The Dry Season

We’re deep in to the dry season and, once again, there’s no water. We’re doing a somewhat regular routine of two days of no running water and then two days of a little running water – just enough so that we can fill up jerry cans and tanks and tubs to last for the days of no water. The word is that the village is going to dig another well – I hope so.

Despite not having much water, our tomato crop is in, and we have hundreds of fresh tomatoes along with a few heads of cauliflower and some pumpkins. I’ve eaten the tomatoes and cauliflower – for some reason I didn’t get any of the pumpkins. I’m looking forward to mango season which should be here in a few months.

We have two more really hectic weeks before our two-week vacation. Vacation corresponds with part of Ramadan; so the two weeks that I’m going to be on vacation are two of the four weeks that I’ll be fasting. I’ll be in Bali for those two weeks to see Mercedes, my oldest daughter, and to take care of some of the business that needs to be done before retirement. On this trip, I’ll be getting photos ready for the retirement visa documents. I want all the paperwork prepared several months before I’ll need it, so this will be my key focus during this vacation. I’ll also do some school work as usual – lesson plans for the next term, some work on new tech things that I want to do, and some writing. When I’m fasting in Bali, I rarely leave the house for more than an hour or so as it’s just too hot usually.

We’ve had a few people contact us who are interested in buying the house. The question now is whether to sell it now or rent it out for a few years and then sell it later. That’s something that Su and I will probably be discussing for the next few months.

Grandparenthood

Well, my son and daughter-in-law had their first child - a girl. They're all fine, and I'm relieved as I hadn't heard anything for a while and was getting a bit concerned. So now I'm a grandfather. It's going to take some time to get used to this I think. More on this later as students are coming in really early to complete a social studies assignment that's due today.

The Last August

I’ve just finished my last August as a teacher so two months of working have now passed. I haven’t taken a look at my little retirement boat on the cyberbali.com site, but I know it is now in the 9 month period. As I continue to move towards retirement, the emotions swirling round the next stage of the life cycle become more heavily mixed than when I first decided that it was time to retire. I read an article the other day about retirement that quoted an academic who had been retired for a few years and compared the first year of retirement to the feeling of playing hooky from school. Just planning out today, I keep thinking that it would be nice if I had more time to get this and that done because two days is just not enough to do all the things that I would like to do, especially during baseball season when I put in a half-day of work every Saturday.

Mini book review

Book: Java: A Traveller’s Anthology

Compiled and introduced by James R. Rush, this anthology is part of the traveller’s series published by Oxford University Press. Java has 35 travel accounts by Westerners who landed in Java during the period 1330 through the 1980s. Some of these tales are intentionally quite humorous such as S.J Perelman’s account or the one titled, “John and Iris do Jogya;” others are unintentionally humorous such as Eliza Scidmore’s description of the Javanese as “…a little people, and one feels the same indulgent, protective sense as towards the Japanese.” Wow, talk about colonialism. This is one of those books for the specialist on Java or Indonesia.

Podcasting and other computer projects at our school

We completed our first podcast last week; it was in an interview between two eighth graders here. One is from the international school and the other is from the national school. I have the podcast up on my cyberbali.com site for now as we can’t access the server for our schoolweb site as we need to ftp files over 500K and the company won’t let us use ftp. I also put a link up on the Education Podcast Network. It seems like it works, but there’s something wrong with the rss feed – well, it works but it looks funny. As I’ve written other rss files that have worked, I must have done something wrong with it as it was the first xml file that I tried. I’ll try to clean it up in a week or two.

We played the podcast over the school emergency broadcast system, and other than trying to get the sound on the system right, it worked well and the students liked it. Every class is working on podcasting now. I have the first/second grade combination working on them as well. They are looking forward to hearing themselves on a Friday morning.

After we’re done with this project, I’m going to have students work on developing an internet presence where they can save websites that they need. I started working on delicious, and I’m going to look into working with that again. It was a bit complicated for some of the students, but I think that if I introduce it very slowly this time, the majority of them will be able to handle it.

The photo actually has nothing to do with this post. It's my second daughter dressing up for one of the independence day activities last week.

More on Daily Life in an Indonesian Village

We’re deep in the dry season and the weather has been clear and cool lately. Last night it was 64 degrees F, and even now at 7:30 in the morning it’s only 68. As usual during the dry season, water is at a premium, but it’s something that you get used to here in Sumbawa.

Despite the lack of rain and water, we have some crops growing: our cauliflower in the back is doing well as is some green, leafy vegetable that tastes like spinach. We also have hundreds of tomatoes, which are doing well, and dozens of cucumbers that we have already started eating. Five of the banana trees and five of the papaya trees are bearing fruit. It’s not mango season yet, but it will be soon.

We continue to have baby animals arriving here on the farm. Six baby ducks hatched last week – two mysteriously disappeared, so we have four left. We had to use one of our hens to hatch the duck eggs because the mother duck destroys her eggs after she lays them – we don’t know why she does this, but she always does. So, this time we placed her eggs with one of the chickens who sat on the eggs until they hatched. They follow her around (was it Lorenz who did that experiment with the baby ducks?) like she is their mother which she is in a way. She in turn protects them, but our two geese have entered the picture. They have adopted the baby ducks for some reason – they don’t adopt the baby chicks so somehow they sense some affinity with the ducklings. Having the geese protect them gives the ducklings a lot of security because all of the other animals are afraid of them including Dave the dog. Whenever Dave or the puppies get close to the ducklings, the geese attack. It’s quite humorous to watch.

On other local events:

Little League baseball started again yesterday. This will be my last time coaching a team after 30 years or so of doing this. Hmm…a part of retirement that I won’t particularly enjoy. We lost 19 -15. Not too bad. We had two innings of sloppy fielding, but otherwise did well. Anyway, it was fun to be out there.

Four more weeks until vacation and a chance to see my eldest daughter in Bali.

A Long Weekend

This is Indonesian Independence Day. It’s a national holiday, and I have the day off. The kids had to get up early for ceremonies at their schools, but then they were able to come home after that and take the rest of the day off. This is my only long weekend for the term so I’m intent on enjoying it. The only school work that I have for the weekend is grading some social studies exams, and setting up a hardware database for the merger of the international and national schools in January. Other than that I plan on enjoying myself, relaxing, playing with the puppies, and doing some cement work on the house.

Another Anniversary

This is also my 18th anniversary of living in Indonesia (I do have the four years that I lived in Pakistan during this 18 years, but the family was still here, and I thought of Bali as home so…). When I left San Francisco for Indonesia, I never thought that I was leaving for good; the move was pretty much a change of scenery for a year to clear my head and then get back to life in the Bay Area. I had everything I owned stored and fully expected to pick up where I left off. But, here I am 18 years, four kids, three houses, and a wife later. My life is one of those strange hybrids that you find over in Asia of the Western guy married to the Asian girl along with their kids and quite often some of her relatives somewhere around. I know guys who live basically an American life with their Asian wife in Asia; then I’ve met a few who have pretty much gone native, and then there’s the ones like me. I tend to by located on the gone native end of the continuum although just a little way over. Food is basically a fusion of the east and the west; entertainment is more or less the same – I like traditional dance and music here, but I also like Western movies and tv, and I read a lot which sets me off from most Indonesians that I know. Hmm…

Baseball

I’ve been a St. Louis Cardinals fan my whole life. As a kid, I also rooted for the Red Sox (Ted Williams was still playing then along with Jackie Jensen) and the Yankees (it was the era of the great Yankee teams of the 50s and early 60s with Mantle and Ford and Berra and Howard). For most of the last 18 years, I haven’t had much of a chance to follow baseball, but the last four years here in Sumbawa I’ve been able to watch games on the weekend on ESPN. As I’ve noted before most of the games are Yankee games so I’ve decided to make the Yankees my second team since they’re really the only team that I get to watch regularly, and I hate just watching baseball without supporting a team so I’m now a Yankee fan (St. Louis as well). And for my first day as a Yankee fan? They lost to the Tigers.

Independence activities

This is independence week in several countries – Indonesia is one of them. Independence week involves a variety of activities including a lot of marching. Go anywhere in Bali during the month before Independence Day and you’ll often be slowed down by kids and adults marching in columns along the road. The first few times you see this, it’s one of those scenic things about a foreign culture that you take a photo of and write about to your family and friends. After you lived in the country a few years, the traffic congestion that long lines of marchers cause gets to be irritating. But once you get around to having some children that grow up and start taking part in the week’s activities, you develop another perspective on the whole thing.

So this year, there have been a few events involving kids from the local schools. Today my son and the two daughters that are still here were involved in the annual march. I didn’t know that it was today, so it was kind of a pleasant surprise when I entered the village on my motorbike to see lines of kids and adults marching through the village. By the time I reached the house, my son and youngest daughter were already finished, but did get a chance to see my second oldest daughter march.

Last night Rebecca was in a dance competition along with some of her friends. As usual the plan was to start at 8 pm, so I drove my motorbike over to the community field where the dances were going to be held. The dances started at 8:45, but the delay gave me time to have a nice conversation with my daughter, Mercedes’, former math teacher. The actual performances only lasted about an hour. I filmed all the dances – some traditional, some Indonesian pop – with my mini dvd camera and found out that the camera actually works better in dark conditions if I’m farther away from the light source.

Events like those of the last two days provide some form of entertainment for folks living in remote villages.

Interesting News from around the Net

More on weird weather –

Salon’s How the World Works had some interesting facts on world weather:

Cyclone Gonu, the first documented cyclone in the Arabian Sea, landed in Oman on June 6 with maximum sustained winds of nearly 148km/h, affecting more than 20,000 people.

In east Asia, heavy rains in June ravaged southern China, where flooding affected more than 13.5m people; while in England and Wales the period from May to July was the wettest since records began in 1766.

Germany also saw its wettest May since countrywide observations started in 1901; in sharp contrast with the previous month, which was its driest April since 1901.

Further south, the worst flooding in six years hit Mozambique in February, while abnormally heavy and early rainfall in Sudan since the end of June has caused the Nile River and other seasonal rivers to overflow.

A series of large swell waves (3 meter-4.5 meters) swamped 68 islands in 16 atolls in the Maldives, while to the west, in Latin America, early May saw Uruguay's worst flooding since 1959.

The article also noted that global land temperatures reached their highest level since 1800. Hmm… does this bode well for future generations?

And more from HTWW about living the low-carbon life. For someone like me who is just discovering the discussion about carbon-credits and low-carbon like and such, this article was pretty informative. I did learn that calculating everything in your lifestyle to see how it balances out in the healthy planet balance sheet is becoming a popular parlour game (presumably among liberals as I know no one who does this – but that’s another issue).


Retirement update:

My impending retirement continues to draw a variety of comments most of which still favor the “you’ll be back working at another school within a year” opinion. Just a snippet from a conversation with a friend the other day got me thinking about the continuing to work elsewhere option when he said that he had to keep working for a number of reasons (he’s ten years younger than me for one) which included keeping up his lifestyle. I started thinking about that as soon as I got on my motorbike to drive home. Hmm…making my current income, we can buy pretty much what we want when we want it (and we’ve done so pretty much for the past 17 years) – the kids want ipods, my wife wants a new handphone, I want a new computer, we want to renovate one of the houses, someone needs an expensive medical procedure. It’s nice to be able to buy things when you want them, I have to admit. Not worrying about money is certainly enjoyable, but…is that really where I want to be at this point in my life?

The kids are going to continue to need money to continue their education, but I think that I have enough put away to cover all of them through college, and then they’re on their own. As for Su and me, well she generally doesn’t require much more than a present for her birthday; she takes care of her other needs out of the house money, and I don’t require much other than some tech toys to work with during my retirement and some book money. As for the other stuff, what’s the point? I’m perfectly happy wearing t-shirts and shorts with holes in them, I don’t like eating in restaurants, entertainment is watching tv a few hours a night. Being a consumer is like being a junkie. One more jones to get rid of. Add that to the smoking and drinking, and I have a few personal issues to work on during retirement. Should prove to be interesting, and as an old friend used to say, it will keep me off the streets.

Rural Life in Indonesia

Well, I’m just about over the nasty case of flu that I’ve had for the past four days. I actually took two days off work which is fairly unusual for me. Last time I took a day off work was in February after an operation on my ankle. I took two days off to recover from the surgery. Anyway, it’s nice to be able to breathe almost freely now.

I went over to the kebun with Su and the kids today for the first time in a week. The puppies are still hanging around and are still little chubby things so their mother is obviously still coming by to feed them at some point during the day or night. Bush, the daddy goat, saw a few young females pass by and he set about trying to destroy to fence so that he could get out and hang with the young ladies. It seems like Veronica, Bush’s mate, is pregnant again, and she’s keeping Bush away so he’s out looking for action. Hmm, goats remind me of some humans that I know.

So Sunday was pretty much of a garden day. I did correct some work that I had taken home when I thought that I might not be back in school for a day, but mostly I’ve been out in the garden across the road where we have the goats and the puppies and some of our fruit trees. All of us except for Rebecca went. Sam messed around with the puppies and built them a shelter; Meredith watched Sam for a while and then went in the bungalow and watched tv; Su started a number of fires as she likes to do; and I played with the puppies and searched the trees for snakes – there weren’t any.

Later in the day, Su and I went out and inspected the gardens in the backyard. We have a number of bananna trees which are producing fruit now; the problem will be to keep the monkeys away from the bananas until they are ripe enough for us to harvest them. Our cucumbers, greens and tomatoes are growing well, but again we need to keep the monkeys away.

The Environment and Global warming

Mercedes seems to be doing well in high school so far other than some problems with money because she has to buy books and new school uniforms, pay for school fees, and pay for additional lessons (known as les in Indonesia). We call her three or four times a day, and she calls us several times so there is a lot of communication going on. We’ll be going back to Bali in another seven weeks.

One of my more recent interests (as those who read this blog occasionally know) is the state of the worldwide water situation. Another one that I’m just developing is global warming. It’s fairly obvious that the weather has changed over the past 18 years here in Indonesia. Generally, environmental issues were never something that caught my interest (with the exception of rainforest destruction), but perhaps because I’m on the verge of retirement, new issues have entered my radar.

I was reading an article about the pollution of the atmosphere from air travel. I didn’t realize that there was so much activity around this area. I took a look at a carbon calculator to see what the cost would be in carbon emissions for a trip from Denpasar to Chicago and back. Well, I’m glad that I won’t be doing this much. Actually since I’ve moved to Sumbawa, I rarely fly: one overseas trip a year for the annual EARCOS conference, and occasionally, I take a short flight from Bali to Lombok, although usually we drive which is more environmentally friendly according to the article in Salon that I read.

The environment is becoming more of a political issue in Indonesia these days although public awareness still is fairly low. At my house in Bali, the neighbors still throw their trash in the sea; and here in Sumbawa, a neighbor still throws his trash in a patch of jungle in front of his house even though we mentioned it to him once. But, on the positive side, there are more public trash bins available, the cities have trash collection, and recycling has taken hold in some places in Indonesia. Eco-tourism is starting to develop as well. There is hope that environmental awareness will develop here. And just as I’m about to finish this, there’s a report that the Pope is committed to making the Vatican green. Good news from the Vatican and the Pope.

mileposts and new life

Last night was my last "Orientation" night as a teacher, as well as my last July workday. It was a quiet night as I am down to six students in my homeroom. Only three parent discussions. All in all, a nice way to end one part of the school year.

A feral dog decided to have her pups in our kebun. We have three cute little chubby puppies. My wife says that they have noses like hers. Now we just have to figure out what to do with them.

Computer classes and younger students

Computer classes for children in preschool and kindergarten is a topic that can raise some tempers in certain quarters. I have taught computer classes for children as young as 3 who would troop in to my computer lab twice a week for 45 minutes for …for what? The children were too small to see the screen properly without putting cushions on the chair. None of them could read or write. Why were they in computer classes? The answer is, of course, to give their teacher a prep period.

Students at preschool age should be working on a multitude of other tasks more appropriate for their age and developmental level than sitting in front of a computer monitor. I do think that small children should be introduced to computers, but by their parents in very short spurts. When my children were small, they would sit on my lap and listen to a Talking Book and then we’d go out and play.

As far as kindergarten students, computer use should be integrated in with other classroom activities, and should involve only short periods of time. Placing 15 or 20 or 30 students in a lab with one computer teacher for 45 minutes twice a week is basically a waste of time as the small ones will spend a significant part of each period waiting for help from the teacher when the computer freezes or they accidentally turn the program off or they get lost in their program. You know that a computer period is too long when students ask how much longer before the period is over. Activities need to be short and focused

When I was a classroom teacher and teaching second grade, my students loved going in to the lab to work because they were continuing on with something that they had started in the classroom. During those years, I had a rather large first grade class of students that would come in to the computer lab, but I loved having them there because their teacher had a plan for what he wanted them to accomplish, and he had done the groundwork so that I, as the computer teacher, wasn’t creating lessons unrelated to what they were doing in the classroom.

As more and more international schools insist that candidates for teaching positions be computer literate and familiar with integrating technology in to the regular curriculum, life will be easier for the computer teacher who has classes of younger students. The ideal situation, in my opinion, is to have mini-labs for primary students where the computer teacher goes in to the classroom and works with small groups of students on specific tasks with clear goals related to their daily activities. The computer teacher and the classroom teacher work together during this time rotating students using a center model for instruction. This would be a good time to bring in a parent volunteer or two to work with the students as well. In this type of collaborative activity, the kindergartner is developing computer skills while working on other areas of the curriculum.

I’d like to hear other opinions about this issue.

Slang words and the foreigner

I was scrolling through new entries in an expat forum that I follow recently and came across a thread called Gaijin, Farang, Gweilo along with a poll asking how expats felt about being called by one of these words. The poll which had 30 respondents showed that 63% didn’t mind being called by one of these words. However, on other forums, I’ve come across some rather nasty comments about our (we expats) local hosts who call us farangs or in Indonesia bule.

I first heard the word bule when I was living in Papua in Indonesia. Little Papuan kids would scream it as I drove through Timika (a town in the south of Papua). I always found it rather amusing, but I never heard an adult call me a bule until I moved to Sumbawa. Kids and adults both will occasionally refer to me as a bule. I generally take it in stride although as I’ve mentioned to some of my friends including ones who use the term that if I was to refer to them by their skin color they would probably be offended. The response is often what term would you use?

Hmm, I’m not really sure about that. I’ve heard Indonesians from Java and Bali (who can be just as racist as any other group of people) refer to Papuans as Orang Hitam (Black people) or Orang Primitif (primitive people) or Orang Desa (basically a hick, a rube, a farmer – to use some equivalent American terms).

In Bali, foreigners are usually referred to as tourists. These days if some Balinese refers to me as a tourist, I reply, “I’m not a tourist, I’m a bule.” That generally gets a laugh.

I don’t mind what people call me when it comes down to it. What I do mind is how they treat me, and I have to say that with the exception of some government officials, I’ve always been welcomed by people that I’ve met in Indonesia whether they’re rich or poor, young or old. And that is one of the reasons that I’m still here after 18 years.

Habits

Habits. We develop these habits as we age. When I quit drinking and smoking, I had to give up sitting on the veranda watching the sun set every evening because it was connected to scotch and Marlboros. Today my gardener asked why I haven’t been over to the garden – across the road from the house – since I came back from Bali. My reply was that my wife isn’t here. That habit of coming home every afternoon from school and going to check on the fruit trees and the goats is part of my non-smoking, non-drinking behavior. My wife isn't here so I am on a different system.

I did notice today that a number of ripe papayas had large holes in them. My first thought was that it was the monkeys. But, the gardener said that bat have been coming in at night and eating the papayas. For an old city boy, it’s an object lesson in the difficulties of having a farm – pests. The monkeys and the bats are our big problems, but they have to live as well, and the problem is coming to terms with them. Su won’t let me shot them because she’s absorbed a lot of the multiple religions that have crossed this island over the centuries. I regularly watch Indonesians shoot gorgeous parrots, hunt protected dolphins, capture protected birds of paradise, but she insists on not killing any living creatures even poisonous snakes and bugs and worms. We captured a millipede one day whose bit is excruciating and she insisted that I put in a bottle. She dumped it in the jungle across the road all the while speaking to it about how she spared its life and it should just go about its life and not bother us again. Sometimes I feel like Su is a hippy transplant.

Children leaving home

Dealing with kids leaving home. This is an issue that is going to be something that I’ll be dealing with probably until I’m dead. I made it through the first time when my eldest son left home although I could have dealt with it better. I’m trying to deal with things rationally and coolly this time around. It helps that I have a wife this time to talk about all of this with. The first time things were complicated by divorces and career issues; this time it’s a bit different – if for no other reason than that I’m almost twenty years older and a lot slower.

Mercedes is a first year student at SMA Lab in Singaraja. An Indonesian teacher friend here told me the other day that it was an outstanding school. Mercedes seems to like it from what she says on the handphone. She wants to be a doctor so she’s taking an extra biology class as an elective. I asked her the other day if she was making friends (knowing how important that is to kids around the world, but perhaps even more so for Indonesians who are constantly perplexed by the amount of time that I spend alone (more on that for another post). She said yes she was making friends including a few girls that she knew when she was in elementary school in Bali four years ago. Being perhaps an overly protective dad, I asked her if they were all girls, and she asked if it was ok is she had friends who were boys, but not boyfriends. Hmm, ok Dad how do you deal with that? I thought for a moment and replied that yes it was ok. But (ah, the Dad but), keep focused on your studies.

So she’s pretty much on her own. She lives in our townhouse in Singaraja. The house adjoins what we call the Beach House, and she has an aunt and uncle and three little rugrats living there, and she has another aunt and uncle just 50 meters away down the street. Still, it’s a big jump for an Indonesian kid from a fairly tightknit family. The sensitive one as my oldest sister would say.

So this year I’ll be living in three houses on two different islands – keeping an eye on the end of my teaching career and my family here in Sumbawa, and keeping an eye on my high school daughter in our houses in Bali as she starts off her higher ed career in Indonesia. Higher ed because graduation from high school is still not the norm in Indonesia – mandatory schooling here ends at the end of junior high (and many tragically don’t make it that far due to economics).

Next year, we’ll all be back in Bali; I’ll be able to keep an eye on the kids and help with their homework, and Su will be able to start her new business to keep her occupied once she no longer has to run a big house, a garden, and a crop of kids and animals.

Oh, animals. That’s been one of the questions about how I’m going to deal with moving to Bali. The townhouse is just that – it has about the same space as a small New York townhouse which means no ducks, chickens, geese, goats, and dogs. The plan (another one of those plans) is to get a baby python here and raise it (I’m assuming that it will respond to raising like my old boa constrictor did when I lived in Berkeley, California) and keep it in the small courtyard that we have in Bali.

Back in School

Just watching the Yankees get pounded by Tampa Bay. The Yankees always seem to be on ESPN over here (I’ve probably said this before), but it’s baseball anyway. If I had a chance to come back, it would definitely be as a ball player. One of the things that I am willing to pop for next year when we are living on a restricted retirement income is a subscription to Indovision or the new company that I came across in Bali a few weeks ago. The idea of being able to watch baseball every weekend without having to worry about getting papers graded sounds like heaven. And, with an internet connection, I can just get online to check on players’ stats when I need to. Yeah, definitely heaven.

So the first week of school has passed by somewhat quickly. It was good to see my homeroom class once again after the four week break. I’m going to miss teaching, but not the other stuff that goes along with being a teacher. It’s going to be an interesting year.

On the retirement front, I’m “running the numbers” (as I call my compulsive playing with my proposed retirement budget) again, and things look fairly good. I still have to make a major saving effort this last year of work, but if we can do it, we should be able to live fairly comfortably on the retirement money. My wife thinks that we can rent our house out in Sumbawa rather than sell it, and she’s pushing me to take that route. Financially it makes sense if we can get what she says we can because we can stretch out our first retirement fund from lasting two years to lasting three and a half which means that we can stretch the second retirement fund out to three years from the original plan of two years which means that we don’t have to use the third, and last fund, until I hit the age of 66 instead of 63 which means that by that time we could have reached the stage where our interest and my Social Security will be sufficient to last indefinitely. So this is what I spend my morning breakfast time doing everyday before I go to school. Of course, it would be easier if someone just gave me a couple of hundred grand, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

There’s a lot of excitement about the “early” retirement – certainly from me, but from friends and family as well. On my part, I suppose that it is comparable to the feeling when I know that I’m leaving a job in one country and moving to another. The sense of the unknown with all the mystery, hope, fear, and risks jangling the nerves and heightening the senses. I can remember how keyed up I was before my first move overseas back in 1989, and then again in 1999 when I moved to Pakistan, and again in 2003 when I moved back to Indonesia, although that was a bit less because it was returning to “home.” This time, I’m as jacked as when I moved to Pakistan. Bali, where my other home is, seems just as exotic as Pakistan once did.

I spend a lot of daydreaming time doing the “next year at this time, I’ll be …” One of my friends replied the other day to my comment that I had so much to do in Bali during my three weeks there recently. He said, “Yeah, but you were there for three weeks, next year it will be forever.” Right, good point. I need to constantly keep that in mind, although my plan of announcing to the faculty and my students that I’m retiring is to put me in a box, so to speak, so that I can’t get cold feet at the last moment and back out thinking about the security of a nice salary and comfortable surroundings and doing what I love doing. I need some new challenge and some juice to get these old bones moving.

Playing with Feedburner and Settings

One of the great things about having a vacation at home in Bali is having access to the internet. So I found out about rss, podcasting (which I already knew about but had only tinkered with),feedburner, and xml. Now I think that I have things set up, but I'm not sure how long I will remember all this when I get back to work.

I'll be leaving tomorrow. In fact, by this time I'll already be in Lombok crossing the island with a view of Rinjani.

Still in Bali

I know that I said that I would write more about family today (and maybe I will), but the sunsets have been so spectacular lately, in addition to the weather. I do the sundowners thing every sunset these days. It's just so wonderful that I can't let it go by. I make an effort to be at home to see the sun set every afternoon. There's a scene in an 80s movie that I really liked about just thing. The movie is about Chicago as well which makes it even better. Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines are Chicago cops that want to retire and run a bar in Florida, and when they get there they're wandering around the pier and everybody is staring up at the sky and they ask what they're doing and the reply is watching the sunset. Yeah, precisely why I want to retire.

I just read some articles on the cnn online site about retirement for my generation, and I sure as hell don't want to work until I'm 75. The goal is get out before they carry me out. Jim Morrison said it as well as anybody – trade your time for a handful of dimes.

OK some family stuff. The photo is three of my children and two of my nieces and a cousin. The only one really smiling is daughter #2 who loves photos and attention and is the outgoing and troublesome child of the group. My wife and daughter #1 were out in Sumbawa getting my daughter's graduation certificate so she could register for high school here, and I was the cook and responsible adult so we went shopping. Since the car was in the south of the island, and I wouldn't let the unlicensed teens drive the motorbikes, we took a bemo (small public transportation), It was a lot of fun for everyone except for my son who found it somewhat embarrassing to be in a public bemo. The younger kids have never heard the stories about my somewhat tenuous financial situation when I was younger. So they got to hear it today. Ahh, getting old.

podcast test

This is a test to see if my podcast is working, and I can get a link to it from here.

Family in Indonesia

Well, the foot is better, and I can walk without much pain. So I decided to dig all of the weeds and dirt out of the ...hmm, not sure what to call it. It's this area around the balcony that acts kind of like a flower box, and for me, living in the kampung, it's as close as I'll get to my gardens back in Sumbawa. I dropped all the dirt off the third floor balcony down on to the little patio we have just off the kitchen. Su was rather irritated as it was mud and splashed all over the walls and windows. She calls it the landslide. I told her that I would clean it tomorrow when it dries. It was lots of fun.

Now a link to a blog a few days ago about family. As I was in the process of dropping big mud balls and weeds down to the ground, one of my brothers-in-law saw me mucking around and came up to see what I was doing.

“What are you doing?” he says somewhat obtusely.

“Cleaning the flower box.” (I know where this conversation is going.)

“OK, I'll help.” (He starts looking around for tools.)

“That's ok you don't really need to help.” (I'm hoping that he won't so I can slip into a work/meditation state.)

“Oh, I want to.” (Rude of me to tell him no.)

So he set off to find some tools (I was doing this with bare hands.) While he was gone, one of our neighbors from Sumbawa who dropped in on their way back to Sumbawa from a visit to his wife's parents in Java appeared suddenly from the stairway, and we went through the same conversation. So it ended up that the three of us were digging all the weeds and dirt and cigarette butts out of the flower box and dropping them downstairs.

So here's the point, and I'm writing this so that I remember it in the future when the family irritates me over one thing or the other. Family members and neighbors will drop what they're doing and come and help you if they see you starting in on a project. They don't make a big deal out of it, they just do it. Sometimes it's really hard, dirty work, but they cheerfully do it anyway. They don't expect something for it, it's just part of being a family member or a neighbor. I don't know how many times this has happened over the last 18 years. (There are good and bad points about this actually, but I'll get to them tomorrow.)

The main point today is to remind myself that when I do something like take all of them to the Treetop Adventure and pay for all of them and they don't thank me, it's just part of being a family member or a friend. They just expect me to pay because I have money and they don't. The reciprocity (that good old word from Anthro160 with Stevie Garbarino) is that they do stuff for me where they provide what they can – their labor or local knowledge (my brother-in-law from Denpasar who constantly drives me there from Singaraja) or their time (running to shops doing errands for me).

'Nuff said for today.