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.
The Via Ferrata Season resumes on Monday with La Via Farinetta reopening. This news came via the Via Farinetta Saillon official page, as seen with the Facebook embed below.
Bonne nouvelle! La Via sera ouverte à partir ce lundi 11 mai ??
Néanmoins nous vous rendons attentifs sur les instructions des autorités.
N’hésitez pas à nous partager vos photos.
Prenez soin de vous!Posted by Via Farinetta Saillon Officiel on Thursday, 7 May 2020
I’m happy with the news. I won’t rush to climb though. I’d rather wait for two or three weeks and see what happens. If no one gets sick then we can start climbing again. If Décathlon does open I can get gloves that cover fingertips to be safe.
I have altered the route I usually walk because cows are in one of the fields I like to walk through. The alternate route requires walking along a road, so it’s less pleasant because there are a greater number of people to avoid.
In the picture above you would never know that there is a path that you can walk along. It’s only because one day I saw people walking from the other direction that I decided to investigate. If you walk closer you see that the gap is large enough for people to pass, as in the featured image. Even when you know where it is it’s easy to miss.
It’s VE day, and the poppies are out.
I saw a flower I wasn’t familiar with and when I looked closer to take pictures I noticed that these were strawberry plants. The season for strawberries is almost here.
Strawberry flowers
I didn’t eat any because they’re not ripe. They’re still green, and they’re on a farm, not wild. For wild ones we have to wait until we get to the mountains again.
We’re just days away from Switzerland rebooting in Safe Mode. Rebooting in Safe mode means that children will go back to School on alternating days. Hairdressers and creches are already open. So are flower shops.
When I went to the local shopping the music festival maze to get into the shops was simplified and made more efficient. You don’t need to walk around so much. The doors to the shopping centers are also opening in the normal configuration again. Life is already to return towards safe-mode normal.
French people in Switzerland have fallen in love with the sentence «Il faut agir aussi vite que possible, mais aussi lentement que nécessaire». Translated it means “We must act as quickly as possible, but be as meticulous as possible” or something to that effect. It’s important to be responsive, and to take the time it takes, to get life back to normal, safely.
Part of this experiment should include a smartphone app to track who we’re close to and when. It’s developed by the EPFL and we’ll see how it behaves and if it provides us with any interesting or useful information. I’m a fan of apps that provide me with information about the information I’m providing. I like Google Maps for this reason. I’ll have an opinion on Monday.
Rather than go for my daily walk I went for a daily bike ride. I went as far as Versoix and back in a respectable loop. The borders are still shut so the paths I like to take are not accessible yet.
@richardazia Completely surrounded by ##cows in ##switzerland. Time for them to go up to the ##mountains.
While some of us have gone fifty-two days without being within two meters of another person due to the pandemic others walk side by side down country lanes, forcing those walking alone to make the decision of whether to risk infecting the vulnerable couple or stepping off the road and waiting under an electricity pylon while the selfish people clear the way.
In the image above we can clearly see two couples walking side by side. If these couples could walk single file then single people would be able to move around more freely. That’s why I went for walks in the rain, why I walked through muddy fields and paths that became streams. It’s the only way to avoid these people. Solitary confinement may be the reason this behaviour bothers me so much. It’s hard to see people that are not alone, when we are.
If I was walking in open fields at the moment I would have been charged at least two or three times by cows protecting their young. The reason for this is that they’re with calves that are just a week or three old. You can see them stand defensively and that they’re ready to charge you if you get too close.
Now would be a very bad time to walk into an enclosure. Now is a good time to be careful when hiking.
@richardazia
Today I went in to a shop without knowing that the limit was two people at a time. Paradoxically there were not two but five people in the shop because if you’re a parent with a child you’re allowed to be two, so there were four people. I saw no sign on the door because the door was open so I didn’t know. The shop in my village doesn’t have that rule.
It seems stupid to ignore the rule for two parents and their kids from separate families. I thought that I would walk my traditional summer route today but of course that was a mistake. A trio of three people from one family were walking lined up making it impossible for me to pass them without them entering my two metre exlusion zone so I waited by a petanque field for them to pass.
A girl and her mother were distracted doing something and the bike began to roll down a slope and I questioned, “How do I help without touching the bike. I thought of running and stopping it with my foot but as it gained momentum I ran out of time. It rolled into the road.
I was thinking “How can I help the mother walking with her children and I came to the conclusion that the safest part of the bike to grab and place it back on the pavement was the down tube. Saddles and handlebars are always touched but it’s unlikely that people, in normal circumstances would touch the down tube.
These are the things we need to think about during a pandemic. Helping someone as a spur of the moment thing is temporarily out of the question as a moment’s kindness could lead to tragedy, not that I expect either of us to be at high risk of catching the virus from each other. According to a recent article there were just 40 new contaminations yesterday. Now we’re even further into the long tail of the pandemic.
I just got back from a two and a half-hour walk at dusk. I had no plan to go for such a long walk. It was elongated because I ended up taking a detour to see calves just as they were being fed. They’re quite excited about getting some food. They were very happy to get their daily milk, as you can see from the image below.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Richard Azia (@richardazia) on
During today’s walk I saw calves and their mothers. Their mothers were mooing me away but I was taking video so I didn’t move until one after another started to approach me. By then I had the footage I wanted to have. I had a strong fence fixed with wooden posts and a bush between myself and the cows so I calculated that the risk was low enough not to bolt.
@richardazia
This aftrnoon reminded me of the need for outdoor exercise. I was feeling lazy and unmotivated to go outdoors. I thought that the rain would come back during my walk, as it did during my scooter ride, and as it did yesterday. I checked the weather app and I saw that we should have good weather until tomorrow so I took advantage to go for my walk.
This time I was light. I went with my AirPods, my phone, and money just in case. I walked the usual route but this time I think I saw farmers and their child, and plenty of people on bikes. It would be interesting to see how important a role physical exercise played in Switzerland managing to flatten the curve for now. With so much sunshine and exercise you’d expect the Swiss to be primed for coping with such a virus.
@richardazia
Today I was caught outdoors during a thunderstorm but rather than run to shelter or rush home I continued taking a timelapse video of some flowers. According to the apps we were meant to get some rain at 1800 so I expected it to be short lived.
This didn’t stop my clothes or my bag from getting wet but I was wearing hiking trousers and I wasn’t worried about the shoes. I didn’t expect anything to be soaked through and I did prepare to run home if need be. By the time I was ready to run the rain was stopping so I took out the phone and waited, and tried to capture lightning.
View this post on InstagramNice and stormy. Not a good day to be up at La Dôle hiking naked.
A post shared by Richard Azia (@richardazia) on
Today at around lunchtime we had a few minutes of rain for the first time in weeks but it didn’t last long. By the time I went out for my daily walk the ground was dry, as if it hadn’t rained at all. There was no mud to walk through so I came back as clean as when I left.
The daily walk is a good part of my day because it forces me to have some AFK (Away from Keyboard) time. That’s the thought I had when starting the walk. For two hours a day I spend time looking at the landscape, at how the plants and fields are changing day to day and more. I notice how paths are being worn where they would not be worn in normal times.
New trails are forming in some places. As people attempt to discover the area around them, and stay away from cars a new set of trails is emerging. Yesterday I was not even appalled by a woman showing off about walking with an umbrella in the mountains. Solitary confinement makes me long for the day when I can go back to hiking with people.
On today’s walk I went to see the cows quickly and tried to get a few seconds of them mooing but they were uncooperative so I have several seconds of cows just staring. Some people think of them as sentient beings that shouldn’t be eaten but the cows I looked at today didn’t seem to have much intelligence. They certainly don’t have the same character as cats.
I thought that the Latin page I have would take hours to make mobile friendly so I put it off for a few days as I took time to think of a solution. Today I used the viewport meta tag and CSS table options to make that page more modern. What I thought would take hours took minutes.
I went back to my first blog post and worked my way forward from there making twenty to thirty pages AMP ready. In the process I added tags to those pages as well as quickly corrected typos, dead links and related problems.
I also started porting my old “Surfing the World Wide Waves (WWW)” blog to this installation of Wordpress. My reasoning is that since it’s a blog it makes sense to combine two generations. When enough of the content is ported across to the blog I will use content views to provide a more contemporary looking interface.
These are time consuming tasks but now that I’m unable to use Facebook or Twitter due to the lack of social interactions in the physical world I feel no choice but to avoid them. Avoiding Facebook and Twitter has had a positive effect. The less time I spend on either the more I have to show for the day.
It was interesting to read blog posts I wrote as a uni student and articles I wrote as a school teenager. It’s interesting to see how things have changed today.
Having said that I really like the For You tab on Tik Tok. I get recommendations like these. I like these recommendations because they make me thing forward, towards the future, rather than feel negative about the present.
@freeridewtour Hugo Hoff going to the speed of light! ##FWT20 ##ski ##freeride ##challenge ##foryou ##foryoupage