It’s an overcast day, but there hasn’t been any rain after almost continual downpours for the past three days. It’s that time in the rainy season where all the rain begins to get depressing. We do look forward to the rain after the extended dry season in Sumbawa, but we’ve already reached the enough is enough period.

I was planning on taking a walk outside the gate today to buy some supplies at the local shop that carries just about everything, but after my nightly phone call with the family back in Bali, I’ve put off buying anything but absolute essentials for a while as I need to re-evaluate what my plan is for the near future.

There’s a possibility that I could extend my contract here for another six or twelve months, but the situation has changed from a sure thing to a maybe thing. After a lot of soul-searching, I decided to let my boss know that I was amenable to extending the contract, then the situation changed to maybe the company would extend it.

My children are opposed to me extending the contract even for a few months. They’ve become used to me living with them after the four long years that I was gone while I was working in Pakistan. They weren’t particularly happy that I was moving back to Sumbawa even for six months, but they understood the economics of the situation (well the older ones did). My wife is the poster woman of practicality and said if we needed the money, then moving back would be ok. She’s even put her intense Indonesian jealousy on hold and doesn’t pester me with questions about whether I’m involved with someone here in Sumbawa.

But, last night, all the kids asked when I was coming home and even my Penelope asked how long before I came home. When I mentioned that I was re-evaluating my decision to stay here, she said that she was good with that decision. No questions about how much money we’ve lost in the worldwide economic collapse or if we have enough to put all the kids through college. She just said, if you want to come home, I support that; I miss you and the kids really want you home.

life was once easy

I passed through the last January of teaching. Now that I’m down to four months and two weeks (according to my counter on cyberbali.com), things will get interesting. I have three students left in my homeroom, and they all will be graduating in June. So none of us will be left – the thing now is to keep all of us from getting senioritis and keep us with business as usual. I just want to have some fun.

The weather here has calmed down a bit. Early last month we had some intense storms, and we had some water damage here, but we’ve just about finished with fixing the problems. I love doing the house repairs. It is nice have running water. The water tower that we put in last month is doing just what it is supposed to be doing, and I have no idea why I didn’t put this in years ago.

We’re at the point of getting serious about renting or selling the house here in Sekongkang. We had our first company in looking at the house for renting so we’ll see how that goes.  I’d like to sell the house, but Su prefers to rent it out. We’ll do whatever seems the best when the opportunity arises.

Last week we had a week of Qur’an reading here in Sekongkang. There was a huge parade here with students from as far north as Taliwang coming down here for the readings. Just like you would find in any small town in any country in the world, the whole village turned out to watch the students and teachers and dignitaries parade through the village on their way to the community field where the opening ceremonies were held. Life in a small village has its little pleasures.

Sam’s starting to prepare for the national exams that students take here at the end of 6^th grade and 9^th grade. I’m not a fan of these exams as students spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for the exams rather than carrying on the educational process. It also puts a lot of pressure on the students, as well as their families. Students in small remote villages like Sekongkang are at a disadvantage compared with students who live in large urban centers with more resources, but then if you look at education in the States, you’ll find a similar situation.

Well, time to get some work done around the house.

I like the word mishmash – it just sounds nice and means just what it sounds like. What?

Well, another weekend is wrapping up, and I’m trying to get the weekend podcast finished, but its been one of those weekends of fixing a lot of stuff around the house as we start getting serious about moving back to Bali in June and preparing the house to be rented or sold.

Windows and the weather. Its amazing how quickly things rust even here a kilometer from the ocean. The salt just seems to be everywhere in the air. So this weekend I continued on with replacing the screws in all of the window so that they open and close properly. Lots of fulfillment in the manual labor vibes. Then my handyman and I changed several light fixtures that had filled with water during the major storms last month. Cheap and easy even with the fifteen-foot ceilings in most of the rooms.

Not to be left out of the weather-influenced thread here – the monkey have gotten increasingly aggressive about attacking our gardens. They managed to destroy 200 square meters of corn and several banana trees over the past two days. As much as I love monkeys, they are getting increasingly irritating with destroying all the work we put in to working on the gardens. And bees and wasps. They also seem to be responding to the weather. They are everywhere and in addition to attacking me last week when I inadvertently sprayed one of their major hives, they are taking up residence inside the house so we do a lot of spraying here to keep from getting stung inside the house as well as outside.

Some new photos of my granddaughter out in the snow for the first time. Isn’t she just adorable says granddad. And doesn’t my eldest son look like a lawyer?

More tomorrow.

Just a note for Jakartass if you are reading this. Blogspot has been blocked here so if you could send me your email address, I can send that article I was going to do.

After a fairly quick drive (although the beginning was not auspicious because we arrived at the harbor in Padangbai just as the ferry was loading its last car and had to wait for 90 minutes before we could leave) of 15 hours we arrived back in Sekongkang. In the month that we were gone, both Bali and Sumbawa had been hit by intense storms. We had some water damage to the house here but it is easily fixable once the rains stop.

I say once the rains stop because it has been raining here for the past six days – intense rains with winds. So this means that we have water but this time far too much of it. The water tank is finished and we can now get running water in the house daily – for the first time in six months. It’s quite wonderful.

But, too much of anything is …well, too much. I’m looking forward to a few dry days so we can dry out the laundry and finish repairs to the house.

It’s always amazes me how quickly the jungle reclaims itself. While I was gone for a month, my gardener and wife were only gone for two weeks, yet the grounds look like it has been months. The grass has grown to the point where we have to be careful of snakes; the crops have grown incredibly. In another few weeks we will have over a dozen bunches of bananas, and over 200 square meters of corn. We have forty papayas that should be ready for picking in another few weeks, and lots of tomatoes as well.

I wasn’t ready to leave Bali, but it’s time to start the last semester here and get things organized for retirement – if that is what is going to happen. I’m looking at opportunities for doing some freelance writing, but we’ll see how that goes.

The dogs went on a destructive rage while we were gone and ate my wife’s motorbike seat and tore around destroying as much as they could. They’ve calmed down now that we’re back. They don’t like being left alone.

So, the switch from writing about Bali to writing about the jungle. I’ll do a podcast this weekend and see if it can be uploaded.

The rest of the family arrived from Sumbawa yesterday along with our gardener/driver. They spent seven and a half hours on the ferry from Lombok  to Bali in rough seas so they were seasick, tired, and dirty (they spent a lot of time throwing up on the ferry.

Today was our first day here as a group, and the first order of business was to accompany Dommi, our gardener/driver to the village of Tegallingah where we have a small amount of agricultural ground which we use for growing rambutans. Dommi has been smsing a young lady from the village and somewhere during all the smsing (encouraged by my wife), he decided that he wanted to marry her. So we were going as his “family” to meet the girl’s family and get the process begun.

The village is up in the hills above Singaraja, about thirty minutes from our house.  My wife and I went as Dommi’s parents, a neighbor and her husband who are originally from this village went with us as well as my youngest sister-in-law, her husband, their smallest child, my smallest child, my middle daughter, and one of my brothers-in-law. We had Dommi with us as well.  My wife and I drove up on one of her motorbikes which I planned to use later to make an early exit (people are used to me showing up to be polite and then exiting as soon as possible). Everyone else drove up in our car. When we entered the village where the girl (a potential new “daughter-in-law”) lives wth her family, a crowd of people immediately converged on the car. We climbed a steep walkway to the family’s house. The father and mother came out to greet all of us as neighbors began to gather to observe the city people (along with the “tourist”). As I was smoking a cigarette, I sat outside with my brother-in-law while the rest of the family went in to the house. As I was sitting outside smoking, groups of village children came as close as possible to stare at me (why not – how many tourists do they get?). I amused all of them by saying “hello” in a rather loud voice which, upon hearing, would cause all of the children to giggle and run away. The growing crowd of adults kept a polite distance where they could observe me.

Finished with the cigarette, I went inside to take part in the process. My wife was sitting alongside the parents on a carpet on the floor, the bride-to-be, was sitting next to an older sister with her tiny niece in her lap. The prospective bridegroom was sitting back by the front window next to my sister-in-law. The maternal grandmother entered just behind me and introductions were made with an apology for the smallness of the house. Then chitchat as the eldest sister wrote down the information we needed about the girl (Ratna) to get paperwork done for all of the bureaucratic formalities that are going to be required.

A few humorous comments were made about the beauty of the prospective mother-in-law (Su, my wife) and the handsomeness of the prospective father-in-law (me) and how it was only fitting that the prospective husband was so handsome. Ratna’s father mentioned how friendly the village was and how it was well known for it’s hospitality to visitors. Looking up, I noticed a huge crowd standing in front of the doorway and window observing the group inside. I made a required comment about how I was sure that I would be visiting many times in the future.

Having spent my 20 minutes there, I asked permission to leave so that I could visit my garden to see how the rambutan trees were coming. I took one more look at Ratna (cute and acting very shy only occasionally making eye contact with my wife and never with me). My wife and I took off on the motorbike. We drove another 10 minutes up the road and stopped at the house of the farmer who farms our land – we bought the land from him years ago, and he farms our land as well as the adjoining land which he still owns – he receives half of the produce from the land and we get the other half which we give away to family and neighbors as it’s too much for us to eat.

The rambutan trees are just bearing fruit now so there wasn’t much to see or pick so we chatted a while about the orchard and land prices in Sumbawa and our kebun there. I went on for a while about all the animals we have – both wanted (the dogs, chickens, geese) and unwanted (monkeys, monitor lizards, vipers, cobras, pythons, musang). We had a coffee and returned to the village so that I could drop Su off there so she could continue with negotiations and I could pick up Rebecca (the middle daughter) and go home to do some work.

Besides my first negotiations for a marriage (I have another “adopted” son who married a few years ago, but I was out of the country and missed the negotiations), I was interested in how Dommi and Ratna were going to react to each other as they have never met in person; they know each other through smsing and sending photos on their handphones. They almost never looked at each other during the time that I was there which was commented on by a few in the negotiating parties as being to shyness around all the families. All this was interesting to me as an anthropologist and technology teacher/geek because the parties involved come from two different islands but carried on a fairly intense courtship via handphones. Interesting how technology is being used in an archipelago to bring people together from diverse parts of the country.

More mundane, but necessary, Mr. Mom stuff. I washed the floor for the first time since I arrived. With all the rain and wind and the thousands of small flying insects that lose their wings in my bedroom every night, it seemed rather pointless. But, the weather is somewhat clear today, although I suspect that rain will come in the afternoon, and the floor is really somewhat grotty.

The floor looks great now, and I did the balcony as well since there is a chance that it won’t rain. One of the major differences between this house and the house in Sumbawa is the way this house is built to take advantage of the climate. My room on the third floor is fairly open with two walls being primarily windows. So there is a lot of light and a breeze from the ocean to help cool things off. The house in Sekongkang is designed to keep malarial mosquitoes and pig flies out so it’s closed. It’s also designed to keep raiders from Lombok out (this was a problem four years ago, but since the police shot a few of them we haven’t had that problem in years).

The different designs are also related to land use. Here in Bali, we only had 200 square meters to build on so the house is narrow and tall. In Sumbawa we had 6000 square meters so the house is long and wide. I love both of them – too bad we need to sell the house in Sumbawa.

Well, we’ve been back in Bali for a few days now. My son and I took one of those plane, train, and bus trips to get over here, although we substituted a ferry for a train (there being no trains in this part of Indonesia. The trip over was one of met expectations along with the usual unplanned, but not unexpected delays. We drove our car up from our house in Sekongkang, Sumbawa, to the harbor of Poto Tano in the northwest of Sumbawa. From there we took the public ferry across to Lombok. I planned ahead a bit and had a taxi waiting for us at the harbor. (By the way, if you try this, you have to get an ojek from the harbor to the village of Kayangan about 3 km outside of the harbor because taxis aren’t allowed to drive in to the harbor area itself unless they have a passenger.)

We had a ticket for a three o’clock flight from Mataram to Denpasar on Merpati, but when we arrived we were told (rather rudely) that there was no flight at three and to come back later for the five o’clock flight. So we spent four hours waiting for the twenty minute flight. Last time that I’ll take Merpati.

I’ve been keying down from an intense six months of work – six months more to go before retirement. I’m starting to get the “what did I do feeling about quitting my job and trusting the remaining years to fate. But, over the past twenty years fate has been rather kind to me, and I’m hoping that it continues to do so.

I’m starting to find out even before my retirement actually starts that they cushion that I thought was sufficient may not be with all the economic turmoil around the world over the past few months because of the US housing loan crisis. I think that I know how the retired Americans in Thailand feel now as they’ve watched the US dollar lose value in relation to the Thai baht. But, as I said, fate has always seemed to work fairly well for me so we’ll see what the future brings.

My youngest son (Sam) and I will be on the road tomorrow as we do a move for a month to Bali to be with my eldest daughter (Mercedes). I’ll be doing some regular blogging from there as I have an internet connection at home.

For those readers who also watch the cyberbali.com site, I am in the process of moving to a different web host. Freeservers, which I’ve been using for years, has lost my mail and made it impossible for me to retrieve any email for the past two weeks. I’m in the process of moving to Omnis which offers a much better deal. If the cyberbali site disappears for a day or two, it is only temporary. As soon as I get to Bali, I’ll finish up with the move. For family and friends. All of your email addresses have been lost. Please send me an email with your new addresses.

The weather seems to have turned again to rain, and it appears that the rainy season is upon us again – good news for getting running water, but somewhat depressing as it’s been dark much of the day. We’ve finally decided to do something permanent about the problems with our water supply as it appears that the village authorities having some difficulties fixing the water pressure problems. We’ve started building a tower to put a large tank on that we can fill with water and then open up so that we have running water in the house. These tanks can be found in many parts of Indonesia, but are especially prevalent here due to the long dry season. We should have done this years ago, but I was playing it cheap while waiting for the village to get things set right.

New houses are continually being built here and with the mine planning on being around for another 20 years or so, the future looks good for this area and its residents. I expect that at some time in the next few years more tourist development will take place here as the beaches are so incredibly beautiful and empty and the waves are so good that the only problem that needs to be sorted out is getting the local airport running again. The good news for us personally means that the value of the house and land will continue to rise meaning that the kids will have something for the future.

Six more days and Sam and I will be going to Bali for vacation. Su is going to stay here with Rebecca and Meredith so that Rebecca can take her semester finals. I told Mercedes, my eldest daughter who is living by herself in the house in Bali, that we would be back every ten weeks since she gets lonely being there by herself. Anyway, it will be nice to get back to Bali for a month.

If you are one of my family and friends who sends emails to a cyberbali address, I’ve lost it for the time being. My web provider says it isn’t them, and the company here says it isn’t them. Regardless of who is at fault, I can’t access my email so if you want to write to me you can leave a comment here or send me an email to drbrucepk at yahoo.com

Living without a computer is a drag, especially for someone who makes his living largely on the basis of his IT skills. Not having a computer means no blogging, no podcasting, no testing new software for school, no web page updates, no doing school work at home. I think that you see what I mean. I’ve been tweaking my son’s computer so that I can use it for the next few weeks until vacation starts and I go back to Bali where I have my iMac. I do miss my Mac.

The good part about not having a computer of my own is that I’m reading more, but not writing about the reading. I probably interact more with my family as well, although they are used to me being on the computer and a lot of our interaction has to do with what new things I’m working on. One other good thing – I found an Iomega external dvd drive and burner that I bought about four years ago and used for a few months and then packed away in a drawer because I bought a computer with a built-in dvd drive and burner. I spent the morning scrounging around for the cables and software and, to my surprise, the drive works.

Life in Sekongkang News

I brought my students over to my house in Sekongkang for our annual lunch. We did the usual things: climb up the hill in the back of the house where it’s possible to see all of Sekongkang as well as the ocean; take a walk over to the garden to see the fruit trees; and then play with the animals and have some lunch. This time we had an unexpected treat – we found a 2 meter monitor lizard hiding up in the branches of one of my trees. He just laid there like he was dead. We threw a few branches up at him to see if he was alive, and when we finally hit him, he showed up he was just resting while waiting for some lunch to stroll by.