Today is Earth Day, as Google, Moleskine and other companies are reminding us of. Earth Day is an opportunity to think about how to reduce our carbon footprint and ecological impact. Sigg recently began to sell aluminium water bottles that are made entirely from recycled aluminium. Instead of encouraging us to recycle our old bottles, they have skipped a step, and now make their bottles from recycled aluminium directly. It takes five uses of a recycled Sigg water bottle for the carbon footprint to be offset.
My usual loop is around 30 kilometres but for the last two bike rides I have extended them, to reach 50-60 kilometres respectively. I cover this distance in about two, to two and a half, hours. Cycling is good at the moment because plenty of people are on holidays so the roads feel safer as there are fewer commuters on the roads. View of the Jura and fields
On both of these trips I ended up in Geneva.
Northern Exposure is a series about a doctor who finds himself sent to Alaska to be a doctor for a few years. He thinks that it is the middle of nowhere and he has to adapt from enjoying life as a New Yorker to life as a frontier town doctor. Early colza in the Canton of Vaud
Although the series is thirty plus years old it still remains relevant today with its exploration of global warming, pollution and more.
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.
I am going for a run and a walk three times a week at the moment. The run is set by the Garmin Coach and the walk is set by the route I have chosen to use on that specific day. By running the first part of my daily walk I increase my fitness, according to Strava, Sports Tracker and one or two other apps.
At the same time by running, rather than walking these routes I am saving time.
I go for walks, runs or bike rides every single day, whether it’s rainy, windy, snowy or a heatwave. As a result of this I often walk along routes where mud forms. Sometimes I come home from walks and my shoes are spotless, thanks either to a drought, or paradoxically due to the rain.
Recently we had snow and it was cold so my shoes were relatively clean. I could come home, stomp a few times and my shoes would be clean.
Switzerland is living under the illusion that the pandemic is over. If you look at the data on the RTS website and other sources of information such as Cotrack - Grafana then the pandemic is over. The number of new cases has gone done so if you look at the metrics then it is over.
There is a good chance that this is an illusion, demonstrated in three ways. The first of these is the number and saturation of hospitals now, with many of them overloaded and in a situation of crisis.
Yesterday we had a snowy day. I saw that the snow was beginning to pile up so I went and cleared the snow for fun. I could have left it as it was but I saw an opportunity to have some weight training, for free.
I regret that I didn’t set a fitness tracker to track the snow shovelling as weight training. It took a while and I got at least 2500 steps out of it, but as I wasn’t counting this as a workout the calories burned was counted differently.
Recently I have tried growing potatoes and onions. I had flower pots left over, dormant after basil plants died. I often try to keep Basil plants growing but they have a terrible tendency to die. The easiest plant for me to grow has been an orchid that I have had for as long as the apartment in which I live. All I did was give it water, and that was enough.
There are times when I listen to two or three hours of podcasts a day and I learn from them. I usually listen when I am cooking and when I am walking. For several weeks now I have hardly listened to any podcasts. This is for three reasons.
The first of these is that I spend two to four hours studying a day, so when I go for my walk I think I have listened to the point of saturation and now I’m ready for a change of ideas.