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I have spent a week and a half with the Garmin 45S and it doe what I expect the Garmin to do, but with more regular charges. The battery is rated to last for a week working as a watch and up to 13 hours working as a sports tracker. You can track your workouts with GPS, GPS and Galileo or GPS and Glonass.

This watch is designed for running, rather than walking or other sports, so it provides running data that is easy to read, whilst running. At the end of the run it provides you with useful data, as you’d expect from such a tracker.

According to Euronews Next up to half of people in some European countries do not exercise enough. This is based on “A joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)”.

There are only three reasons I would not walk ten thousand steps in a single day. A road trip, where I am in the car for most of the day, a bike ride, where my workout is not counted in steps or because of some reason I have forgotten about. Last month I walked 450,000 steps. This month I am regularly walking over 17,000 steps per day. I can’t imagine not being physically active every single day. It’s part of my routine.

Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.

This risk of drought is recognised. The RTS wrote about how people are getting water tanks, due to the regularity of droughts. The problem is so bad that aside from the article about people buying water tanks to store their own rain water there is another one speaking about how the underground water table is at risk. “Il faudrait donc qu’il pleuve quasiment non-stop jusqu’à fin mars pour que les nappes phréatiques retrouvent leur niveau normal”. It would need to rain non-stop for two weeks for the water tables to find their required levels.

Recently I repotted Orchids and now they seem to be doing fine. I see evidence of new buds and suspect that they have continued to grow despite my intervention. For months I considered repotting them but I was afraid that it would kill them. I waited until they were between blooms but they’re constantly blooming so that wait was long.

In the end I repotted them when I noticed that a plant was growing and flowering in the air. I found that it seemed to be completely detached from the mother plant. I filled a pot with the wood chips that are meant for orchids, wet them, and then placed the orchid plant within. I did this for several plants and now have four pots with orchids.

During a recent walk I thought about existential crises and the pandemic. I thought that it’s a shame that we spend so much time speaking about depression rather than looking for a new reason for being, a new existential identity, or goal in life. We treat the search for a new identity, due to the pandemic as if it is a depressive moment but I think this is wrong.

The pandemic has changed whether we can socialise, and how we socialise. It has changed whether we agree to be indoors, or whether we prefer to be outdoors. It also shapes whether we want to be near crowds or away from them.

I am approaching the five kilometre mark now. I am getting close to being able to run five kilometres in a row once again. It is paradoxical that I find running hard, compared to walking and cycling. I was able to run up to 13 kilometres before. Now I’m aiming for half, to a third less.

If I ran somewhere flat I would find running easier. One of the challenges of running in this landscape is that it undulates. In theory I could also run around in circles like others do. I could run laps, rather than a long circuit but I don’t want to run around in circles. I am considering running around in a circle for the 4.8km run. I want to run around in that circle to focus on achieving the distance, rather than struggling to cope with the contours.

Due to the pandemic I almost never go to Nyon. If I do I often wear a mask and avoid walking around too much. Most people think the pandemic is over. I see, from the data, that it is not, and I want to stay true to previous ethics and morality.

Flowers in spring on the slope behind the Musée du Léman

Today marks 100 days in a row of walking 10,000 steps a day. It helps that we’re in winter than in summer because my step streaks are broken when I go for bike rides. Step counters don’t count pedalling as steps, so it’s easy to lose a streak.

I could pretend that I have learned ten things by walking ten thousand steps a day but the truth is that I haven’t. I simply have a habit of walking that is not affected by snow, rain, wind or other. I walk every day, and sometimes the streak is consistent enough to reach 100 days according to an app by Pedometer.

Back in the good old days of Twitter the length of a tweet was limited to the length of an SMS. The aim was to make it possible for people to tweet and have conversations using GSM phones. With short messages we could leave the keyboard behind and read messages on our mobile phones.

Jaiku was similar except that it was more advanced, having an app that played well with Symbian devices. With time, and the advent of the iphone and ubiquitous data plans so platforms like Twitter and Jaiku could add images and more. With time Seesmic experimented with video and instagram with images. Instagram thrived because it made uploading and sharing images fast and easy, even in the days of limited bandwidth.

Today I played with an Apple Watch Ultra in a shopping centre and two thoughts came to mind. The first is that this is finally a calculator watch that is big enough for an adult to use. This is meant more as a joke than as a serious comment.

The second thought is that if they are not careful watch screens will become too big. The only iOS phone I can consider is the SE because the others are too large, and if they are not careful then watches too, will become too big. I don’t want such a large screen.