Today has been one of those days when you don’t really know what day it is, what time it is nor do you care. It’s kind of like a hippie day.

Students of mine over the years have been fascinated to hear that I was a hippie once long ago. Partly I think it’s just because they can’t imagine me wearing clothes other than the ones that I wear to school everyday – six sets of clothes that I rotate religiously. Just recently when we were in Malang, and I showed up in the evening after having my mandi wearing a t-shirt, my students were shocked that I actually wear something other than a polo shirt and slacks or a short-sleeve button down dress shirt and slacks. So, the idea of me having long hair and beads just makes them all giggly.

So why is today like a hippie day besides time (a driving force for most of us, and certainly one for the international teacher)? Today is a special day for the Hindus of Bali – Kuningan – so most everything is closed and everybody is doing nothing special.

I’m sitting out on the balcony now, and I can see a few sampan out in the water with guys fishing, there are a few kids snorkeling poking around for fish and interesting shells, the women in the house have been cooking all day like the usually do but without the interruptions of taking kids to school and going to the market (although for my wife that is one of her favorite parts of the day).

I decided not to go snorkeling today and instead process all the photos that I’ve taken over the past week. But I didn’t get up until 8 and then checked on a movie download and email and finished up with a leisurely breakfast. I did some blogging and then edited a video of the Bali Sea that I uploaded to YouTube. I watched some more depressing news from America on CNN, and then spent most of the rest of the afternoon reading anthropology.

No banking , no tax forms to fill out, no thinking about all the financial things that continue to perplex and worry me. Just a day of doing what I want when I want and at the pace I want. Listening to Buffalo Springfield and CSN&Y. It could be 40 years ago except that I’m sitting on the balcony of my house in Bali.

And, I’ve been thinking about retirement again because…well, because it’s getting to be that time again (3rd times a charm, keep saying that) and because I read a post on a forum the other day by a guy who has been saying for years that he was going to retire and then did with the plan to move to Bali. After a month or so, he decided to go back to work basically because he was bored. I’m still trying to process that. I love teaching, but the one thing that I wasn’t during my five months of retirement was bored. I went back to work because I needed the relatively quick $35 grand.

It seems sad that people get so encased in their work that they can’t see another life out there with so much to do in one lifetime. So I’m back to the hippie theme again. One of the things that we believed in was that there was a life beyond work, even if it was just relaxing with friends, having some food together or a joint or two, watching the sunset or the sunrise, grooving on nature, exploring the city, making love, stopping the war. There was this incredible wealth of things (spiritual and profane) to do in the small amount of time that we had each day. As we grew up, most of us fell into the life of careers or jobs or gigs (as one of my friends used to call them) so that we could make money and buy things. I’ve bought plenty of things over the past 60 years. I fondly remember now the late George Carlin’s routine on “stuff.” When do you get enough stuff? We have rooms of stuff that no one uses anymore that we could have done without.

When I left my job with Freeport and ISS years ago, I had four rooms of books, records, art, clothes, furniture and other odds and ends of 40 years of life in the U.S.A. It was too expensive to ship over to Indonesia, so I gave it all up. My life didn’t change because of it; other than that I had less stuff to find a place for.

I can see that this is starting to be a ramble, but that’s one of those benefits to growing old – everybody expects you to start rambling and, while I have always been somewhat of a rambler, now I can do it in a culturally acceptable way.

So, maybe we weren’t so off the track when we were hippies, or maybe we were on another track that made more sense.

My son and his buddies

Today’s anti-work quote:

“My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.”
—American Beauty, 1999

We’ve had guests for the past few days so I haven’t had time to blog, although I have been snorkeling. My friend, Stephen, his son, Oliver, Stephen’s friend, Ade, and Stephen’s driver, Wahid, came up from Kuta to visit for a few days. I enjoyed having them all visit; it’s been a while since I’ve had a friend visit the house. Of course, like most teachers, we talked a lot about school and education, but that’s one of the hazards of the profession – getting wrapped up in what we do.

The kids have been out of school for most of the week; we have family up from Denpasar because of the Nyepi holiday so the house has been very busy this week. Today is Kuningan so prayers from the Hindu temple just down the beach have been going on for hours now.

I let Mercedes and Rebecca drive up to Bedugal today for a treat. Lots of trepidation on my part because the roads can be so dangerous here, but I guess that I have to start to let go some as Mercedes is almost an adult – she’ll be 18 in a few months, and Rebecca will be 16 not long afterwards. Still, I’m waiting anxiously for her to call me to say that she has arrived safely in Bedugal.

damselfish

Today’s anti-work quote is:
“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”
—Oscar Wilde

Wow. Life without internet is tough. The school’s internet has been very spotty over the past week and getting anything done has been a struggle. I’m hoping that this new week brings some relief.

Weather is the big thing here. Rain, and rain, and rain. I’ve never seen it rain this much in the five years that I’ve been in Sumbawa. The back part of our property is soaked. Literally soaked. The ground can’t absorb anymore water and walking through the back is like walking on top of a sponge. That said, we have plenty of water in the house which means lots of showers and no problems with washing clothes. I’m waiting for the dry season to see how our new water system will actually work once it’s really put to the test. 

One of our goats died the other day – I’m not sure why, but we found her after a few days and her body was decomposing. Yuuck! Dave, our main dog, has developed the travel bug and insists on being let out in the village everyday or he goes ballistic. Once he has his run out with his buddies in the neighborhood, he comes home to eat. Ah these men.

With all the rain and the ground as soggy as it is, we’ve had a rash of snakes appearing looking for dry ground. Last night we had a green viper about half a meter long. Su got hysterical as she does when she sees snakes, and it was clear that it was poisonous so there was reason to be worried as it was dark and my teenage daughter almost stepped on it which would have been very bad.

I start on Week 15 tomorrow. That is I have 15 weeks of teaching here left. As my whole 8^th Grade Class (of 3) will be leaving with me, it should be an interesting period. All of my students have been accepted into boarding schools for high school: two will be going to the States and one to Canada. So we’ve done our job. One of the things about our school is that our students always do well in their new schools being placed in advanced classes or achieving top grades. That’s a good feeling for a teacher. It’s something that I’ll miss.

On the upside of leaving, I’m really looking forward to having all of us reunited in one house again. And I’m looking forward to having unblocked internet access. I haven’t been able to read some of my favorite and most valuable blogs just because they’re on blogspot.

I started writing on Hubpages to see what that’s like over there. It’s part of developing my web presence so that I can try my hand at freelancing for some blogs or websites starting in June. This is a new hub that I put up today about Paradise.

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.

The whole wedding affair was far more complicated than I remember my wedding being. But, that’s probably because it involved two Indonesians and not an Indonesian and an American. As we were acting for Dommi’s family, we ended up (let me rephrase that to everyone except me ended up doing all sorts of work). I think the family was getting fairly irritated with the whole thing at the end, but it was hard to tell.

So for the actual nikah ceremony we drove to a village just outside of Singaraja and all packed in to this fairly small house which belonged to the relatives of the girl/woman (she’s 18 and very desaish so I’m not sure what to call her). Dommi forgot some of his lines which made his bride’s uncle extremely irritated and as a surprise to me, he let on his irritation.

I spend a lot of time living in a somewhat liminal state in Indonesia in regards to my status – perhaps because the status of the expatriate (the one who is actually planning on living here forever, not the one who is looking to stay a few years and then return home) is so fluid here in Indonesia.

Hmm, how is this related to the wedding? There was some connection, but it seems to escape me right now.

Well, the wedding went off alright finally and all the papers were signed by the appropriate people. Dommi was given a lecture on his role as a Muslim man and husband. Ratna got a much shorter lecture. That surprised me.

We returned home then, but Dommi had to go to Ratna house in Tegallingah for a few days so that the could meet all the family members and let them get to know him. When he came back, there was a huge ceremony for just the women. The newly married couple had to sit on a stage where everyone stared at them and took photos with them. There was some praying and everyone received food and then all 200 women left. I spent the ceremony up on the balcony on the third floor with my retired psychologist friend. It was much more pleasant up there.

One more set of ties for all of us.

Here’s a post from the original Life in the Tropics blog over at blogspot. New Year’s Eve got me thinking about this one although I just stayed home and watched some fireworks from the balcony. The old drinking days are a bit of the past.

Lists of favorite things. Most people have them. I’ve spent the last five days mostly surfing the internet, reading, doing some writing, and as usual, a lot of thinking about odds and ends.

Here are some of my favorites. We’ll start with bars – in no particular order.

1.    Billy Goat – when I drank there in the 70s it was just a little hole in the wall institution that was immortalized by Jim Belushi’s Saturday Night Live skits. Back then, it was just a place that Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times workers used as a place to have a few drinks at lunch or after a shift. It was unpretentious and quirky. I ate a lot of cheese and egg sandwhiches there over the years.
2.    Oxford Pub – a place on Lincoln Avenue that was popular with the artsy crowd during the 70s when I lived in Lincoln Park in Chicago. It was a fairly big place with decent food. It was a 4 am bar so when the 2 o’clock places closed, everyone gathered there.
3.    The Red Baron – just a few doors up from Oxford’s. It was a smaller place run by a German, Herbie. It was my favorite place for years partly because I lived across the street, and partly because Herbie made this great Hungarian Goulash.  It had an odd assortment of folks who hung out there.
4.    Weiss’s – another Lincoln Avenue bar from the same period. It was right on the corner and fairly big. I used it as the place for a few hard-boiled egg breakfasts when I was working the night shift at the Tribune and going to U of I during the day.
5.    Biu – a small open bar in the Lovina area of North Bali. The owner, Ngurah, was friendly and an excellent host. He’d get tourists together and have these impromptu parties. The only place in the north that had Bintang on tap. He kept a bottle of scotch hidden in the back for me.
6.    A place on Orchard Road just south of the Hyatt. I never knew what it was called, and it was mostly a place to eat, but they had a bar where I’d sit and watch the folks walking down Orchard Road while listening to the Singlish of the staff.
7.    The Timika Yacht and Swim Club – I was the Vice-President and spent a lot of time there during the years that I lived in Papua. It was in the jungle and that made it all worth it.
8.    The old smoking bar in Don Muang International Airport in Bangkok. It was a haven for me during the years that I lived in Pakistan. I’d do a Saturday morning transit and sit there for an hour or so and suck up four double scotches at 7 in the morning while chain-smoking Marlboros before my flight back to Bali. I met some interesting folks there.
9.    A place on Telegraph Avenue whose name escapes me right now. It had two floors; the ground floor was a restaurant and the bottom was the actual bar. I hung out there during my Berkeley days.
10.    Sri Homestay – actually a restaurant in Anturan, Bali. I drank there for years, occasionally having something to eat, under the watchful eyes of Ibu Sri. My drink of choice there was Three Star arak along with Bintang beer.

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.

It’s amazing how an island like Sumbawa can go from being extremely brown to extremely green after just a few rainfalls, but it happens here every year. We seem to be officially in the rainy season. The only problem with having a lot of property and a lot of animals and a lot of rain is that the house is often muddy because of all the kids tracking mud back and forth, as well as the dogs running in and out (even though they know that they are supposed to stay outside). But, I’d rather have some mud in the house than no water. Ah rain.