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
1 comment:
That is obscene - US$219 million! The poor of Jakarta should hit the streets too.
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