Moving

The company that controls my life to a greater extent than I'd like to admit to has blocked all blogspot address so I will be moving to drbrucepk.wordpress.com for the time being. We'll see what happens in the future.

Migrations

It’s late October and we are at the end of the dry season. Next month should bring the start of the rains – I hope so anyway. My family is due to return home tomorrow. My eldest daughter has asked them to stay in Bali for a few more days. She’s grown up in an Indonesian culture and before she moved back to our house in Bali to attend high school there, she had never slept alone and was very much the homebody. Now she’s living basically alone, and it hasn’t been the easiest thing for her, but she’s done a good job so far.

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails recently (generally I receive quite a few, but over the last few months, I’ve received even more than usual) from people wanting to move to Bali either to retire or start a business. A lot of the traffic comes from some articles that I wrote several years ago; the minority comes from my blog or the cyberbali.com website. I certainly don’t mind responding to most (I don’t respond to the ones that give a few questions with no other text, such as “how much does it cost to live in Bali,” or “How do I get a job in Bali”). Fairly rude as I see it. I do respond to the emails that start out with a hello, or a I really liked your article. I’m even more inclined to respond if they give some background information like, “I’ve vacationed in Bali six times in the last…years”

But besides the response issue, there’s this nagging question about why so many people want to move to Bali. I’ve forgotten the stats on the number of legal resident foreigners in Bali, but it was fairly significant for such a small island. (Then there’s a whole other world of illegal resident foreigners – the idiots who don’t bother to keep their visas current or abide by the national laws on immigration and residency.) Maybe I should be put up a poll on my website about immigrating to Bali.

Animals

How many animals can you have? We have ducks, chickens, geese, birds, goats, dogs. I turned down an offer of buying baby sea turtles yesterday because they’re protected. It was one of those decisions of whether you buy them to protect them or not buy them to discourage people from selling them. I went with the not buying them.

A few years ago when I spent a lot of time swimming in the ocean here, I came across one territorial sea turtle who seemed to always be in the exact place on the beach where I wanted to swim. I’m someone who has a thing about sharks (think 10 years of living in northern California where you regularly get Great Whites who like to take chunks out of surfers), and I would think the turtle was a shark. Eventually we got used to each other, and (s)he would let me get within a fairly close distance and then swim away. It was one of those beautiful things about living out here in the “jungle” that you rarely get elsewhere.

I’m not sure how I’m going to get used to not having animals around when I retire to the house in Bali next year. The house is relatively small (compared to this one) and we have no extra land like we do here, and our neighbors in Bali are of the Muslim variety that think that dogs are haram. Dogs here aren’t haram; dogs in Pakistan aren’t haram – check out President Musharraf and his dogs.

One lovely story from the vacation in Bali. One of our neighbors is an excellent fisherman. He was out getting his boat ready to go out the next day and he saw a fin moving up close. He took it to be a shark at first glance and was about to spear it. Then he realized that it was a baby dolphin. He took the little guy up and put it in his boat and dropped it off 500 meters from shore because most fisherman in Bali won’t kill a dolphin. Why? Some interesting stories of dolphins saving guys who have been washed off their boats and have been saved by dolphins dragging them to shore.

Another Ramadan and the Joys of Life in the Tropics

The month of fasting for Muslims is over; today is Lebaran. It’s a day of celebration and visiting neighbors and eating sweets and various Indonesian delicacies. Women will spend weeks baking for today – my wife does – so that by Lebaran they have plenty of goodies to offer neighbors who come visiting. This is also a day of asking for forgiveness for any wrongs done intentionally or unintentionally to neighbors, family and friends.

My family is in Bali for Lebaran; I came back last week to begin work again. I could have tried to get home (the Bali home) to be with the family, but I’m bogged down with work and also don’t want to compete for space on transport with the hordes of folks on the move across the country at this time of the year. So I’m at home doing school work and trying to get started on some repairs to the house.

I woke up this morning put on the baseball game between the Red Sox and the Indians, fed the animals here, and made my first real breakfast in a month. Our puppy who grew quickly while I was in Bali has an enormous appetite; our oldest dog eats rather sparingly as he’s a finicky eater – he’s used to being spoiled by my wife with different food everyday. He’s been eating chicken for three weeks now and is bored so only eats when he’s starved. I had a large cup of Bali coffee for the first time in a month, and now, four hours later, I’m still buzzed by my first caffeine fix in a month.

I love (generally) having houses on two different islands. I call both home, but ultimately the house in Bali will be “home” because that is where my wife is from and the place the children consider to be home. So, as I’ve said before, we’re planning on selling or renting this house in Sumbawa. But, just as we are getting ready for that process – we were hit by an intense earthquake about ten days ago. The epicenter was apparently only about forty miles north of here, and the house suffered a few large cracks in a few walls which we are repairing – structurally the house is sound, but from reports from friends here the house swayed and thus we had some damage to the front end of the house. My gardener and I found the cracks in the wall and began repairing them, but we didn’t think about the roofing tiles.

Last night we had the first big rain which hopefully signaled the end of the dry season. The problem is that some of the roofing tiles in the front of the house shifted position and during the rain the roof in the front bedroom let in a torrent of water. Fortunately it missed the bed, but did get the electrical equipment that I had spread out on the floor where I charge batteries for my various cameras. The power shorted out when the voltage regulator made contact with water (fixed that), the long parangs that I keep under the bed in case of an intruder (different from story from a few years ago) were soaked (dried them out so that the won’t rust), and some clothes that I had laying on the floor (my bachelor routine) soaked up a lot of water (they’re out on the line in the backyard drying).

This morning I continued to work on fixing the door handle and lock that my gardener and I had to destroy when I arrived back from Bali. Why? My wife forgot to bring the keys for the bedroom to the airport when I left Bali for Sumbawa (she’s the Keeper of the Keys – I don’t take responsibility for that one) so I had to break the door down to get in when I made it back home. I’ve been working on repairing the door for a week and am just about finished.

So the lesson about this? Don’t complain about little things – I could have no houses (as I did once during my youth when I was one of the student poor) - ; keep your tools around where you can get at them (my drill is in Bali); work slowly and don’t give in to the guy response of force it; make sure that your wife and you are on the same page; make several sets of keys; get hi-tech and have retina identification installed in your house.

Leaving Bali and something from the News

This is my last day of being home in Bali; tomorrow I’ll be heading back to Sumbawa for another ten weeks. The two weeks were good. It was nice to have all of us together. Generally we almost never eat together, but because of Ramadan and with all of us fasting, we’ve been having two meals a day together which has been great, even if most of us are asleep for breakfast.

It’s evening, everyone has opened the fast, and the children are running up and down the streets yelling and screaming and tormenting each other as small children do. Dozens of small boats are out fishing, their lamps lighting up the horizon.

I was able to finish a lot of my work on the third floor – replaced everything that was rusted and fixed a few broken appliances. I even did a little work on the second floor – changed the door handles on one of the bedrooms and put a clothes hanger in the second floor bathroom. I finished all my lesson plans for the next term and loaded them on the school website. I had a few emails from old students from Pakistan and Sumbawa that I answered along with a few personal ones. I put up a facebook site (which I won’t be able to update until I get back to Bali in December as social networking sites are blocked at our school. I took a look at my eldest daughter’s school textbooks and found them challenging enough. I spent a lot of private time with her talking about how life can be expensive and the need for budgeting money. The other kids spent all of their time with their friends as they see me everyday in Sumbawa.

I was able to see my old friend a number of times, but didn’t get to visit other folks because fasting puts a lot of stress on my body when I’m in Bali. I’ll do that in December. I had a lot of time to check out what other international teachers are doing with their students in terms of technology. I was also able to do some emailing and petition signing about the military crackdown in Burma.

And then there were the things that I didn’t get around to that I wanted to – stripping the paint off the third floor windows, fixing the kids’ bathroom on the first floor, sending more personal emails, getting my daughter a different IP, taking more personal photos, and doing some podcasts from Bali. That’s what retirement is for I guess. After an intense ten weeks, I spend a week just keying down and then get around to doing some work.

Tomorrow is a day of moving again – moving from one reality to another. I’m ready to just work on one reality and maybe that is what retirement is.

A few clips from the news:

People who are conscientious and prone to "doing the right thing" are less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as they age

The Jakarta administration has allocated about US$219 million for the installment ceremony and other facilities for the governor-elect and the deputy governor

Technology Stuff

Some cool tech stuff today that I’ve started using.

1.SnapNDrag for Mac OS - lets you create an easy screen capture and just drag it to your desktop or wherever you want to put it.

2. Open Source Mac – a website not an app, but you can get some cool (like SnapNDrag above) and free apps for your Mac here.

3. iGoogle – I’ve just discovered the iGoogle homepage and all the things that you can do with it. I customized mine in about 15 minutes with half a dozen technology feeds (both Mac and Windows), a variety of baseball feeds, a half dozen different news feeds, This Day in History, clocks showing times around the world, bookmarks, Einstein quotes, a google map, and a number of other cool things. My iGoogle page is one of the first things that I bring up when I go on line now. How will my students respond to it? I’m not sure, but I’m gong to find out when we get back to class.

4. MyYahoo – same thing as above except that I like the layout more. Google does have a few more gadgets to add to your page than Yahoo does. I keep both open when surfing.

5. Bluetooth – Bluetooth came with my iMac but as I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices, I’ve never used it. My eldest daughter has a nifty little handphone that is Bluetooth enabled and we tried it out the other day. Cool. We quickly sent loads of photos and music back and forth. It was impressive. It almost makes me want to buy a new handphone.

6. A little Bluetooth device that plugs into your USB port that I found today at a local computer store. For 75,000 rupiah (about 8 dollars US), I just plugged it in, installed the software and had it up and running on my daughter’s laptop. Now she can easily transfer the photos that I send her to her handphone to show her friends.

7. Facebook. An old buddy is using Facebook to do a little log on where he is on his round the world trip following his retirement. I signed up and found two of my nieces on there. It’s fun and useful as well. I found all sorts of folks talking about Burma and was able to sign a lot of online petitions. This is one of the ways that folks can use the internet to support freedom fighters around the world.

8. RSS – I’m starting to get used to using RSS now to get feeds of things that I want to keep up with, and I think that I have gotten the hang of writing my own RSS code to update my cyberbali.com site.

With less than a week before I head back to Sumbawa for another 10 weeks, I’m regretting that I won’t be taking my iMac back with me. It’s just easier to leave it here so that I have a computer to use when I’m back for December break. I’ll just have to get used to using my Windows machine at home I guess.