Day Seventeen of ORCA in Switzerland – April Fool’s During Self Isolation

Reading Time: 3 minutes
April Fool’s during self isolation is not fun. People made jokes about how our freedoms would be limited even further. In ordinary situations those jokes would be detected but because we have the freedom to get food, go for walks, and sit at home we have no other rewards as such. One of the jokes was that bandwidth would be throttled. The second was that Strava would be used to track people and the third was that bikes with handlebars would be allowed but not racing style bikes.

There is a fear that those jokes will be implemented too easily. During a pandemic little things matter.

I decided that to avoid people I would do some more exploring. I explored along the usual river but this time I walked under one bridge and went along the river to another bridge and then went onto my usual path. The route was good because I hardly had to avoid anyone and when I did encounter people I could walk through the grass and give more than three meters.

In some places the river has some nice deep pools. They would be good to jump into in the middle of summer. The river is shallow, so it could also be an interesting place to try river walking if it’s allowed. I haven’t checked. There are quite a few small waterfalls along the path. They are just 30 centimeters or so high, so nothing to drive too far to see.

Either the walk tired me or I’m still fatigued from being in self-isolation for seventeen days. I need to recharge and refresh myself before tomorrow.

What I listened to.

During the walk I listened to the liferaft episode of 13 minutes to the moon and it was so interesting that when young people tried to get my attention I ignored them and continued listening to the podcast. I also didn’t want to encourage them to get too close to me. In a pandemic, children have a tendency to approach. I thought of telling a three or four year old to stay away yesterday but the father did instead.

People always say “you should be happy with what you have, it could be worse” and today I thought “Yeah, you could be in Aquarius during the Apollo 13 mission when the oxygen tank blew up”. We’re not in that scenario. Our biggest challenge is dealing with a new form of solitude if you want to use a positive word, and loneliness if you want to use the negative one.

Couples and parents can only dream of this solitude.

I really recommend listening to this podcast. I tried listening to others but at the moment my ability to listen to certain content has fallen through the floor so I’ve been unsubscribing. I’m looking for informative and interesting podcasts, with as little superficiality as possible.

When most of your social interactions are via social media sensationalism becomes toxic. That’s why I’m using computer games, Flickr and other forms of “entertainment” to fill the time.

It’s 1900 and the sun is still up.