#LivingInLockdown
Day 17 – Wednesday 1st April
It’s April fools day and social media is full of posts wishing Corona Virus was one great April fool but unfortunately not. I have woken up with a mild hangover. Last night I drank a bottle of red wine. It wasn’t my intention to do so, but it was a friend’s birthday. I arranged a Zoom conference call for him and he did an Abba theme party. I spent the night singing Abba and Queen songs and the wine just went down a tad too easily, but it was great fun.
That means my brain is not up to new challenges today and we are going to revert to our usual hangover cure of eating our own body weight in junk food. I did manage to do my usual 36 flights of stairs, but there was no way the body was up for burpees today. As I dragged my body up the stairs I pondered a challenge sent me by one of my family. Apparently a group of Brits who were due to climb Mount Everest had their expedition cancelled due to the lockdown. They have each decided to climb the equivalent height of Everest using the stairs in their homes.
As someone who regularly hikes up mountains (hike not climb, so Everest will never be on my list of things to do) I could do this stair challenge for say the highest peak in Madrid. This would be Peñalara which is 7965ft high. However you don’t walk up it from sea level. Normally you start at Puerto de Cotos which is at about 6000ft altitude, so the hike has an elevation of 1965ft in total. The average flight of stairs is about 10ft so I would need to climb 196.5 flights of stairs.
Now I have climbed Peñalara many a time and don’t get me wrong it is a damn good work out, but not the hardest hike I’ve done. Having said that the idea of walking up 196 to 197 flights of stairs in one day leaves me cold. I currently do 36 flights a day and most people think I’m bonkers to do that. At this rate it will take me nearly a week to climb what I would normally do in a day. The stairs seem harder, though in fact they’re not. The mountain is definitely tougher as the terrain is uneven below your feet, whereas stairs are uniform. But the mountain wins because you are surrounded by fresh air and scenery that distracts you from the exercise. The only thing to distract me on the stairs is the fact they need a bloody good clean. Besides which I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be climbing the stairs at all as it is a shared area. To do 196 flights I’d have to go up and down the 9 floors 22 times. Someone is bound to notice and I don’t fancy a fine, so we’ll give it a miss.
I decided to tackle the task of getting a photo display onto my television via AppleTV. Theoretically I just need to put the photos into a shared folder in iPhoto and they will then be visible in the iPhoto app on the AppleTV box. I used to be pretty good with technology, but today it is stubbornly refusing to work. Nothing I do on my computer makes these photos appear on the TV. However every single photo on my iPhone is visible (I don’t want them ones). It is so frustrating! This is what happens when you drink too much, your brain turns to mush. I give up for the day.
Time to retreat back to bed and fall back on a good read. However as I promised to try out new things this week I was very good and didn’t resort to a slushy novel. At the start of this quarantine I signed up to the New Scientist magazine online. My Dad has this delivered and I usually nick his, obviously I wont be doing that for a while. So I forced my brain cells to concentrate on the latest discoveries in the scientific world. There was a lot of virus stuff, as you would expect, though nothing new. I spent much of the time rereading an article on quantum wave collapse that was seriously tough to take in. Quantum physics and red wine clearly do not mix. Roll on tomorrow!