reset it to zero for the cleaner, so it has nothing to do with not respecting cleaners and their work. It has to do with wasting, or investing time. Cleaning shoes is pointless because shoes are dirty for months at a time during the wetter months.
Old buildings used to have shoe cleaners. they used to have matts so that you could wipe your feet, metal bars so that you could scrape the mud off your shoes, cubbies so that outdoor shoes could be swapped for flip flops and more. If the building has a problem with mud, then a proper mud clearing mattress would make sense.
In the 21st century everyone drives so no one gets dirty shoes. People prefer noise pollution and air pollution to walking. If road paths were clean of mud, if car drivers didn’t drive homicidally close to pedestrians and cyclists, then there would be no exposure to mud.
Ever since childhood I have had muddy shoes because of my walking and adventures, so it was normal for me to drop mud where I sat, whether at school or sometimes at work. Mud is a sign that people are fit and do exercise. Mud is a sign that people were outdoors, rather than eating Al Desko. Mud is a sign that the weather is slightly wet, and that people do not always walk on the cleanest of paths. Mud is part of life, when you walk in all weather, in all seasons, except for summer droughts. Finding mud then is a challenge.
This problem of mud says something positive about me. The rest of the building live sedentary lives. They use the cars to go to do sports, that are clean, and they come home by car. This means that they never have mud on them because that mud has fallen off either in their cars, or it was never on them.
My mud is fresh, from walking rurally and locally two minutes ago. If everyone was like me they would either see the need for better shoe cleaning options or they wouldn’t mind mud in the corridors. It’s because I am alone in my habits that I can’t play ignorant.
My current solution to this problem is a brush and a skewer in the post box. When I get home I unlock the post box, brush my shoes, skewer the more stubborn mud, and step into the building. I have to be like football players, before they return to their changing rooms. That’s where I got my idea for that type of brush.
