February 2004

If you ended up here, this is really a page for family and friends for photos and information about how and what we are doing. There's nothing here particularly educational. Just some portraits of what life is like for us over in Sumbawa with the hope that it will entice a few of you to come over here and visit us once we finish the new house in Sekongkang, Sumbawa. The plan at this point is to have the house done by the end of April, but you can never tell here.

This is the fourth update on the family page. February has been zipping by. Last week the kids and I spent the weekend at the beach. School was closed on Friday because of a strike at the mine so I had a three day weekend. After all of the swimming last weekend, I ended up with the flu. As they say over here, this is the flu season because of the rain and changing weather - hot and dry one day, cool and rainy the next. Besides playing havoc with our health, the rain is interfering with our construction plans for the new house.

After months of playing around with trying to get the house in Sekongkang built, the last week has been a rush of activity. We finally agreed on a price with a contractor to build a smaller house than I had originally planned. Su was called over by the head of the local government to complain about why she had chosen another contractor rather than him. Su bartered about a payment plan for the house, and they finally began work on the house a few days ago. The foundation is just at the beginning stage. I was rather frustrated yesterday when I saw the building site. The outline of the house looked rather small to me (after all, I was planning a 21 room house to begin with), so Sam and Mercedes and I spent an hour measuring the outline and came up with a size of 4.48 are which translates to 448 square meters. One meter is equal to 1.094 yards which is equal to 3.282 feet. So converting all this to feet, the house will be 4,825.64 square feet which should be large enough. It will have four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living rooms, and a kitchen. Since the house will only cover approximately 4.5 are and we have 70+ are, we have a lot of land to work with after the house is done. My plan is to build a small bungalow in the back for a maid and perhaps another worker, and use the rest of the land for fruit trees and a vegetable garden. I also want to build a gazebo on the top of the hill at the back of the land. Su's plan is somewhat the same as mine although, as usual, she probably has something else planned which she will surprise me with when the time comes. The kids have a plan for a pool in the back. We certainly have enough room for that, although we don't have enough money.

The new airport which is located just about five minutes from here will open on the 18th. The domestic carrier, Merpati, will be flying out of the airport and has planned two flights per day direct to Bali and one to Mataram which is in Lombok, the next island over. The price will be one million rupiah (approximately US$125 for a round trip to Bali, and five hundred thousand rupiah for a round trip to Mataram. Local people here hope that this will bring in more tourists, while those expats here are looking forward to an easy way to get to Bali to do shopping. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Back to the house. We went back there today to check out how large the rooms would actually be. Armed with a calculator, the blueprints, a bunch of bamboo markers and a digital camera, we set about measuring the building site. Well, I set about doing it myself while the family decided to have lunch. Eventually I was able to get them over to help me. It turns out that the rooms will actually be good size - not as large as I wanted, but quite respectable. My bedroom will be six meters by six meters. The kids' bedrooms will be four by four. We have a six by six living room to entertain guests, and a larger one for the family. The bathrooms are six by four and the kitchen measures a large 7 by 16. One of the kids suggested that we keep goats in there. By the way, the mutt up above is our Shepherd, Apple. He's actually quite useless other than for barking, but he terrifies everyone who sees him. We tell them that he likes to bite people.

As we were surveying the land today, our neighbor came over to visit and check out our blueprints and tell us how happy he was that we were getting construction started. He thought that the house was quite large. He also let us know that he was trying to sell his land on the beach over by Yoyo's. So now we have two plots of land on the beach that we want to buy, but have to find some funds for. It's always possible that the new airport will bring tourists over here, but then no one really knows what impact the new visa regulations will have on the tourist industry over the next few months. Anyway, we were admiring the view that we will have once the house is finished. The valley in front of us is lush and lovely.

I just updated the OS on my home computer (I have a desktop at home, and I keep my Toshiba laptop - a misnomer as it weighs in at 9.9kg - at school) to XP so I have the Windows Movie Maker. I took some of the video clips that I have and put them together into a few videos longer than the 15 second ones that I have had up. First there is the Balinese dancers from last July in the Samosir house. Then there is the single Balinese dancer from the same party. Finally from July, there is the Balinese clown. The last compiled video is of the kids at Yoyo beach in December.

The final piece of news this week is a report on my new, and hopefully last, attempt at stopping smoking. I had a little physical the other day and received some news on a heart murmur. The doctor pushed the anti-smoking thing on me and after 42 years of smoking, I'm working on quitting. I have been taking this medicine called Zyban which is supposed to make you not want to smoke, and it has somewhat. I have four more days of smoking and then I am supposed to stop completely and continue to take the medicine for another 5 weeks. We'll see how it goes.

I put a little guestbook here so you can leave a message here for us if you are having trouble reaching us by email. Thanks for the messages in the guestbook. I like hearing from you all.