Today I ran and then walked a reverse journey of what I did yesterday. I wanted to take a picture of the corkscrew tree. It would have required for me to wait for two slow walkers and their dog to pass and because they insisted on walking two abreast it made more sense to turn around and take an alternate route.
Slight increase in the number of cases in Switzerland.
Although my attitude may seem extreme there has been an increase in the number of cases. At least three times today I would have been within people’s personal space if I had not turned around, found a snicket through a forest, or stepped into a field. I look forward to the weekenders being back in their home offices on Monday. They shouldn’t be allowed in the wild. They lack common decency and courteousy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbm50zj0POQ
I watched Darwin speak about how quiet the AT has become as a result of the order for everyone to vacate the trail being given. This season will be a different one, if it takes place at all. It’s a shame that thru-hiking isn’t allowed. In theory they could easily sleep in tents and eat take away on the rare moments when they’re in town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJduf7v4Wwo
I also watched this fifty minute video of a successful thru-hike in 2019. It looks like this was more of an adventure than other videos I’ve watched. It also looks like a lot of fun. I still dream of doing multi-day hikes again.
I also listened to the Thru-Hiker episode with Tip Tap as an interviewee. I’ve been watching the videos but I’m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRY2Ys5ILL8
I think i finished the journey videos but I’ve lost track as a result of watching so many videos on this topic.
By May we may be able to go back to doing sports in groups as long as they are not “contact sports” in Switzerland. For me this means hiking, running cycling and other related sports. For me climbing is a contact sport because we touch the same hand holds as everyone else climbing the routes, we use the same ropes and we share quickdraws and belay devices.
This being said I also have no desire to do sports like climbing at the moment because they require us to stand around and socialise and I haven’t really socialised in at least 38 days. I need to ease back into the world of the extrovert. Hiking is a good way to do that.
Visual Studio Code
Today I started watching a course on Linkedin learning about using Chrome for webmastering but got distracted with the idea of installing a server on my mac book pro. I then got even more distracted by Visual Studio Code.
I like this piece of software because it’s free, intuitive to use and quick. A few days ago I had spent hours playing with another html editing tool and the process was so laborious that i wasted a lot of time. With Visual Studio Code it’s fast and I’m getting through the task of making the old part of my website mobile friendly.
The process is interesting. The more pages I optimise the more experience I gain and the more efficient I become. I found that if I remove some bits of code the page is mobile compliant within two or three steps and I can move on to the next page, and the next one after that.
In theory these pages should always have been mobile friendly because they’re light. There is no CSS or other clunk. Images are also small as bandwidth was an issue in those days. It still is, but we have a firehose rather than a syringe today.
Webmastering is great because time really flies when you’re working on a website. You can easily spend ten or more hours a day working on something and still have a few more hours of work. That’s why some professions look so busy compared to others. Of course it’s time consuming because I am still perfecting the work flow. By the time I’ve optimised every page I’ll be proficient at an updated skill.
TikTok
Last night I was unable to focus so I installed TikTok and looked at plenty of videos to clear my mind enough to be able to think about dinner. I must have been in the right frame of mind because I enjoyed quite a few of the videos and flooded my facebook timeline with examples. Don’t worry though, out of the flood I only got one like. It seems that no one saw the flood so it didn’t happen.
1SE – One Second Every Day
More in character with me is the One Second Everyday app. I created a compilation for every day of quarantine so far but I won’t share the video too frequently because it will be most effective when it has at least sixty more days.
I question whether we’re living in the future, or uncertainty during this pandemic. One friend on Facebook wrote that Coronavirus is making us live in the future because of a number of reasons, as listed in the embedded post below.
If I am being myself then I would say that we’re living in the past. We’re living in an age before cars where our village or neighborhoud has become our world. For the first month my home village and the shopping centre one village over were the only two places where I spent any time.
I resorted to walking from home and exploring more and more of the local countryside, to the point where I was walking along dirt tracks that only farmers use to avoid crossing too many other people.
It’s also living in the past because we’re living with very little to no use of the car. The car, for someone like me, is synonymous with going for an adventure in the mountains, whether hiking or other.
Working from home, in my case is blogging, and looking to find opportunities on various websites and through e-mails on an almost daily basis. We’re connecting with people online via WhatsApp, Zoom, Infomaniak’s video tool and other methods. I even used facetime for the first time in a long time.
We’re seeing which countries have good self-discipline and those that do not. I’ll focus on the positive without being negative. The positive is that Switzerland said that people should self-isolate, stay at home and keep two meters away from other people and to a great extent they did. I’m not saying things were perfect all the time, because previous blog posts show they weren’t.
What we do see in Switzerland is that at least at the time of writing this post the number of new cases was flattening to a couple of hundred a day compared to the higher figures from previous weeks. Switzerland said “you should stay home and avoid being to close to people” and people did this.
The consequence is that Switzerland is a rare eutopia, in that we could go for two hour walks if we wanted, we could go on long bike rides and more. In other countries people were restricted to ranging within one kilometre of their homes as in one country, and in other countries of being under house arrest, except for shopping, going to the doctor or other.
Uncertainty
We live in uncertain times because we don’t know whether we’ll have a normal summer. In Switzerland at least one third of people have cancelled their summer plans. On the oil futures market the value of petroleum went down to zero because those that had the ability to buy petroleum did not have the storage space to keep it.
Imagine being in a moment in time where petroleum is worthless, albeit temporarily. For the environment this may be great news because oil producing companies will have a strong incentive to innovate. We have to see if the fall in demand for oil lasts long enough for oil producers to reach a point of no-return in producing alternative fuels and technologies.
At least twice in the past oil crises have helped push innovation forward but that progress was abandoned when oil, once again became a cheap alternative.
A Short Daily Walk
Today my daily walk was a lot shorter than usual. This is due to the weather not being as nice as usual but also because my leg muscles feel tired and in need of a rest. After a 30km bike ride, a 16km walk with 790 meters of climbing and another ten-kilometre walk over three days my body needs a rest. It needs to recover. This wasn’t a zero-day so much as giving my body an opportunity to recover and rest.
Today I went for a Hike from La Barillette to La Barillette. It’s a shame that the restaurant wasn’t open to the public. It is currently marked as private, and scheduled to open on the first of May. Today I didn’t expect to do a long and physical hike. I expected to complete my usual daily tasks and then to go for the usual walks around where I live. In the end I did do such a hike, but it involved a slightly different geographic location.
The road to the top is currently closed to cars but sneaky motorbikes and cyclists can still head up the mountain. Plenty of cars were parked along the road by the first barrier. Instinctively I expected that we would see plenty of people walking up and down the road to La Dole but that wasn’t the case. The road was busy with cyclists.
Groups of up to five cyclists at a time headed up to the mountain. Some looked comfortable heading up, others looked okay, and some looked to be making an effort. I was surprised to see one person riding up that hill on a tandem and to see someone else ride up the hill on an electric bike pulling a child’s trailer. I couldn’t see a child in either the child seat or the trailer but that’s still quite a bit of extra weight to get up a mountain. Although that’s a nice distraction it isn’t the reason for this blog post.
Self-isolation means that we have to keep distant from other people but walking along paths with high traffic makes that complicated. For those with a little more energy and a lot of time the solution is to walk from the base of the Jura to the top. Initially the plan was to go up via the road but my curiousity got the better of me so I checked on Komoot to see whether I could take a side road up to the top and when I saw that this was possible I took advantage.
You follow the yellow and the Red and blue markers. We took one wrong turn so we had to scramble through some underbrush and climb up an even steeper incline. At least two or three trees have fallen across the path but they can all be avoided by going either side of them.
The trail is not used as frequently as others so navigation can sometimes be more challenging. It’s good to have some previous experience of navigating in this type of landscape. There are no sign posts and the red and blue and yellow markings are irregular. Without Komoot I would have explored more. I know that the aim is to reach the top, so from that aspect the goal is simple, but you could spend time wandering around without getting where you want to be.
During the walk you go from paths that are wide enough for cars to drive along where orienteering is easy to narrower paths where navigation is hard.
In Summer, when the restaurant is open this would be a good variant. I would have enjoyed having a fondue or Entrecôte at the top. As it so happens that’s my dinner, but prepared by myself rather than someone else.
For people who love flowers now is the ideal time to go up. You see plenty of these flowers growing in patches all over the top of the mountain. You need to go just as the snow finishes melting to see them at their best.
Less worried about the Virus.
By meeting up with someone to do an activity I went against my self-isolation rules. Two weeks ago when I was asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride I flatly said no. Now that the virus appears to be on the decline and that the number of cases is dropping I am being less aggressive about my self-isolation. I still give as much distance between myself and others. We also met using two scooters, rather than catching the same car. When I was asked if I wanted to stop for a coffee I had to say no.
People were having a big song and dance about how we shouldn’t call it social distancing because social distancing has negative connotations. Today I wanted to say yes, and I wanted to get back to normal but I couldn’t because the rules are still in place and we’re not in the clear yet. Let me point out that this is day 35 of not having a conversation within normal conversation distance, or of a handshake or a hug. It would be nice to be able to say yes to all of these things.
People, in big families, will never understand what living through a pandemic, is like for people living alone.When we get the green light to meet people again we should celebrate, not by going to a bar but by going on a hike.
When the Pandemic was just starting I thought that this would be perfect for a daily bike ride and I was tempted to go to the mountains and to do other things. I didn’t though, because emergency services said “Don’t monopolise our resources getting injured because we may be required to help with the COVID-19 situation. Within three or four weeks they changed their statement to “if you need help we’re still here, our emergency services are still working as normal.
Last year I broke my arm on a day of Canicule and I spent at least four hours waiting to be seen. The wait was so long that I started to lose patience. When finally I was seen, and the break was confirmed the doctor was smiling, almost laughing. “Normally when people break their arm they can’t rotate their wrist”. It shows that despite my interior monologue being impatient during the wait my exterior monologue was polite and courteous to the point where a doctor was relaxed and good-humoured.
I didn’t want to repeat this experience during a pandemic. My other concern, and reason for not cycling was that if the chain broke I would have to walk home, get the car, and then return and get the bike. To call for help would be to break self-isolation for myself and someone else and I was unwilling to do this. That’s why I walked everywhere within range of home.
During the bike ride I saw a lot of cyclists but what was really interesting is that there were more bikes than cars on the roads, at least on the roads I rode along. It was also interesting to see how I was cycling past some people so quickly. It seems that walking every day for so many months has a beneficial effect. It’s also because I am not fatigued.
If you view “Flybys” you will see that plenty of people are active.
As people can’t go to the shops, can’t go to the mountains, have walked enough, and more we find that plenty of people are actively cycling. Usually when I look at flyby information I see four or five bikes at a time. Today the map lit up in a way I have never seen before. Twenty people cycling simultaneously in twos or threes.
I overheard someone ask “so do we go down or do we go straight across”. They were new to cycling in the region. As I was doing the cycling equivalent of HYOH (Hike your own Hike), Bike your own bike ride, BYOB, not to be confused with the beer/beverage version, I just continued exploring.
Today’s route was different than usual because I had three variables. The first variable was that I wasn’t allowed to leave the Canton De Vaud. The second variable was that I couldn’t go into France so my usual ride segments were out of the question. The third variable was to ensure that the ride was not too short. I accomplished all three of these goals.
I got five personal records during this ride, which isn’t bad and for one segment I was in the top 5.4 percent. it won’t change my life. I got that time on a segment I love to race cars down. It’s a straight road and the bike lane is downhill so it’s easy to go fast. What was unusual is that I was giving so much power, but without burning out. When I stopped pushing it was to coast, rather than because I flamed out.
Blocksite is a Chrome plugin to block specific websites.
I downloaded a Chrome extension to block Twitter and Facebook. Neither of these sites provides me with what I need during this pandemic so rather than delete my accounts, as I almost did this morning, I blocked them. If websites don’t bring joy block them. Good mental health, during a pandemic, especially when self-isolating alone is essential.
As I write this blog post we’re getting the first rain in over a month. Finally the rivers will be able to get their fill. Imagine if I had been caught in the rain during my bike ride. I love the sound of rain on the veluxes.
Today I went on a video walk with the DJI OSMO pocket three or whichever number it has and I took a series of frames. Before going for my daily walk I searched through the Vision Du Réel virtual Film Festival list of films and I found “The Bridge“. It’s available for all to watch during the festival. I didn’t watch it in full but from what I saw it’s a series of shots in the style of Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera.
This inspired me to get out and go for a walk and try an experiment of my own. It’s nine minutes of footage of a village during lockdown in Switzerland. You can hear birds cheeping, banging of some kind or other, people playing in the distance and more. You can also see the occasional car, pedestrian or cyclist. If ever you wanted to go and get B-roll for a post-apocalyptic film it would be now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsYjDnzj0EM
A few minutes of footage for a small village in Switzerland during self-isolation.
The footage was quickly edited using DaVinci resolve and I simply removed the chrominance. It would take seconds to prepare the version with normal colours. This is as an hommage to the vision Du Réel documentary.
I have a single tab open in Chrome at the moment, my main browser. This window, to write this blog post. We are now in Day 32 of self-isolation and I’m keeping myself distracted through blogging, making webpages mobile friendly and more. I’m also limiting the time I spend on news websites, social media and more. I have a five minute time limit on social media apps on my phones.
I wanted to write a Facebook post while on the escalators to go shopping but couldn’t because i was already up to the limit for today. Pandemics are funny because they end up being really boring. You can walk, you can run, you can river walk and you can cycle, but if you have technical issues you need to find a way home. You also need to creatively find routes that people are less likely to follow. People are discovering my snickets so I need to be more and more creative.
It would be so nice to get into the car and go somewhere but for now that idea is absurd. We have to wait for the right time. A few more weeks of nice weather and then, when the rain comes, we can start spending time outdoors again. I write this as a joke. It would suck if we did see that happen.
Coiffeurs, physiothérapeutes, jardineries et médecins seront autorisés à rouvrir leurs portes dès le 27 avril, a décidé jeudi le gouvernement.
From the 27th of April onwards people will be able to get their hair cut again, and to make it easier, people will be able to leave their children at kindergartens. On the 27th of April normal shops will be allowed to reopen and on the 11th of May children will go back to school. That’s if every step goes smoothly of course. In another article they mentioned that exams in Switzerland will be in August.
Poor teenagers, spending their summer holidays studying for exams. Does this mean they will head to university a month later?
When speaking with a neighbour/teacher two days ago he told me that some children and their parents went to secondary homes in France and other questions so the question is how will they get from their secondary homes back to Switzerland in order to start lessons on the required day? Is returning to Switzerland seen as a legitimate reason to drive over big distances?
Un été blanc et sec attend les festivaliers
Annulations Historique! Paléo, Montreux Jazz, Caribana, la Cité… Les grands rendez-vous prévus d’ici fin juillet devraient tirer la prise de leur édition 2020.
This summer may be one of the quietest in decades or even centuries. There is a chance that all of the music festivals will be cancelled for this summer. In one article I read that, if so many countries are still in lockdown then it isn’t worth going on a tour, as a band for just a few gigs.
The risk of forest fires is now severe enough for fires to be banned.
Although it feels like we’re nearing the end of the pandemic we can see that it’s still a month or more away, so our current lifestyle will have to be resilient enough to carry us through.
We’re in day 29 of ORCA in Switzerland and I have an ever increasing desire to go for a hike. During today’s walk I listened to two podcasts about hiking and I walked yet another variant of my usual walk. Apple tree blooms are increasing in number and the Colza looks almost ready to harvest.
We’re also going into a dry summer. During this pandemic we have hardly had any rain for a month. The whole of Switzerland is either yellow, orange or red with the risk of fire. I’ve been walking outdoors with a t-shirt.
We could be under the illusion that Switzerland has beaten the virus but that’s an illusion, because the risk of a new center of contagion is possible. We have to continue self-isolating. Today two children cycled too close to me so I crossed to the opposite side of the road because they stopped and would pass me again.
Today during my walk this afternoon I surprised a cat on some stairs and I moved patiently. It brushed up against me so I started to stroke it. During this pandemic the only living things I have had physical contact with are cats. During a pandemic, if you’re not living with people, you are very limited.
Yesterday I did go out for a bike ride with a group of people, virtually. Before the ride I was feeling really down, and negative. After the ride I was feeling refreshed and relaxed. For the first time in three weeks I was able to do something physical without having to avoid people, worry about routing or anything else. All I had to do was pedal to the limit of my motivation and endurance.
If we went into full lock down then I would treat it as if we were in winter. I’d train hard, on the indoor trainer, so that when we are finally allowed more freedom in the outdoors I’d be fit enough to explore new routes.
The Shopping situation
When I went to the shops they were the emptiest I’ve seen them in a long time. I didn’t even need to queue to get in, although I did have a brief moment of over-exaggerating my steps as I was behind people walking slower than me. Everyone, or almost, walks slower than me, so that’s not a criticism of the people ahead of me. It’s good for you. You can use entirely different muscle groups as you behave in an eccentric manner. Even the self-checkout was empty, just one other person.
Of course in the process I forgot to buy plain rice so now I’m going to have to cook with wild rice today. I think playing the COVID-19 lottery, by going to the shops once a day, is risky enough. Wild rice is meant to be healthier anyway.
A Slow Down In New Cases
According to the figures I see, and articles in the press, it seems that the Pandemic has reached a plateau and we may be able to feel optimistic about the end coming in two or three weeks. Of course we have to be wary. With good weather more people are going out to enjoy the conditions, and the likelihood of another flareup is high if people are not careful.
Having said this I saw a tweet that the Canton De Vaud judiciary is going to start work again today, I saw that a shop selling coffee was open again and that a pet shop was open again too. These could be seen as signs, that more people are optimistic that things are improving.
Societal Change
I see that people are discussing whether society will have changed when this is all over and I believe that it will not have because of two key reasons. The first is that the wealthy, those with the power to effect change, will not have suffered like those that do not have the power to effect change. As a result many things will remain the same.
The second factor is rate of infection. When China was infected every other nation on earth had the opportunity to react, but as we see, after Italy was infected, no societies changed. Switzerland, France, Spain, The United Kingdom and the United States did not change.
It took governments saying “stay home, and self-isolate” for people to take action. To me this is a clear sign that the societal change people idealise is just that, an ideal.
Update: Victorian England was afraid of germs and diseases, which is why they wore white gloves and tried to keep their homes clean. The problem is that the paint they used to cover their walls was poisoning them, as was makeup and other elements of everyday life.
Side Effect
I have seen the headline in French and English that according to some people, the earth is less seismically active than usual. As none of the reputable news services have written about this story I am seeing it as just a curiousity, rather than something serious. It’s more likely that with less traffic, whether cars, trucks or planes, that seismometers, may detect less background noise.
In theory now would be the perfect time to have the LHC running, as there is less background noise.
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.
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