Right. Back in Bali once again after the usual long trip except this time it was made longer and more difficult by the fact that all of us except our youngest, Meredith, were fasting. The trip was actually on the fast side as it took us 15 ½ hours to make it door to door from Sumbawa to Bali. My failing eyesight in my right eye makes driving at night a problem, but we made it through the usual mad traffic in Bali safely.
Mercedes was glad (to say the least) to see all of us – Rebecca even hugged Mercedes when we arrived which, considering how the two continually fight when they are together, was a nice touch. My friends, Robert and Putu, showed up to welcome us and Robert gave me a nice bottle of scotch as a welcome home present.
No one got to sleep before 12 and everyone was up at 3 to eat before another day of fasting. Su woke up at six to go to the market which left me alone for most of the day. I spent that time unpacking all the stuff that I brought with me as part of this phase for the big move next June when I quit working.
I began setting up my file cabinet to make it functional again after four plus years of serving as a storage device for miscellaneous junk. Then I spent hours on the computer setting up bookmarks on my iMac which I brought with me and which will stay here – I’ll use my windows machine in Sumbawa for the remainder of my time there.
Mercedes came up and spent a few hours just chatting about her life and helping me unpack – as well as helping herself to some of my office supplies. It was good to spend some time with her after the 10 weeks apart.
I brought a load of work with me which I’ll get to in a few days; right now I’m doing my retirement stuff which gives me a feeling that I’ll get there eventually. I have to write a report for the Board on primary computer use.
I uploaded the first of my attempts at doing digital 3d art with Bryce. I’ve introduced this to my students in 3rd – 8th grade and they love it. But I want to get a little beyond just having them make nice landscapes. I printed out the manual, and I’m going to work on developing my skills with this program. I’m also going to clean up the podcast page on cyberbali and do a few podcasts from here. The kids enjoy doing the podcasts, and they’re great to use with the students because they develop skills in a variety of areas: they had to write out scripts to use (no stream of consciousness stuff), sort through a mass of sound tracks to use as background music (this was optional – the younger guys had some trouble with that so we skipped it for them), then they had to record their program and edit it so that it sounds smooth when we broadcast it on Friday mornings before assemblies. If I was going to be around for a few more years, I’d do a lot more work with the podcasting, but as it is, we’ll do some basics for now.
Unfortunatley, the company that owns the school has blocked us uploading any multimedia files so we can’t put the podcasts online anymore. I’m going to do that from here if I can find all the work that the kids did.
I received some new photos of my cute granddaughter today which the family loves seeing. I have to print them out for all the kids to put in their rooms.
We opened the fast this evening with all of the family having dinner together which is something that we rarely do – generally everyone eats when they’re hungry so it was really enjoyable to have dinner together.
And that ends the first day back home.
(The photo is one of the papaya trees that I cut down last week. I couldn’t upload the photo to the blog because of the new restrictions on uploading graphics)
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