Two Stars in One Day! - June 30th, 2016

Thursday, June 30^th, 2016

Mission Type : Solosan DSTO

Location : IDS#5 KNT, lapangan kuntum, CIFOR. (6^o33’24.79” S 106^o45’10.64” E)

Trash Recovered : 18,85 kg + 21,15 kg + 21,4 kg + 19,05 kg + 14,5 kg + 19,75 kg + 19,4 kg + 19,8 kg + 21,15 kg + 19,7 kg = 194,25 kg

Personal Report:

I really feel awesome today. Though I still hate myself and feel like I haven’t accomplished enough to be worthy of the gift of faith and understanding I asked for recently. I’d have to give way more effort than that of today, pfft 200 kg, who cares?  I mean, yeah today was the most tiring day ever. Or was it? Well, I don’t know for sure, because we can’t measure pain and compare it with previous missions but I can assure myself that even worse missions are to be expected, and in those ones, there will be no room for tusk repairing, equipment restocking, and transport assisting. I am going to buy myself my very own motorcycle so that I wouldn’t have to depend on anyone but myself to start killing some IDSs. By the time I own a vehicle, I would be able to unleash the full capacity of a sanitizer soldier in the IDS without having to worry about delivering the trash to the TPS.

I met some people today, they gave some typical disgust against the trash expressions, and I just listened, because I knew they were being recorded by my camera behind the bushes. The shot of the IDS during the cleanup is quite satisfying and it made a good time lapse video of the whole process.

I will start to use the term whole-scoop for the type of DSTO I conduct at IDS#5, because I often times just grab a bunch of plastic and shove them down the TBH, regardless of what other components that could have been trapped between them. There’s just no time to separate every grain of sand, every individual of maggots, and leeches from say, the diaper pile. Some organics just have to come along. I dislike this and I should really look forward to campaigning the idea that it should be restricted to mix types of trash. It is freaking heavy to lift at a personal scale, and at a macros scale takes up landfill space that could have been used for the more rightful un-organics.

This missions transport took almost just as long as the process of scooping itself. I walked 4 km in total dumping the first two, realized walking took too much time and was boring, So, I used my bike instead and travelled another total of 4 km dumping the 3^rd and the 4^th bags, but I ditched the bike and ended up using Mr. Wowo’s wagon because it took too much effort trying to balance one freaking heavy 20 kg trash bag on a thin bike handle while busting your groin every upslope. I managed to transport the rest of 6 bags to the TPS despite of all the struggling I went through during that last trip. I literally had to pull 120 kg along the 1 km road of CIFOR. Well, at least it was only one trip so I saved like 4 km of going another back and forth of either walking or biking, which I already ran out of energy for both.

I don’t want to sound overly dramatic in this post, but I would like the drama to get across. Point is, I ended up feeling very proud of myself because this is the first operation above the hundreds that I transported all alone with my own power. Oh the pride, I’m sipping it like wine.

Technical Report:

Everything went fine, except for one ARP tusk, which broke and I later replaced with an exact copy. The tripod worked satisfyingly well, the angle was so good I decided to leave the bottom section stuck to the ground and only took home the camera holder part of it. 

Back on Track - June 22nd, 2016

Wednesday, June 22^nd, 2016

Mission Type : Solosan DSTO

Location : IDS#5 KNT, lapangan kuntum, CIFOR. (6^o33’24.79” S 106^o45’10.64” E)

Trash Recovered : 21,35 kg + 21,5 kg + 21,55 kg + 18,9 kg + 12,6 kg + 22,2 kg + 19,4 kg + 21,2 kg = 158,4 kg (very high impurity)

Personal Report:

I feel good and pretty much in a quite stable state of mental health, maybe. But regardless of my condition, my missed my schedule by an hour or so because I let myself fall asleep in the morning. Even so, I managed to fill up 4 trash bags before 12 o’clock. I didn’t expect to have so many spare time to sanitize. I set my schedule to sanitize until 3 o’clock. I gathered 8 bags of trash and two of them I transferred the conventional way with my bike and the rest I decided to load onto a wagon that I borrowed after dumping the first two with time efficiency in mind. Dude I really don’t feel like there is anything special on this particular mission day.

Technical Report:

The lever of my first ARP03 broke, replaced it with the lever of the other spare ARP because the spare ARP’s main body strength hasn’t been put to the test yet, I don’t want to go back twice. I loaded 6 trash bags onto the wagon, it was very damn heavy. Luckily, I met Noor and she was on her motorcycle so she helped me reach the LDS/TPS. This is by far the greatest solosan mission I have been through in terms of total weight. There’s really much to tell, but nothing special about this strike. 

going bak and forth - June 15th, 2016

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Mission Type : Solosan DSTO

Location : IDS#4 KNT, lapangan kuntum, CIFOR. (6^o33’24.72’’ S, 106^o45’06.26’’ E)

Trash Recovered : 8,95 kg + 14,9 kg = 23,85 kg (high impurity)

Personal Report:

                

I clearly had messed up my sleep schedule by now. I woke up only one hour before the planned mission launch time and ended up starting it an hour late. Because of the unpreparedness, I didn’t get to record the mission the way I wanted to the other day using wooden tripods that I was supposed to assemble in the morning. Anyway, this is a personal not a technical report so I’ll get into depth of the technical later but the thing is I felt kinda sadly exhausted to bike to and from the IDS. I broke the ARP02 that I just modified earlier prior to the launch, and totally wrecked the ARP03^c that was the only one of its kind in the arsenal. Patience is really being tested today, but I also took a mental note that if this is the worst that could happen, that would be good, right? Well, yes because the fact is the likelihood for such an event to re-occur is pretty high and by far has been quite a common event. So, I thought that I should try and reinvent some gadgets and put in a little more tweeks in my crafts.

Another part of the personal report to be noted is that I trembled like an old lady. Was it because of my hunger? Malnutrition? Or what? I felt like I didn’t have full control of my body. Probably because my sleep schedule is messed up so… what? I don’t know the connection but something is clearly not right with my body. I can clearly identify my knee and calf pain from the previous day’s epic trash bag relay. I really should be enhancing my stances and train my butt like doing squats like 100 a day. It might also be a good idea to start ARP throwing again to train my sanitizer reflexes.

Technical Report:

Boring as it’s supposed to be, I broke the one and only ARP02 and broke the ARP03^C and that felt heart breaking and at the same time just pissing me off. The ARP02 was broken at a connection joint of the guard rail stick. The axel stick was fine as it always has been, but sadly the carving of the name “Nurmalita” was on the guard rail stick. Well, I could carve that out o’ anything though. The 02’s damage happened when I did a spaghetti roll on a pile of trash that was way too strongly planted to the ground in a quite berserk mood. I didn’t hold it firmly and it then, snapped. At that time, I only had that in my inventory so that meant I had to ride home and grab an ARP03^C. Oh, I mean the ARP03^C, because that was the last thing I had that still kinda worked.

So I rode back home and switched gear. If that broke, I wouldn’t have any more ARPs to go around with. And it did. It broke at all four tusks and horns. I don’t know but I probably should have remembered exactly which ARP should I use hard and use gently. I misused this one and totally torn it apart. Well, not total though, because the lever and the main body is still firmly intact so the mechanism is still technically running. It’s just as if a cat lost its claws but still having its strong limbs intact. The repairing is simple, its nothing like broken bones, it’s just like losing a fingernail. But the fact it happened early on the field was pretty much a disappointing fail.

Despite having spared about 2 hours before maghrib, I have already managed to obtain two trash bags. The impurity is of course high, since the kuntum IDS’s are the potential mines of baby poop were that ever to be a sellable mineral, a.k.a. “diaper-land”. I later searched up some stats on google and found out a statement telling that baby diapers represent 30% of non-biodegradable waste. Damn it, no wonder its everywhere. Since it is dubbed “un-biodegradable” it shouldn’t be listed as impure, right? Well… In sanitizer standards, we wanna keep it real too. That thing in the diaper’s gel, is poop, and that’s organic. But for sanitizers to take note, it should not be frowned upon to collect diapers without removing the orgs, because we simply can’t, and the fact of it being there causes more problems that having the poop all aboard the garbage truck on its way to the landfill. So, impurities by diaper can and should be forgiven, but don’t be lazy to separate what you can while you can.

get a hold of yourself! - April 25th, 2016

Solosan,

250416, Monday. Muddy DSTO. Equiped w/: ARP02^B, ARP03, Trashbag Holder.

IDS#4 KNT. (6^o33’24.72” S, 106^o45’06.26” E)

17,75 kg + 14,5 kg = 32,25 kg.

Personal Report:

So, I realized a new way of seeing sanitizing. I should think less of it being my own activity and start to accept that I am not worth giving credit in the healing of the ecosystem. When I sanitize I am no longer me and I no longer have any right to represent any organization or person like ASF or me, this is a duty from nature. And the so called sanitizer spirit is not a property of mine, but instead a property of nature. It is a spirit that possesses any one’s body that commits to do kindness, in this case healing the ecosystem. But leaves when the person is doing otherwise. For example, I become “the sanitizer” during missions, but I am myself when I am dealing with personal affairs and none of me is officially titled “the sanitizer.”  Hanna was right back in the days, she stated that she was not a sanitizer instead she said she was a human being. And I understand that today, we as filthy human beings with all our sins don’t deserve a fixed title such as “the sanitizer.” The sanitizer can be inside anyone that commits kindness, it is a spirit that endorses constancy in the act, and brings joy and satisfaction including the feeling of fulfilment to the person whom it enters the body of. It is not a living being, instead it is a form of positive energy in nature that can technically enter any one’s body. I should let go of my ego on being “the best sanitizer in the world” for the spirit of sanitizing belongs not to me but to nature, as a tool to fix itself when it is in need of curing. If I were to die or simply stop doing what I do, there will be someone else to fill in my spot because “the sanitizer” never dies.

Technical Report:

Crap, the caterpillars are back. But way before that I met monkeys hanging above the IDS on the branches, their gestures were not friendly at all. I was startled but got myself together and started sanitizing without looking up. Not long after that, they left into the arboreal jungle above me. Whew... I sanitized for quite long until I realized some caterpillars were descending with their webs. Damn, it can’t be another cocooning season right? I mean, the last time I came here last year it was cocooning season. Last year the forest was crowded with hanging caterpillars and one actually landed on my jacket. I don’t want that to happen again this year. So based on that thought I rushed to tidy up my stuff and brought all my equipment and two trash bags to the field where it was hot and bright enough for caterpillars to be visible. Fortunately, this time, there were none of them crawling all over my stuff. I escaped the forest just in time that I avoided the descending of even more caterpillars. My conclusion for this report does not give any real solution. The fact that I am scared of creepy crawlies is inevitable, also the fact that I am allergic to them and the fact that even to normal people, caterpillars of that kind cause itchiness. The only way to clean the IDSs is either to take risks of getting sick or waiting a few weeks for them to turn into butterflies. But I choose to not wait. I am looking forward to making sanitizing more practical so we can escape the sani-zone quickly and tidily. Also, I intend to develop suits to keep us comfy in the sani-zone. My current thought is to make an insect proof suit to avoid getting itchy or having bugs enter your underpants. It might also help if I made longer equipment that can reach deep into the forest while the user stands in the clear where he is safe from the critters inside. 

getting out of a hiatus - April 17th, 2016

Sunday, April 17^th 2016

Mission Type : Unassisted Solosan

Path Orientation : Road-Sweep, radial vicinity from TPS.

Personal Report:

Since I haven’t been sanitizing for a while, getting back into it feels new and kinda strange. The sanitizing skills didn’t just kick in the very moment I extracted my ARP from my back-strap. The activity felt pointless at first, I guess because the extremity of the situation that I expected was too high. Probably because I reviewed too much time lapse videos of sanitizing and really expected sanitizing to be that fast. Simply put, I forgot how to enjoy being in the sanitizing zone for a long time.

Conclusions :

I have to constantly question myself about my purpose and intentions in sanitizing. I have to remember some motivational punchlines, such as, “trash is on its way to destroy life, I am correcting Its course.” Even though really, the trash I sanitize will pretty much end in the Landfill if not burnt by the local TPS managers to reduce volume. So this gives me another question, is sanitizing actually correcting trash’s course, or making things worse? Well, we are still far from the time where the pollution of plastic trash is significant enough to cause detectable harm, but starting the solution today, might help ease fixes in the future. You are doing the right thing, keep at it.

Technical Report:

Turns out that the way trash is scattered doesn’t match with most models I make for demonstrating the utility of the ARP02 during road-sweeps. I find these small trash concentrations smaller than average IDSs and I call them mini-IDSs. As we know it the ARP02 can efficiently pick up plastic pieces scattered at an average of 5 cm apart from one another along a certain path or area. Any denser than that, we might need a ARP with a large jaw capable for chomping loads of trash each bite. Otherwise you would have to swing your arm back and forth exhaustingly picking up the trash one by one, when will you ever advance? We have the ARP03 of course, but these mini-IDSs are small, and carrying a giant chomping machine along the way only to clean up a small concentration of trash that you are not so likely to encounter during a road-sweep is just not worth it. Let’s put it this way, ARP03s are only made for planned DSTOs where we are certain about the probable density of trash in a region that we already know has a serious IDS in it. We can’t bring an ARP03 as a secondary equipment, It’s too heavy.

Conclusions:

A single handed ARP03 practical enough to be used as a secondary. I also think that adding mods to the Battle-ARP02 can be a solution.