Time Passes Too Fast in Paradise

It’s Sunday already, and time has eaten up 15 vacation days. I’m just hanging around working on my new ebook, doing some reading, and checking up on the kids. Right now, I have this feeling of incredible laziness – not wanting to do anything in particular which I notice happens sometimes when I spend too much time writing and not enough getting out and around. And distractedness. It is so easy to get distracted here – I start one thing, someone comes and wants something, and I end up forgetting about what I had originally started.

I reviewed two international schools today and sent out a few emails. I upgraded some software on both Macs. I started a few letters and spent a lot of time keeping on eye on the new kittens that still look like oversized baby rats. I need to start working on my new lesson plans for next term, but I’m waiting until next week when I’ll start feeling more urgency to getting it done.

My two eldest daughters took off yesterday to go down to Denpasar to visit family there and for “refreshing” as my oldest daughter calls it. In the meantime, I’m spending time outside on the balcony writing on the MacBook. I love having the ocean breeze to cool me while I sit here writing rather than the fan when I’m inside working on the iMac.

A few folks bought my Retiring in Bali eBook today, and it’s always nice to have a sale or two while I sit here writing another book. , as well as working on some updates for the Bali book.

The photo today is the balcony where I’ve started doing most of my writing. I can gaze at the sea when I’m at a loss for words, although the afternoon sun can get a little intense. Kind of like being an old hippie sitting out here writing, having a few beers, and listening to the Greatful Dead. Plus, I’ve figured out that my cable will reach through the window so I can get internet access out here, and connect to a power cable as well when I need one. Time for retirement again, I think. This setup is better than it was before.

I stopped by the local mini-market to buy some beer and hotdogs, and there was an expat there that I think that I know, but I couldn’t quite make out where I knew him from so I didn’t say anything – I hate the memory loss that seems to be accompanying my advancing age. So far it seems selective though; my long-term memory is fine, I just can’t seem to remember who people are. This could be a problem when I forget my wife and kids.

I bought a new battery today for my handphone, as cell phones are called here in Indonesia. After 5 ½ years, the battery kept dying on me at very inconvenient times like when my wife is trying to figure out where I am. Hmm, makes it seem like I’m trying to hide, or that I am up to something fishy.

I’ll get around to the ghost thing in a day or two when I get most of it sussed out.

Time to Go Home

Time to Go Home

Three weeks in Sumbawa, and almost a month away from home. I’m more than ready to get back to Bali. It’s been different living and working here this time. I live in the cell, and I work in a school that I’m just getting comfortable with. It’s been an adjustment, but I’ve started looking at this entire experience like a long traveling trip.
I’ve made up little routines that get me through each day, as travelers often do. Rise, shower, and drop off my computers in my classroom and then off to the mess for breakfast. Once that’s finished, I go back to school and take care of business on the internet. My students arrive , and I spend the day teaching. Every day at 4, I leave school and have dinner at the mess. Then back to school to get my computers and back to the cell where I work or write for the rest of the evening until 10 when I turn in for the night. Each day is pretty much the same, variations occur only with the classes that I have to teach each day.

There are always lessons; as much as I dislike the mantra life-long learning that IB people chant like the religiously impaired, I still am learning. So the lesson from this trip?

This is the last journey as a teacher. Like the aging baseball player who comes back for one more year when the arm is gone or the bat has lost its magic, I’ve realized that I like the life of retirement more than I like the life of teaching. I have a great class and I’m enjoying being with them, but it’s time to get out and do something else with the time that I have left to me be it a few months or 20 years. I have a few things that I want to do that I didn’t get around to on the last retirement and this time I plan on getting to all of them. The most important of those is being with my family. Just two more days.

Next, I’m enjoying getting a chance to talk and work with the Indonesian teachers. I haven’t had much of a chance to do that over the past 19 years of working in Indonesia, and it’s been an interesting and instructive experience. The school is undergoing a big change, and as an anthropologist, it was interesting to watch it from a somewhat distanced view when I was preparing to leave last semester, and now it’s interesting to be involved in working on the change even if it’s as someone who is only here temporarily. The expat population is less than half of what it was when I arrived here five and a half years ago. That in itself is a big change for the students as well as the expat teachers.