Saturday, August 28, 2004

The Last Baseball Game

Sometimes life in the tropics is very similar to life in the US. You have barbeques with friends, go to birthdays, have Friday drinks, and watch little league baseball on Saturday. Today is the last day of the season form my Giants who are without a win. Have to run.

Friday, August 27, 2004

A new skin

I'm testing a new skin here to see how it works. I think that I have to play with the dimensions of the photographs first and then go from there

Blogs, Houses and Time

So this is the second post on my blog. I spent some time yesterday checking out different blogs that I should have spent doing work, but I can't work all the time.

I went to check out the house yesterday and found out that they, indeed, had installed a toilet in the kid's bathroom. Just that the toilet is primarly plastic and will last about two minutes with my four rambunctious kids. The ruang tamu (literally guest room) where guests are entertained when they visit has a large crack in the north wall and we haven't even moved into the house yet. The roof, on the other hand, is almost done, and if anyone showed up who felt like working for more than 10 minutes at a time, they could finish the roof in a few hours. So we are plodding along at a snail's pace still, and each day that passes just increases the tension between my wife and me about "the house," as we usually refer to it.

This is, in part, one of those cross-cultural things that no matter how long I live here, I will never transcend - I have a Western sense of time and work, my wife has an Indonesian sense. There is just something about a work crew going as slow as possible that grates against me - probably all those years that I worked in a factory in Chicago before I became a teacher and anthropologist.

I have to get ready for class.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Welcome to Life in the Tropics

Hi. I've been reading blogs for the past few days from my old city of Chicago and thought that I would see what it was like to write a blog. I have several websites where I can post anything that I want, but this is something new and as I make my living teaching computer applications, I'm up for a test. More later.