Rain

If I look across from my apartment I can see plenty of pigeons lined up in a row. It’s raining heavily and they are not flying. They are just sitting on the roof, letting the rain water trickle down from them onto the roof below. I assume that in this weather pigeons don’t want to get their entire body soaked. They prefer to sit and huddle.

Staying Safe

I am waiting for the rain to stop before driving. I don’t need to rush to do today’s chore, and when I do this journey the battery for the electric car should be at one hundred percent anyway, so I can afford to wait for the rain to slow down.

I love to walk and cycle every day. I love to walk from home and not touch the car. This morning I refuelled the car and it cost 90 CHF for 44 litres or so. Every single time I refuel the car I get a shock. Petrol is expensive, and yet people drive every day.

Usually I go for five days per week without touching the car. I walk from home and back. This saves on driving time, parking and petrol. I come up against a clear frustration.

By some fluke I have now gone for two bike rides in the rain. The first time I rode in the rain my hands got cold and I had to warm myself up again. Yestrday I went for. a bike ride again, expecting the weather to stay good. It drizzled almost non-stop. As a result my socks got soaked and I was once again covered in splatters of muddy water. I didn’t even ride through mud. I was covered in mud despite riding on tarmac.

My fingers went numb with cold during today’s bike ride. I saw that there was a chance of rain but I went anyway. I went for a simple reason. Some people in an apartment next door were banging on walls, and the noise is unpleasant. The noise is so unpleasant that the idea of cycling in the cold rain was more appealing than listening to that noise. 

When I started the ride I wore my rain clothes. I also wore gloves. I wish I had at least one extra glove layer to protect me further. I think the mixture of rain and cold got through the gloves to my fingers. For the entire ride I questioned whether to turn back and give up on the day’s ride. I didn’t. I toughed it out. 

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.

Yesterday i drove through the rain for two hours at night and it was so demanding that i stopped the audiobook to focus on driving. It was harder to see the lines, and the rain was heavy enough to impact visibility.

I made it but i would think twice about driving through such rain at night on a 12hr drive for the last two hours.

Sometimes you end up walking into heavy rain. That’s what I did today. I looked at the weather and because it was meant to get better over the coming days I assumed that this evening it would get better. Instead, as I walked it started to rain a little more, and then a little harder, and eventually quite a bit harder. Did I get wet beyond the top layer? Nope, but my beanie got a little wet, as did my fleece. My shoes on the other hand were clean, thanks to the flow of water.

They forecast rain and I looked forward to going for a walk and having clean shoes as shoes are washed by the rain keeping shows slick. The rain didn’t come so my shoes got muddy and I stood by the tap trying to get the mud to drain away from between the tread, without much luck. Tomorrow if I run down the stairs as I always do I will leave thick clumps of mud from my apartment down to the garage

Today is a rainy day so I have less of interest to write about. The rain fell this morning. It continued until this afternoon. Rain is an excuse not to go for a daily walk. It is an opportunity for a rest day.

Yesterday my 770 plus day streak on Duolingo was broken because I was too distracted to take a lesson. I wanted to break that streak. I didn’t want to break it intentionally. I wanted it to be by accident. I accomplished that goal. Now I am free to reset and work on creating a new routine that is better suited to the new goals. The focus will be web development, whether JSON-LD, JS, WordPress, or more.

Plenty of rain today.

Plenty of people wear masks, both outdoors and indoors. You also see people wearing masks on television.