Today I noticed how quiet the world, or at least the area in which I was walking, was. I saw very few cars, very few people walking, and very little noise from other people.
This doesn’t mean that people weren’t out and about. Although my route was for the most part deserted of people I did encounter crowds at two or three points. I think a man said “hello” but I ignored him for the cardinal sin of not walking single file, down a path, with his companion during the closing days of a pandemic.
“What does it matter?”, you may ask. I would love to do a group hike or a group Ferrata but I can’t because from a scientific point of view Switzerland is not yet clear of the virus. Meeting in groups of more than five is currently still forbidden. The groups I usually go with could be up to twelve people or more. I don’t know how long I will have to wait for the opportunity to do social activities once again.
It’s good to vary between walking, cycling and running. I even threw in skateboarding but I am not confident at that sport yet. The beauty of walking, cycling and running is that these are sports that you can do straight from home, without getting into a car, and without having to put up with other drivers. The one drawback is that dangerous drivers endanger you on every outing, but that’s another topic.
Comfortable
Although I was worried that I would regret running with barefoot shoes, after wearing them for over six hundred kilometres I can say that they were the right choice. The reason for which they were the right choice is that now, rather than run two kilometres before my knees hurt I can run for five kilometres and reach the goal I wanted to achieve. I wanted to be able to run five kilometres comfortably, and I can.
No Extra baggage
For this run I took no backpack, no lumbar bag or any other form of bag. I had my phone, some cars in case, and my house keys. I don’t usually run so light. I didn’t expect rain. I didn’t expect to feel thirsty, and I didn’t expect to need the external battery pack, to recharge the phone. I didn’t even take earphones.
The Route
Originally I was thinking of running the usual route, to avoid being near homicidal car drivers but I noticed that there was a village party, which I didn’t want to run through. I changed my routing and it had me run up a steep road for several hundred meters before turning left and heading down towards the lake, and then turning right along the motorway. That’s not really the point. The point is that I routed it perfectly, so that I stopped running just as I got to a busy road where I sometimes have to wait for cars to pass.
Quiet
It was quiet on this run. I saw one or two walkers and one runner. In a different age, and time, I might have said hello, but in this day and age it is better not to. She was doing interval running, but when she had a rest interval she took the rest part more seriously than I do. When I’m told to rest I walk at full speed. That is my rest pace.
It was busy with dogs and walkers on another route but I always avoid routes where I expect to meet dog walkers. I don’t want dogs to jump on me, and force me to overcome my desire to run away.
And Finally
Running allows you to experience the same route as you would walk, in half the time. It’s a way of enjoying the outdoors, without devoting the same amount of time. I would not replace walking with running, because I like taking the time to walk that route. By walking you can read a lot of audio books, but you also take a break from sitting and being indoors.
By running I am forced to look at where I’m going, as well as to think of how my feet are hitting the ground. I consider the route. Today I surprised a heron that hid behind some trees. It saw me and flew away.
The pain of optimism during a pandemic can clearly be felt by those who were optimistic enough to believe that self-sacrifice during the pandemic would result in a summer free of the COVID-19 Virus in Switzerland.
We went from a moving average over seven days of one thousand one hundred and twelve new cases on the 25th of May to a moving average over seven days of 17 in early June.
The moving average so far, in July, is of ninety new cases per 7 days. That might not seem like much compared to other countries but it means that masks have become obligatory and that I feel the need to disinfect and wash my hands constantly once more. It also means that car sharing and group activities are ill-advised once again. (no pun intended).
In June I really believed that by July we would have a normal summer with zero new infections per day. When the Swiss government saw the leap in the number of new cases as a result of the 21st of June shift in phase it should have rolled back to the previous phase, and made sure to have two to three weeks of near zero infections.
The failure to do so means that I see no reason to put summer tires on a car that will not be driven to the mountains for group activities that are no longer possible. The two-meter rule is impossible to obey in a car, and doing group activities where you stand two meters from people defeats the entire purpose of doing group activities.
Christmas Cancelled
After the cancellation of summer sports and group activities for single people imagine if it lasted long enough to scupper Thanksgiving and Christmas. Imagine if the people, who are least dependent on society being open were the next ones to lose an important season in their calendar. I would find this justice poetic.
The R Number
When I write blog posts I often do some research, to see whether what I feel is backed up by facts and evidence. In so doing I come across interesting graphs and articles. I find the graph above interesting because it shows that the reproductive rate (R number) went positive on the 25th of May.
According to the graph above Switzerland has the most virulent strain.
Justified Self-Isolation
The more you study the data, the more you see that self-isolation is justified. If Switzerland has one of the highest R numbers then this means that it is one of the places where it makes most sense to self-isolate because it is one of the places where you will most easily catch the virus.
Justified Solitude
I write a lot about solitude because it’s an integral part of my life. If you read books, watch films or television series relationships are always the topic of choice. This means that if you have any questions about living with people you just turn on the TV and find the framework you want to experiment with. Will it be the Big Bang framework, the Friends Framework, the Frasier Framework, or other.
For solitude you need to write your own code and programming language. You need to choose what is important to you, and what you want to achieve. Yesterday when studying Ruby I accidentally tried to run RB files in IRB and it took a while before I understood my mistake. Eventually I exited IRB and started running them through RUBY and the code worked once again.
I mention this because during the Pandemic I have enjoyed learning PHP, MySQL, CSS, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and more. It has replaced the Wednesday trip to the indoor climbing gym and the weekend hikes and Via Ferratas in the mountains. In June we would have expected that by July we’d have gone back to being social, but as conditions are not ideal more is to be gained from experimenting with new knowledge.
Relational Databases
One key skill, during this pandemic would be to learn how relational databases work, and how they can be implemented and used. Every bar, cafe, restaurant and night club needs to track who was where, when, and with whom, so that if a case of COVID-19 is detected, that all those that are at risk may be informed.
You would have one table for customers, a second for the day they visited and possibly a third to specify whether it was breakfast, lunch, dinner, or evening. With primary, and foreign keys. The data would follow ‘single-to-many’ relationships. The code could be written so that after two weeks the data is erased.
In theory an instance of the SwissCovid contact tracing app could be written and run in shops so that it gathers the same data as the app on our phones, and thus provide an automatic means by which to track people.
Swarm, Facebook Check in, and Google Latitude
These three apps track who was where, when, and with whom. If they were still fashionable, then contact tracing during this pandemic would have been simplified and there would have been no reason for every country to write a new app for every country, or trade region.
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.
Imagine, you’re a bee. You stop off at the local watering drinking hole but you fall in. All the pollen that you collected in the morning is now lost. It is now in the swimming pool where you had stopped for a quiet sip.
Life would have been over, if not for a human being noticing movement in the water. A pool brush came from underneath and lifted the bee out of the water and then shook violently so you hang on. The brush is no longer shaked. Instead it is put down in a sheltered spot, away from prying bird eyes.
I don’t know if the bee will survive but at least it had a chance at not drowning. If it goes back to the bee hive it may go empty leg pouched.
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