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Nice big clouds of the Jura earlier today. The expected rain has now started and I can hear some, but not much thunder. We will see how fun it gets this evening.

According to Strava this was my 140th hike this year and my 83rd week of tracked activity. I don’t know why it’s only 83 weeks. My habit is older than that. When I set off, it was nice weather and warm. I didn’t set off with much because I expected the walk to be short. It was eight kilometres long. Part of the reason for this is that I did the usual detour by the Huguenot route before walking towards the Jura.

We are over a year into the pandemic that I wrote about for the first one hundred days, and stopped writing about because I thought that the Swiss Government was getting close to eradicating the disease, or at least getting it down to 0 new cases per day. Do you remember June 2020, when we actually thought the pandemic could be over by August? Unfortunately we’re no in April of 2021 and the pandemic is nowhere near over.

Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions. The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people.

During this Pandemic, I have decided to study Web Development and I am slowly making my way through one or two Linkedin Learning Pathways. In the process, I have learned about CSS, PHP, JavaScript ECMAScript2016, Frameworks and more. The course I have studied are: Angular Essential Training / React.js Essential Training / Git Essential Training / Learning ECMAScript 6 /Node.js Essential Training / Javascript Essential Training / RubyonRails Essential Training / CSS Essential Training / Ruby Essential Training : 1 The Basics / Installing and Running Ruby On Rails 5: Mac / Programming Foundations: Web Security /PHP with MySQL / Essential Training 1 and 2 /PHP Essential Training / Programming Foundations: Databases / Responsive Layout / HTML Essential Training / Introduction to CSS and CSS Essential Training.

Sometimes you drive home on the scooter and you look up at the sky and you think “When I get out of this village I’m going to stop by the side of the road and I’m going to take a picture of the clouds because they’re photogenic. The reason for them being photogenic today is that they were rippled like the sea, rather than fluffy. Those ripples make you think of the sand underwater by the beach.

Self-Sacrifice and Pandemics are intimate friends. In order for a pandemic to end we must learn to do without things that we need. We go without meeting friends for months, we go without hugs or handshakes for months. We go without restaurants, bars, cafés or cinemas for months. We go without needing the internal combustion for days at a time. Human Contact I mention all of these things looking at the past 76 days.

For several days I have not been looking as seriously at the COVID-19 case graphs for Switzerland because we the storm waves of new cases that we were getting before are now no more than ripples on a pond. The situation seems to be under control in Switzerland. A graph of the daily new cases - we see a consistent degradation of the wave. As we look at the graph above we see that for at least a month the number of new cases was high every day but that by the fifteenth of April the number of cases decreased week, by week, until the number of new cases per day seems imperceptible at the scale of the graph above.

I want to write about British anger at the wrong day today. As Switzerland gets closer and closer to zero cases and zero deaths per day it’s dangerously easy to think it will be over soon only to find out that it isn’t. I thought that by April 19th we could be back to normal but we weren’t. I thought that when the soft lock down was lifted we’d be able to do group activities.

Two nights ago we did an Ingress Mission Despite Lockdown. This was a Franco-Swiss Mission to create a field over Geneva. Normally with Ingress missions people would drive tens, or even hundreds of kilometres to capture and link portals but this time was different. We all stayed in our little corners and we did whatever we could, however, small the task. We stayed on our respective sides of the borders. In my case I just had to Jarvis a portal one village away.