Cav's Place

I had also signed up to plant trees with this other NGO on November 30, but I had done so tentatively, just because the deadline was Wednesday, meaning to say that I won’t be able to confirm until Monday if they’ll call me before yesterday’s event, since I wanted to see whether I’ll think that I’ll be able to go through something like this again so soon. But they made the decision for me, since they did call, Friday morning, when I had taken the unusual step of switching the phone to silent, wanting to at least sleep then, knowing that the next morning I’ll need to get up at a time when I’d normally get in bed. So I didn’t answer and they didn’t even try again later, only sending an e-mail in the afternoon to say that they had to limit the number of volunteers for that event to 150, even though before the deadline they had been asking for 200, and they already had 150 who confirmed, so I won’t be able to participate, since I didn’t.
At least that meant that I could focus completely on yesterday’s event, since it was going to be the last one for me this year, so I managed to have dinner much earlier than I normally do, shaved even though my shaving brush’s bristles finally came completely off the handle, so I’ll need to glue it once again before using it again, then got ready for the morning, actually got in bed at 2:15 AM and even fell asleep rather quickly… But I got up to pee at 3:40 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep after that, ending up checking the time at 5:15 AM and getting up at that point, even though the alarm was set to ring at 5:30 AM. So, seeing as I didn’t need to pee again until just before leaving, it might have been better to wait until 3:30 AM or so, go once more and then get to bed and have a chance to sleep an hour and a half or so instead of only around one hour. But that wasn’t certain, and just lying in bed and resting probably helped as well. Either way, I did the day’s squats right after getting up, then had breakfast and left at 6:50 AM, taking some trash, which I threw in a bin.
The backpack made it hard to jog, mostly because I had taken the book which I had started reading on Monday, so I only did so a few times, briefly and lightly, but I reached Dristor in 15 minutes and the metro came a couple of minutes later, so I had time to use the toilet from that park after reaching Opera Square and still get to the parking lot a little after 7:25 AM. Then I received that bracelet from the coordinator after saying my name and got on the bus, obviously keeping my mask on until we reached our destination, taking it off just before getting off the bus, even though I didn’t notice anyone else wearing one, though later I saw one guy who wore one even while planting. Interestingly, I ended up sitting right behind that same guy who was my teammate four years ago and whom I had ended up sitting in front of three years ago and across from this spring, but I didn’t say anything after I noticed it, and was relieved when nobody sat next to me, so I put on the headphones, turned on the radio and started reading, managing to do so without getting carsick until I didn’t think that I had enough time for one more chapter. And at that point we were also far enough from Bucharest for the radio frequencies to change, so I just looked out the window until we got there, right at 9 AM, after having left at 7:40 AM.
Before moving on, I’ll also mention that the bus was half full, my quick count getting to 30 people, though I could be a little off, and I’m pretty sure that it had 60 seats. And it was cold, others kept complaining, I saw two girls who had taken a blanket and wrapped themselves in it, and at one point someone went to talk to the driver about it and came back saying that it was 9°C inside and the driver was just as unhappy with the situation, or even more so, since the windows were fogging over, but there was nothing he could do about it. He also offered an explanation, but that woman had walked past me by the time she repeated it and I couldn’t understand what it was. And at least the complaints about the cold eventually put an end to the infuriating conversation about Ukraine taking place behind me, where one woman kept spewing forth Russian propaganda, justifying the war.
This time around, the buses parked close to the site, and while getting there was far less of a problem for the small one, the driver of large one that I was on had to show his skill in order to somehow squeeze through a narrow street, the bus getting scraped by branches and, at least as far as I could tell, somehow just managing to avoid scraping the parked cars. So we only had to make a short walk before being able to get breakfast, and I got a sandwich and a tea, and after I was done I also grabbed a bottle of water and put it in the backpack. However, nothing sweet was offered, and the only equipment that was provided were the gloves, and there were problems even with those, since they decided to have someone grab a pile and walk through the volunteers in order to hand them out, which resulted in many ending up with two gloves for the same hand. But the guy who knows what he’s doing realized it pretty quickly and started checking, fixing the problem even before I checked mine, so I only learned that I had also received two gloves for the same hand when he told me, and then I once again wore them over those latex ones, for a small amount of additional protection.
As usual in that location, and in fact as it tends to happen for most planting events organized by this NGO, it was cold, the sensation being made even worse by the fog and the overcast sky. So the speeches, which started a little before 9:30 AM, were rushed, and at 9:45 AM we started working, the planting location also being right next to that starting area, if I may use the term. My teammate ended up being a woman who was asking which would those teams be when we were told to take one spade per team of two or three, since I found myself saying that the teams are those we form as I passed by her on my way to the spades… And then I was rather surprised to hear her say that, since I took the spade, she’ll take the bucket for our team, having apparently taken my comment as an invitation to team up. Without knowing for sure how the ground was, that was somewhat concerning, since it meant that I was going to be the digger, but we had been told that the ground was soft and had also been prepared to some extent, and accepting the situation as it was meant that I didn’t have to look for a teammate on my own, so I just went with it and she followed me, even the introductions only coming after we had actually started working, after taking a moment to decide where to start from.

This is embarrassing, but this is how far I got before midnight… And even more embarrassing is the fact that I ended up deciding to end the post here after all, even though that means leaving pretty much the entire day for another one. The initial plan was obviously to edit this one in order to add the rest at a later point, but when that wasn’t happening, I just made a couple of additions in what’s above Wednesday afternoon and then reached this decision.