Today was a rich day … it started off by dropping Andreea off at the village center (after using her Romanian skills to purchase a few plumbing pieces at the hardware store) to get on a bus to Cluj where she will be spending the weekend teaching her first Doula course! With us was our neighbor with whom I continued to another neighboring village (~15km) to a local sunflower seed oil press where two sacks of about 65kg of seeds where transformed into ~27 liters of oil + two half filled sacks of the stuff that oozes out of the oil press which apparently is good feed for chickens.

Two things amazed me about the oil press (I didn’t have a camera with me, so we’ll probably get to visit there again in the future and next time I will have a camera). One is that it is a 4 stage process: (1) initial filtering of the seeds to separate them from large debris;  (2) pressing oil; (3) passing the oil through a centrifuge filter; (4) passing the oil through another mechanical filter. That’s quite a lot of work … we were there for almost two hours. Which brings me to the second thing that amazes me … the price … it costs 10 bani (~2.5 eurocents) per kg … which means that for two hours translates to ~6 lei (~1.5 euro dollars) – though the prices was higher because the oozy stuff that comes out of the press also has a price per kilo (though I don’t know how much). Two hours of supervised work by the family that owns the press & electricity (8 oils pressed worked simultaneously on the batch we brough with us). Crazy!!!

Weather sidenot: when we left the house in the morning it was -8.5 degress (celsius) – freakin’ cold and a heavy fog cover. There is a well known (to me anyways 🙂 verse in buddhism on what is real and what is unreal – that a cloud doesn’t really disappear or cease to exist – rather it changes form. It was fascinating to observer my emotions responding to the fog – a heavy uninviting feeling … and then to see that emotion change is we headed out of the village (on the way to the oil press) … once we gained a little altitude the sun broke through the fog … and as the fog lifted so did my emotions – spectactular! When we got back to our village there was still a heavy fog and I got heavier again … I really wanted to go out and do some work … but not possible in this kind of weather. When I got home (~11:30) it was -4.5 degrees outside. I went in, relit the fire and had some breakfast. By around 13:00 the fog lifted and the sun came through … it was almost 10 degrees … unbelievable change in under 2 hours. So with a delay it seems that mother nature did eventually answer my wish from yesterday 🙂

I quickly brought out the pieces of wood that needed finshing applied … and got them done. Then I went out to the humanure hacienda and closed it off some more (higher then it was before) in my ongoing effort to prevent the dogs from feasting on our feces. I think it worked … I dumped a couple of buckets and at the end of the day the pile was untouched (the hay cover was still in place rather then scratched aside).

By the time I finished that project the finishing had dried (the wonder of water-based finishes sitting in the sun) so I brought out the sander with a very fine grit sand paper and a polishing pad and finished the pieces. I then assembled the last unit and moved it indoors together with all the tools I would need to complete assembly inside … I did so just in time as the sun was setting and it was getting very cold. I collected the chickens and ducks, fed and watered them, locked up, fed the dogs and moved inside. The assembly didn’t go smoothly because there was a problem in the base unit itself (the assembly didn’t go great because it was a very deep cabinet (80 cm) … anyways I managed to get through it and will need to do some patching tomorrow to get it done properly.

Dinner is warm, as is the room I am in … so calling it another day 🙂