NHH Gardening

In our strong desire to get away from the office, a bunch of us signed up with our internal volunteer program to do some work at the Mirrabooka Retirement Village. As to be expected, lots of people signed up, but something like half of those people actually turned up on the day. We were divided into two groups: one group is supposed to plant some trees, while the others are to take out all the weeds on the retaining wall. They forgot to tell us that the whole retaining wall stretches one whole block, and that the weeds have been running wild for years.

Doing the weeding at home is more like a leisure activity for me, but here it's manual labour. At home, I search for weeds among the grass. Here, there's no need to be selective; just pull out anything growing on the retaining wall. By lunchtime, my arms, hands and fingers are all sore. We had a really nice barbecue meal with the residents. All of them are quite old, but very healthy. Many of them are more than 85 years old. Most of the time they play bingo or the pokies, do shopping and watch movies. There would be shuttle buses that transport them from place to place.

After lunch, it's mostly clean-up work. Got rid of the remaining weeds. Spread some mulch around. Set up a temporary temp for next week's party. A great way to spend the Friday.