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.