Back to Bali

Wouldn't that be lovely?  Sitting here under gray skies and with cold hands, I think I'd like nothing better than to be swinging in a hammock on Lombok, doing mostly nothing and wearing far less than I have on today.  But my title refers only to going back in the historical sense - to those warm Bali memories so that I can get them out of the way and post the various tidbits I've been writing about our new turf.

August 2010

So far there is one thing I like about the MacBook.  It gets nice and cool while sitting in an airconditioned room.  For the next little bit at least, it feels nice against my wrists and cool through the legs of my shorts.

Tidbits while sipping “Welcome Drink” number two here in the “Intercon” lobby . . . .

It is going to be quite a while before I forget the physical sensation of crawling out of my house backwards on hands and knees.  Well maybe not the house, but each room upstairs I exited with sponge in hand, backing out until I could shut the door behind me.  It’s over a week later now and I can’t forget it. 

We had tenants living in our house 5 minutes before we moved out.  We had liked them quite a bit upon meeting them a few days previous as we toured them through the house (“this is where the nails pop out of the floor from time to time.  We keep a hammer and nail setter here.” “The lock on the door to Ari’s bedroom porch is way up high, so you won’t have to worry about your son getting out.”  “Feel free to use our beater bikes while you’re here. “ And on and on) so we agreed to let them in a day early, so long as they didn’t want to get in before evening.  It made for a hellish frenzied day as we packed final things (including at least some of Evan’s office which was still left undone when we woke up that morning), but it was nice in a way too, as it foreclosed the temptation I would have had to go back there after putting Ari to bed and cleaning until midnight, or later.  So as we walked up the street to the light rail, with just a few bags in hand, (interruption:  Wow, I can’t afford these Welcome Drinks.  About $8.50 with service and tax, and it’s not even alcoholic!   Quite refreshing though), I couldn’t really believe we were leaving it all behind for a year, but it didn’t seem like we lived there anymore either.  Elisabeth had driven away a few hours earlier with our Subaru, which we’ve given her on some kind of rent-to-own status that includes her getting the title, so we had no house, no cars, no neighbors, no address . . . .

After a couple of days in Bellingham with friends, we took the Amtrak to Vancouver.  We boarded the train and I stared out the window watching the U.S. recede from view in my backward position, feeling completely unmoored and somewhat anxious, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.  

Vancouver changed all that.  Within minutes of our arrival, I was happy and calm, with a grin on my face a mile wide.  I have thought many times before that I must have lived in Southwest BC, and maybe even right there near Burrard Inlet in a former life, and this quick trip was no different.  Vancouver makes me want to sing and run and play.  There is sunshine in my brain there even on a gloomy, wet day.  For the nth time I asked Evan if maybe we could live there someday.  

Arrival in Bali was late at night after 17 or so hours of flying.  We had decided to ease into our vacation and our travels by staying the first several days at the Intercontinental Resort on Jimbaran Beach, and our first (and lasting) impression was that we had made the right call.  It’s expensive, and it’s not “real” and I suppose we think it’s not being in Bali in the true sense, but it’s beautiful and it’s easy.  (And in this day and age, where Bali boasts shopping and food that would shame many medium-sized cities, and where the economy is generally based on tourism, what is “truly” Bali?)  Breakfast, while expensive, is enough food that Evan and I don’t need to eat lunch.  There are several pools and a beautiful beach.  The grounds are stunning and require a small army of groundskeepers.  The staff and the service are attentive and friendly.  I will be a little sad to leave here tomorrow.  It’s nice to play at being made of money for a few days. 

At breakfast we made friends with the soup girl, or that’s how I thought of her.  She was also the pancake and waffle girl.  She took a liking to Ari (his looks I suppose, since they didn’t interact too much) and so she and I would talk each day and she was always eager for us to return.  After a couple of days she asked if she could be my friend on Facebook.  What do you say to that?  So the soup girl is now my FB friend.  Of course, I am one of her thousands of FB friends.  Clearly I am not the only guest at the Intercontinental she has asked . . . . .

 

New Pistons, or Something

Today's title is a reference back to my first post on this blog, which had to do with a train named Olig Snush that Ari had created from plastic blocks.  A lot has happened since Olig Snush and his friends Blueberry and Ari Pierson Kanter (the plastic block train) were chugging around our house in Seattle when Ari was 3 years old.  Weirdly, Ari resurrected some make-believe play tonight about Thomas the Tank Engine and some of his friends.  But generally those days of trains and plastic blocks are gone, and we live in a world of Legos and Peter the High King from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and make-believe that includes scenes from Gumby and Pokey videos (from the 50s through the 80s) with bits of knights, pirates and Space Police mixed in.  And to put it in the words often found narrating the adventures of our newest companion, Captain Underpants - To Make A Long Story Short:  We moved.  To New Zealand.  Oh, and before that I quit being a lawyer and went to work for Seattle City Light in the Conservation Resources Division, and Evan became the President of the Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility and did various time-consuming academic things and spent a lot of time on the phone and in meetings on top of seeing his patients at the VA.  And now he has quit that job, and together we agreed to spend a year in Wellington, New Zealand where he is working as a psychiatrist for the Capital and Coast District Health Board.  
So I'm not going to go back and fill in on all the various shenanigans that have happened in between our old life and now, although I will include the writing that I did on our getting-to-New-Zealand adventures in Bali and Lombok that has been languishing in my documents folder the past many weeks.  

more music

better than hand-wringing about healthcare and the media and sarah palin, which is what got sent to my FB page today.  Was listening to H songs on the ipod on the way to Mazama and noticed that "Hand of Fate" did not show up, despite the huge number of Rolling Stones tunes on there.  Well, Hand of Fate became somewhat of an earworm for the entire 10 day trip, even though I hadn't even heard the song, but I couldn't remember which album it came from.  TOnight I went to buy the song on iTunes and the second that I saw the Black and Blue album cover, it all clicked into place.  A College V lounge, and Tom Traub and I (there must have been some party going on), climbing on and around the furniture to the sounds of Cherry Oh Baby and Memory Motel and Hey Negrita!  I am sure that Steve B___ was there too.  What was his last name?  How has he escaped the College V facebooking reunion?  Berkowitz?  Having my computer stolen is such a pain in the ass.  We bought whatever 3rd party software it is to transfer your iPod to your iTunes library (that bothers the crap out of me, as if I were stealing my own music in the eyes of Apple - I am sure they could come up with some way to tag all the songs that you download by sticking the damn CD into your machine - after all, that is days and days of effort), but Evan got his new computer first and so they all went onto his laptop.  Now I'm wondering whether we can copy between his MacBook and my iMac without my having to buy another copy of the software.  For now, I have 6 songs in my iTunes library on this computer -- Shake Shake Shake Your Booty by KC and the Sunshine Band (purchased for Ari because he likes to sing it), Memory Motel and Hand of Fate by the Stones, two songs by a group called Coral I'd never heard of til the mix I posted in my last post and something called Kulun Mankwalesh by some Ethiopian something.  How random is that?  If I can figure it out, I will add a movie here of Ari dancing to Tumbling Dice and then I'll have to stop this blabbering post and pay bills or something.  Laundry. . . .   I can tell that having a Mac is going to make it much more appealing to get back to this blog.  

music

interesting to listen to other people's mixes when you don't know the creator.  this one I saw tonight and want to explore more.  

Love Makes You Feel

I have been listening to my iPod this morning while I make soup. What better way to get through 8600+ songs than by turning on "shuffle" and seeing what comes up?
Listening randomly can be a weird exercise in nostalgia, especially when the bulk of your music collection is stuff you've had for many many years.
So I smiled through Joe Jackson, which reminded me of my old boyfriend Tom, and I laughed at Hunter Thompson reading a William Burroughs poem about Jack Kerouac (how did that get on there?) which made me think of a class in modern English lit I took at Berkeley, and I sang along to The Band doing I Shall Be Released, which made me think of UCSC days. So I was floating around in a musical time that had me in college, and I was enjoying being there, especially being there in a musical way, because I've just been reading a lot about the musical influences of my UCSC friends on Facebook.
Click. Andrea Bocelli singing that song about "It's Time to Say Goodbye." Suddenly I am in a car in Seattle and my ex-boyfriend Terry is asking me to marry him, and I am saying no. It was a desperation move on his part, really, since I had broken up with him earlier in the summer and spent a few tormented months trying to figure out if that had been the right thing to do. On that last night, he gave me the Andrea Bocelli CD Romanza, and we were listening to it in the car as I drove him home from wherever we'd been out re-hashing and crying about our relationship that I had ended. Asking me to marry him while a song played that is about saying goodbye was probably not the best move, but it is in Italian, so I am sure we were not aware of the actual words at the time. In any case, hearing the song this morning didn't make me nostalgic for any of that scene. What it did was set me thinking about turning down a marriage proposal and clearing my life for the eventual arrival of the person whose proposal was right for me. As I thought about that in musical terms, I thought to myself: What I wanted was not Andrea Bocelli. It was someone who would sing Lou Reed's "I Love You Suzanne" (which Evan did at our wedding).
Click. The schmaltzy Italian love song ends and I hear a familiar voice singing "Love makes you ten foot tall." Lou Reed. There is no better way to listen to music than the iPod shuffle.

Becoming Landlords

We are now on our way to becoming landlords. If this is a three-step process, we have completed Step One: Purchase House. Other than that we were dealing with a bank that had foreclosed on the property last summer and it went correspondingly slowly, there isn't much to report about Step One. I found the house on Redfin after its listing price dropped by $60k. Suddenly this house wasn't just in our price range - it was a potential steal! We decided there was something wrong with it on preliminary inspection (an agent let us in when we drove by to check it out) and decided to bring in an agent on our end, even though this hadn't been in our plan. He helped us get it inspected and we were then fairly warned that one wall of the house was full of WDO and some portion of it needed to be replaced. Given the asking price on the house, there was no bargaining room with the bank, but even if we do replace the entire south wall, the house will still be a steal, so we signed up. Last week we closed, and now we are the owners of a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a fully fenced yard on a nice quiet street, with little views of the Olympics and Lake Washington. Dog-owning renters, here we come . . . .

Oh, but that means we will need to take care of Step Two on the road to becoming landlords: Fix House.

Step Two began with the most important task of all -- removing the dead battery from the smoke alarm in the master bedroom ceiling. This had not been done before and we had suffered through its every-40-second beeping during our other visits to the house because it was out of reach on a high cathedral ceiling and a ladder was required to get to it. My first order of business upon getting the keys to the house was to load our ladder into the car in order to attack this shrieking fixture of our new place. Battery removal accomplished, we set out to dig up the holly trees planted too close to the rotted side of the house and start cleaning the gutters. Well, "we" is fairly generous. Evan did most of the lopping, sawing, digging and chopping (with an axe) to accomplish the removal of both trees. I did help with removal of dirt around the roots. My jobs were less strenuous but more dangerous: removing 20 foot long blackberry vines shooting over the fence from a monster bunch of stems in the neighbors' yard (interestingly, they don't have a giant blackberry bramble, which you would imagine from the size of the vines climbing the fruit tree in our yard), and climbing to the top step of the ladder (the one that is clearly labeled "DANGER: DON'T STEP HERE!") to clean out as much of the gutter muck as I could reach. Evan held the ladder of course. Ari helped dig up this and that and eventually decided to retire inside to watch Wall-E.

Today, Step Two really got underway as one of our contractors, Tracey, started pulling off siding on the south side of the house and confirmed that the carpenter ants had been having quite a picnic. We were ready for this news, so it will be interesting to talk with the pest control guy who is coming tomorrow about the extent of the infestation. Clearly some portion of the wall will have to be replaced, and we will be finding out this week about the integrity of what's there. In the southwest corner of the house, you can simply put your hand through the siding and right up to the drywall inside (and probably push right through that if you used anything stronger than your finger). But we could see that when we first saw the place, so none of this is a big surprise.

My yucky job for today was to clean the toilets so that Tracey and anyone else working at the house (and we) could use them. Apparently if you leave a toilet unflushed and closed up for six months, a lovely crop of mold will grow all over the seat, around the rim of the bowl, and inside the tank. Luckily it all comes up easily with regular toilet bowl cleaner and a little cleanser with bleach, and I suppose I'd rather clean mold off a toilet than other things you might find while undertaking a toilet cleanup. I took note of the fact that I spent a good 30 minutes cleaning green/gray living organisms from two toilets and pondered my new role as the "non-working" spouse in our family. Would I have been doing this at some point (late at night?) if I were still working? Would we have just paid someone else to do it? Today it just seemed like another in my seemingly never-ending list of domestic chores (how did I manage to run our house when I worked?) and I just smiled about the fact that I was doing exactly what I wanted to further my own ends and not putting up with someone else's demands that I get something done to further theirs.

Today's other task involved getting some sturdy and lockable doors on the storage room that is part of the carport. Tracey suggested I head over to Second Use to see what I could find, and I was rewarded for my trip over to Southpark with the discovery of a lovely set of solid core french doors that were just what we needed -- $40 for the pair! Of course, being in Second Use makes me want to have another house that I will live in myself, or a big remodel project on our house, so that I could wander around in there and find fabulous salvaged items to make my project "green." Or just cool. I'll have to remember to go back there to look for kitchen cabinet pulls when we get around to replacing those in the rental.

We are still a few weeks away from Step Three in this process - finding a tenant.

Wife Beater

"Mom, I love you all the time, no matter what. Even when I hit you." The words of a future spouse abuser? I hope not. Just the latest cuteness from my little guy, whose "guns" this week were shooting "love" and "Thomas trains." I guess the lessons of Valentine's Day have carried over into this new week.