Thread: Those Moving Blues

My eldest daughter exclaimed yesterday, “Really, only seven more weeks until you move to Bali!” This is the girl who three weeks ago expressed almost the exact opposite sentiments, “Ten weeks is so long Daddy!”

OK, reality check time in the tropics. I can feel myself getting scattered as the time advances towards the end of paid employment. There is still this little thing of teaching everyday and being prepared for class and grading papers and dealing with all the confusion surrounding the merger of the two schools here. And the Bali eBook is stalled. I have two more sections to do and an update of the regions of Bali. One of the two sections requires some research, and even though I have the books here that I need, I’m finding too many distractions to get into the mindset that I need for research.

And then this little thing about our lands and houses here. I’m finding that we are too heavily invested here, and I would like to divest at this point, but I refuse to sell our houses for less than they are worth just because we’re going back to Bali. If it means that we are going to need to hold on to the land and property for a while, then that’s what we’re going to have to do. Life would be easier (for me) if we could just wrap everything up, but marriage to an Indonesian means waiting and waiting. My lovely wife just wants to wait until the day before we leave to try to sell the house or rent it out, and compulsive, Western me wanted to do it a year ago.

So there’s the rub of it – too many projects which all seem to be pulling us in too many directions right now. The easiest thing to do is to just focus on school and do what I can with the book and leave the house and land issues to my wife, but there’s this Western control freak lurking inside which keeps nagging me to get everything under control although I’m aware that that is something of an illusion.

It’s always good at times like these to remind myself that things could be much worse – we could have no land or houses to worry about and be worried instead about where to live and how to survive. I just need to look out across the road for the reality check to click in.

Tomorrow – food riots and the rising cost of food