Sometimes you go for a walk and you see sunflowers and bees. The bees love the sunflowers and sometimes the volume of bees is so great that you can hear a swarm, or even many swarms of them. Each one picks up a little nectar before moving on to the next.
I don’t know whether they have a honey made just from sunflowers, like they do from lavender or other plants.
In July this year I took half a million steps as I was banned from driving. I’m using that phrase for comedic effect. As I had one arm in a sling driving was out of the question for a few weeks and then it was out of the question because my tendons and muscles were in need of physio therapy.
By not using the car for around one and a half months alone I avoided using at least one tank of diesel for every month of injury and one scooter tank of petrol per week of petrol.
By not using buses I saved on my carbon footprint too. Buses are large and heavy and they are not always full. This means that walking is still more environmentally friendly.
In a normal month I walk from two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand steps. The application estimates that I walked 47 hours. That’s almost a weekend of walking. This excludes all the time spent walking when cooking or doing other tasks.
Waking everywhere is time consuming. Instead of taking half an hour to do a task you have to count at least an hour for the closest shop and an hour and a half to two hours for another shop I like to use.
Walking everywhere requires you to think of time differently. Simple tasks become events and the world shrinks. For over a month my world was anything within two or three hours walking distance.
We often hear about how towns are not optimised for walking but neither is the countryside. If you walk along secondary roads you have to deal with tractors, pesticides, combine harvesters and other machines. On some rural paths you have to deal with dogs that are not kept on a leash and when you’re afraid of dogs this can be anxiety inducing.
Too many roads connecting villages to shopping centres and too many roads connecting villages have no provision for walkers. This summer I had to choose between walking through thick grass and plants to stay on the side of the road or walk on the road with drivers not moderating their speed. This is paradoxical as, when you’re driving you always get stuck 20km/hr below the speed limit. When you’re walking, just as when you’re cycling, people feel the need to make the gap between oncoming traffic rather than slow down and wait a few seconds.
I came to the conclusion that they should put bike lane markings on every single road if they are unwilling to prepare and maintain walking paths by the side of the road. As a pedestrian I used bike lanes as if they were pavements mainly because of bushes and long vegetation. I believe that as a general rule cars should only be allowed to drive into a cycle lane when overtaking is not possible otherwise. People need to be trained to see bike lanes like bus lanes and avoid them unless there is no alternative.
One of the things I love to do is look at the soles of my shoes and see how much wear they have as well as whether it’s symmetrical. This time around the wear on my shoes was symmetrical. There is a downside to this wear. Those bits of shoe are left on the roads and in the grass waiting to be washed into the rivers and rivers before making their way to the lakes and seas.
Taking half a million footsteps in a month was a pleasant and enjoyable experience. It allowed me to slow down in a way that I have done before. It allowed me to explore even more than I did last year. It got me used to walking to some locations rather than take the car. I walk to physio therapy, to the shop nearby and to the swimming pool. It means that I am not subjected to modern traffic and that for some tasks at least, my carbon footprint is reduced. For the price of a single tank of fuel you can buy two pairs of shoes that will last half a million steps apiece.
Mastodon is a federated social network where people can join a server, based on their interests in tech and more. Most people join the servers that are open and easy to join but in doing so we have communities that grow, without becoming communal. I am on at least three different Mastodon servers.
I am on Mastodon.social, Techhub.social and Calckey.social and so far my favourite is Calckey.social because that’s where I got the strongest sense of community. In the process it also showed me one of the unique features of Mastodon, compared to reddit, twitter, facebook and other social networks. That feature is scale. I don’t mean that it’s huge and growing. I don’t mean that it has a million users.
I mean that if I wanted to create a Mastodon instance for hikers in the Canton De Vaud I could. I could create a niche mastodon instance that is centered around hiking in Switzerland, and encourage people I hike with to join, as well as to attract a larger community of people who enjoy the outdooors.
At the moment Social media is about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, where everyone is thrown into a gigantic melting pot. The issue is that this melting pot is driven by algorithms and influencers rather than human scale social interactions. On Twitter, Facebook and the two others we are fighting to be heard. On Mastodon, if we find the right instance, we are heard without having to become unsociable.
Instead of asking “Which server should I join?”, we can ask “Which community do I want to be part of?”. This is healthier. This is on a more human level.
Mastodon is not Twitter or Facebook. It is more like Wordpress. If you don’t like one community then you don’t have to stay on that server. You can hop to another that is more in line with your way of thinking. In a community where you feel positive you do not need to hide your name. I would encourage people to flit from server to server until they find the instance that they like. Mastodon is more like a web forum. There are hundreds of servers, the aim is to find the server that you like being a part of.
For a period of time I would buy new mobile phones every six months. This was to test new hardware, new operating systems and new versions. Recently mobile phone development has hit a development wall. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/31/white-nexus-4-available/ of a phone is excellent, if that’s the reason you chose one phone or another. That’s not how I select my phones. Battery life is. For the last two years I have looked at mobile phones and battery life and it has not improved. I like to use my phones as GPS during via ferrata trips, walks and other outdoor activities. Within an hour you are usually down to half a battery or less and by the time you arrive home the phone is dead, unless you get an external battery to recharge the device. The fashion to develop phones that are thinner and thinner with bigger screens is only making things worse. I’d love to see manufacturers once again double phone size and triple battery capacity. I’d like something thick that I could use for a day in the mountains.
Suunto have provided an alternative:
This is a device that you wear as an ordinary watch on your wrist. It has an integrated GPS, pressure sensor and a rechargeable battery. In day to day use the battery loses around 1% of battery charge per day when in normal mode and around 3% per hour of exercise. It takes just a few seconds to get the watch in to activity tracking mode, to pause, tracking, or to stop tracking all together. The data it collects is synced with a computer very easily. If you spend a little extra money you can buy accessories for cycling, for heart rate monitoring, for cadence and more.
Satellite acquisition is fast. Every time you sync the watch and charge it Geo-stationary satellite information is downloaded and synchronised with the watch. This speeds up the time it takes to have an accurate location. It takes around 4 seconds when near the location of synching and less than 30 seconds when 1-200 kilometers away. It’s fast.
The beauty of such devices is that they encourage physical activity. Online you can share your tracks with friends and you can tailor apps to the types of sports you do or goals you set. There are apps for 10k runs, marathons and many more similar activities. Part of the purpose of this watch is to be a fitness trainer and app developers have made a variety of apps for interval training, distance etc.
This watch has replaced my need for a mobile phone app to track the activities I do when outdoors. I can preserve battery life on the mobile phone until I am back on the home cellphone network or using the phone for in car navigation.
During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post.
I mention this because when Medium was first created I liked the idea of a website where we could share writing daily, but at the same time I blogged irregularly and didn’t have a voice. As a result I created an account but never used it. Things have changed now. Now I have written for 274 days in a row. Writing has become part of my daily routine. I was toying between the idea of Substack and Medium but I prefer Medium for the reason that I dislike the idea of sending an e-mail that will be ignored. I subscribe to newsletters but almost never read them. Usually I go through them when working on Inbox zero. E-mails stroke the ego of the writer, but they’re just noise.
In contrast Medium posts are more volatile. They appear in our timelines but we are under no obligation to click through and read them. This is better. Most of what we write has little value but the act of writing, in and of itself has value. It is by writing that we develop the habit of thinking, not just 140 characters, or even 1000 characters, but for an ever growing stream of conscience.
For a while I was using Day One to write my blog posts but the software kept crashing on me so I dumped it for VIM. What I like about VIM is that it’s minimal. I get to practice writing Markdown whilst at the same time practicing with VIM. Vim is a powerful tool that is worth getting familiar with.
As I write this I read a post about people no longer reading. I read every single day. I read both from a kindle before going to sleep, but also from Audible during my daily walks or runs. Remember that if you don’t have to read in one format, you can always read with another one.
The same was said of blogging. “I don’t have time to blog because I’m distracted by social media”. That was true before. During the pandemic something changed. Social Media emptied of conversations and people we would desire to meet in person, either because we wanted to self-isolate, or because we grew tired of seeing others ignore COVID lockdowns. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram. I was tired of feeling more lonely, rather than less lonely.
By becoming less sticky Social Media freed us to do other things. It freed us to study, to read, to write, and to work on projects again. For wishful thinkers the pandemic is over. For others, like me, the habits that helped me cope with solitude are still valid now. Now that I have a writing habit that is consistent, I can share blog posts, rather than tweets, toots or notes, depending on wheither you’re on Twitter, Mastodon, Firefish, other Fediverse instances, Threadiverse, or other.
Remember, before Social Media took over online conversations we had social networks. Bloggers are part of a social network. Medium is a social Network. The Fediverse is a social network. Social networks are centered around human being communicating by electronic means. The problem with Corporate Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Threds and others, is that they use algorithms to control the conversation, rather than chronology. Mastodon and the Fediverse are chronological social networks, like the real world. where conversations take place in real time, where algorithms don’t manufacture conflict.
Sharecropping between Medium and a Personal Blog is the reason for which I didn’t want to post to Medium. I’d rather have my own blog, that I write for, daily, and then share on Medium. I have had my own website since 1996. I left Facebook because I felt they benefited more from me wasting my time, than I got.
Since 2007 or so I said that Social Media companies spent so much time thinking about ROI for brands, PR firms and corporations that they forgot about ROI for the user. This is demonstrated beautifully by the Threads situation. It picked up one hundred million users within days, but lost four fifths of them within a week or two. Threads forgot about the ROI that users got out of being on their app. I loved the idea of Substack Notes until I saw that it was a popularity contest. My enthusiasm for Substack lasted for minutes.
As I mentioned above I like Medium because we can read or ignore what people write, without having to mark things as read. We can also read articles on the site or app, when we’re on the app, rather than working through e-mails. I like the idea of revenue sharing but I don’t like that some content is paywalled. I feel that this removes from the user experience. There are two issues with the Paywall:
We need to pay to finish articles
By paying to read articles our content has to have much more traffic to break even.
Medium doesn’t have to be a mirror of my blog. It can highlight the better content, the content I feel is worthy of being shared more broadly. Now i the time to start a new experiment.
Walking in heavy rain for two and a half hours doesn’t make much sense. You don’t see much. The more time you spend outside the more of you is wet, and by the time you get home you’re cold and in need of warming up.
It’s day 57, the 11th of May. In theory Switzerland has rebooted in safe mode and we can start returning to normal life. I don’t know whether the shops or other places were busy because I didn’t go into any shops.
Yesterday I went for a run despite the rain. I was going down to run along one road that I usually avoid because of dog walkers. I ran along it before spotting someone walking with a dog. I couldn’t tell whether he was walking towards me or away from me so I turned around. I ran along a difficult bit of grass, trying to avoid the drivers in cars who have no empathy for people on foot.
To the left there is a massive field of mud. It used to be an agricultural field but the Swiss turned that field into a field of mud that fills with water when it rains. There is a dirt road but that dirt road is behind a fence. It can’t be accessed on foot.
I was running towards an agricultural road where I would be off the road once again. Once on the road I appreciated the metalled surface but I heard barking so I turned to look to the right and saw a cage with what appeared to be a dog or more barking so I continued running. I then spotted that two dogs were running along a road, on a course to intercept me. I count this as a dog attack because I turned around and ran back towards the road with traffic. In the end I cut across a fallow field but the fallow field was filled with deep puddles of water which I tried to avoid stepping in.
My feet ended up ankle deep in water several times and the effort of running was far greater than if I had been able to follow the path I wanted to run initially. The problem is that I had to overcome my fear of dogs to enjoy that route.
Over the pandemic, and ever since then I have found walking routes that keep me away from people, and away from their dogs. The habit that I picked up during the pandemic never ended, because COVID denialism replaced pandemic awareness. I walk by people sometimes, but if I can avoid them I do.
Over the last five years I have walked locally almost every single day and I have found routes that I enjoy walking along. Now I have an eight kilometre loop that I walk either clockwise or anti-clockwise. I had more routes but because of how cars behave towards me I decided to abandon certain walking roads.
When I hear a car I often step into the wet grass and the mud, because I know that they never slow down for me. Buses don’t slow down, delivery trucks don’t slow down. Motorbikes don’t slow down, and bikes don’t even bother to give me a safe space. The result is that I step into the wet grass and mud, and they wave to thank me. I’m not getting out of their way out of courtesy, unless they’re tractors or trucks. I’m getting out of their way because I am so tired of them passing me way too fast, way too close. It was easier to change my walking route.
For a long time I walked with waterproof shoes but I stopped, because waterproof shoes have good tread, and good tread is excellent at trapping mud. The problem with shoes that are great at trapping mud is that they require half an hour to clean at the end of every walk. It’s easier to wear shoes that have little to no tread. These shoes are not waterproof, so my feet get soaked.
Yesterday I was dressed for running, so I was warm when I was running. Because of the two detours I took, along wet fields the humidity wicked up from my socks to my trousers, and from my cap down to my t-shirt. This is despite wearing waterproof trousers and a rain coat (with no hood).
I have a route that I run and walk every day, whether clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Because of the rain I thought there would be no dog walkers, and that I could enjoy my rainy route. Due to the dog walker I couldn’t, so I deviated, and that deviation eventually got me soaked.
I achieved my running goal nonetheless. I would have enjoyed it more without the challenge of overcoming my fear of dogs. My fear of dogs is recent, growing over the last two or three years. Before that I didn’t bother about seeing dogs. The problem is that a dog ran and barked very aggressively along one fence, near Crassier. Two or three times I encountered that dog with nothing to hold it back so I ran into a field, and waited for it to leave me alone. Another time a dog ran towards me and barked aggressively near a forest, and I climbed onto a fallen down tree to have a slight height advantage. Yet another time I encountered a dog in a forest, where I shielded behind a tree until it left me alone.
The one that radicalised my fear of dogs was near the motorway. I stood still waiting for the owner to put in on a leash so that I could past. Eventually it charged me, ready to attack. I turned to run, and then turned to face it. I really thought that this would result in me being mauled. I walked away with no physical harm, but traumatised by the experience. The only time I decided not to avoid a dog walker I ended up being charged.
Since then I always avoid dogs when I’m alone.
Without dog walkers and cars on agricultural roads I would love my daily local walks. The pandemic showed me the euphoria of walking without cars and I really miss how quiet and pleasant the world was, when cars were rare. I call it the lock down honeymoon. For people who enjoy local walks it was fantastic.
There was a time when I would automatically get into a car to go for a walk. There was also a time when I would not consider going for a walk, or run, in the rain. Those days are gone. Now I go for my daily walk, or run, whatever the weather. I planned to be out for about half an hour yesterday, but because of the deviations I ended up going through wet fields. If I had run my usual route I would have remained relatively dry.
The rain is falling again today, so once again I will get wet, but this time I am walking so I can wear waterproof shoes, maybe.