Making the offerings

 Today was the blessing ceremony and feast and although it was supposed to start at 11am, we waited and waited until about midday while they got ready.

I was required to wear the sarong.

Lots of serious looking ladies and gents arrived in traditional costumes and tables of offerings (the small wicker baskets) were set out. They included eggs, stones, a dead bird, flowers and various fruits and palm leaves.

A small fire was lit in the lawn of villa 2 and some chanting was done, accompanied by a constant dinging of a bell. I’d hoped there might have been a gamelan orchestra, but not today.

Then we owners in turn were required to dip our forefinger in various pastes and make a sign of a cross on the frame of each doorway, first outside on the Balinese doorway, then inside on each bulding and the gazebo. Each time, we had to use three pastes and a hard fruit, then shake water off flower petals three times on the cross we’d just drawn.

Maxine, Patricia, Yudhie, dan Pak Pete

I have no idea of the meaning, but it was an honour all the same.

Then it was into the feast – babi guling, roast suckling pig, chopped up into small pieces and served with rice and pork sate. Washed down with plenty of beer.

I have a confession to make. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not buying the two storey villa after all!

After spending a good part of the day in villa 2 today and seeing it in a different light, literally, I’ve realised it’s much more practical for me. The lift was actually going to cost more than I’d be prepared to pay, so the stairs may well have become a problem in future years.

Switching to villa 2 means I don’t have stairs to cope with and there’s much more room. I’m actually in there now, the guys having moved all my stuff, bed, mattress and all, with no hint of complaint. All the villas are quite different and I’m happy with my decision. The villa costs $40K more, but that’s not as much as the lift was going to cost.

So after watching the housekeeper’s family move back to villa 3 (wow, so much stuff! Like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than the outside), I had a swim and was able to get out by hanging onto the gazebo post near the pool steps.

And I might stay on! I was asked, why such a short trip? I had no answer. I hadn’t thought of staying, but why not? It doesn’t cost me to stay, so as long as my dog is OK, I’ll stay at least another week, maybe more. What a strange concept.

Fridge and microwave oven tomorrow. And I’m sunburned.

We apologise for this break in transmission. Normal programs will now be resumed.

Sorry for the silence over the past few days. Nothing much was happening at home, but now I’m in Bali again for the villa blessing ceremony tomorrow morning, Tuesday 8 March, at 11am. I won’t be able to post this until after it’s happened as I don’t have internet access at the moment.

First, I think we got our strongest house sale lead yesterday, Sunday, as they spent half an hour looking and talking and said they’d phone back. It doesn’t mean any certainty, but it’s promising.

After that, Barry took me to the airport and Steve and Pam came out to see me off, which I’m very pleased about. Thanks, Steve and Pammy! Very chuffed indeed.

When I checked in, the lady saw my walking stick and asked if I have difficulty with the stairs. I said, yes, I hate ’em. I said I’m not disabled, but my legs are weak and I have to go down one at a time, slowly. In that case, she said, use Gate 3 instead of Gate 5 and we’ll take you down in the lift. Which they did. I was led down the aerobridge all alone, and escorted to my seat as the first to board. Since I was in 1C, first row, I was seated and ready to go while the rest filed in.

But I didn’t realise that the solid sides to these first row seats are constricting for my size, so I probably won’t do it again. But once more, I had a row to myself and was able to move to the window seat, so that was better. I seem to be getting these rows to myself quite often. Good!

This time I used the VIP meeting service at Denpasar. Wow! First time, and it’s unnerving. You’re met by an off duty policeman who is known to the airport staff and just escorted through. “Follow me”, right through the Crew immigration counter without stopping! No queueing, just a smile from the immigration clerk.

Then to collect your suitcase, through the X-rays still, but no questions asked. Then the cop asks for your passport and forms, takes them to an office and returns with the visa and stamp. You pay him his fee and he pushes your trolley outside and that’s it. Good stuff! I’ll do that again.

Ian, Yudhie and Wiwin were there to meet me and it was fantastic. Wiwin gave me a garland of flowers and a big hug and I felt a great welcome.

Back to the villa and it was like coming home. The bedroom windows were all clouded up by the cool aircon. The bed base was there and Ian helped me inflate my airbed, and after some talk, we hit the sack about 1am.
Airbeds are soft but they want to make you roll into the centre all the time. It’s very hard to sleep on your side. I had a reasonable sleep, but woke many times. I got quite cold at times, but the aircon remote was somewhere out of reach so just had to pull the sheet higher. However, I felt ok at 7am.

I climbed the stairs first thing and managed them OK without having to pull myself up. Gotta keep doing it.

I wasn”t going to spend another night on an airbed if I could help it, so today we set out on the great mattress buy. I met Greg and Maxine in Villa 1 and they showed me their good mattresses, so I followed their advice and went to the same shop. No worries. They only had one of 1.6m width in stock, but that’s what I wanted so I bought it immediately. Dellivery hari ini, ya? Yessir.

I was worried that they wouldn’t live up to their promise, but they did, and at about 5pm, a little red truck drew up outside my garage and there it was. It’s fabulous – coil springs under, with a layer of latex foam on top. Acid test tonight, but it feels OK.

Then to Lotte Mart where I spent three miillion! Rupiahs that is. A fitted sheet, pillow cases, a wardrobe (in flat pack form), two folding tables and two folding chairs. Plus four pillows. Loooxury.

It was all aided by Made Latra, our most obliging van driver, full of good cheer and very helpful. Nice bloke. He’ll get more work from me.

Oh, and we bought a small flat trolley to transport them all up the lane. It worked perfectly. Ian was a huge help, so by 2.30pm we had it all done and were back home.

Then we discovered the power was off. Connections were being made at a nearby building site. Back at 6pm they said. Gloom. No aircon, no fans, no fridge but most of all, no water. I hadn’t realised that the power is needed to pump the bore water, so no power, no pressure. That means no toilet flushing. We solved that by bucketing pool water!

Therefore a standby generator is going to be needed sooner rather than later. No problem.

Ian left for the airport at about 7pm to go back to Perth, so in one of the most spectacular thunderstorms I’ve seen or heard, I had dinner at Madam Putu’s (not much good) and walked home in the rain. One lightning stroke was so close it left my heart pounding.

It occurred to me that if Minnie were here, being terrified of thunder as she is, what would I do? Stay home at night to keep her calm? Tie her up to ride it out in fear? These thunderstorms are nightly occurrences. It would be a real problem.

An idea was floated involving a transfer at sea from an Aussie boat to an Indo fishing boat, but it’s too risky. All things considered, I think Minnie will have to stay in Australia.

So goes the heat. Another hot night last night (Minnie slept inside again), another hot day today, another forecast for tomorrow, even hotter on Friday. Will it never end???

The house was open today from 2.30-3.30pm to try to catch mums picking up school kids. One quite hopeful prospect came through – knew about renovations, was looking for this area, etc etc. We can only hope.

Or can we? I’ve fallen off a cliff, I think. Is this such a great idea?

Before

After

Minnie got a professional bath today for the first time in a long while. I’ve washed her myself but it’s hard for me. Now she’s back to soft and golden fur, just beautiful. For an 85 year old, she’s a youth!

Now I’ve cleared all the CD-ROMs! Tossed out duplicates, ditched surpluses, ousted old rubbish,… Cabinets and shelves are empty. Makes me wonder why I kept a lot of this stuff. Well, I don’t keep it now. I’m quite looking forward to setting up a central RAID 5 server, as I said, with a proper folder structure, all indexed. Ha! How ridiculous.

Well, Ian should be installed in my villa by now (7.15pm). Have a good night.

This heat is a new record. We’ve had more than 55 days of above 30C this summer and a record number of nights above 20C at minimum (for my exotic cousins and readers).

But tonight I know it’s really hot because even Minnie wanted to come inside to sleep in the aircon. This is a first. She usually wants to be outside, no matter what, even on icy winter nights, but she came in tonight at 8.30pm.

My aircon has been running continuously all day and my power bill must be sky high. All I can say is, thank goodness for aircon!

The headline refers to a book I have of the same title by Carl Sagan. He was well known for this saying, apparently, meaning the billions and billions of stars in the universe.

I’m referring to the biilions and billions of bits of data I’ve got. All data is information, regardless of how small or large it is. The amount of information is like entropy: it don’t go down!

I’m amazed at the number of disks of data I’ve got (at a guess, >300), regardless of whether they’re usefull information or not. Once in Bali, I’m going to have to set up a RAID 5 array, I think, so as to be able to develop a taxonomy to classify everything. By that I mean images (primarily); finance data; word processor files; useful programs; spreadsheets; family history; existing slideshows; future slideshows; video; video editing projects; backups; jokes (yeah!) and so on.

It has to be RAID 5 because it’s no longer possible to back everything up to DVDs or even BluRay disks. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is easy to set up these days, and RAID 5 is a level where the faiilure of any one disk in a group of four or more will not result in data loss. Disks can be swapped in and out without removing power (hot swapping), so a hard drive failure means a disk can be replaced and the data reconstructed.

Who would have thought we’d ever reach this level in a home situation??!! Yet it’s cheap and perfectly feasible to do now. Astounding. Tip o’ the hat to the Yanks – they developed this stuff.

Here’s an image I noticed today:

1954, I think

How simple life was then. No predatory banking problems, personal service in shops, your petrol pumped for you by a young guy setting out on his road to a mechanic’s apprenticeship, checking your oil, water and tyres too, guaranteed jobs after high school, affordable housing, very little stress, good manners, politeness, no swearing out loud, no fear of being assaulted.

I used to scoff at the “loss of family values” warnings, but I’m afraid I scoff no more. I had to go to the city  yesterday (Sunday) and park in the car park over the railway station. On the way up the ramps, people were detecting a hint of movement and just stopping to wait for a car to back out of a bay. It didn’t matter if it took 3-5 minutes, we were all held up behind them! One Audi driver just wound his windows up and refused all horns and entreaties to move for more than three minutes. Unbelievable. The queue stretched back three floors!

Tempers were let loose, I can assure you, and a very fat young woman (20s) actually got out of her stationary car and abused me because I blew my horn at her to move on. “Go around, you mug”, she shouted. I couldn’t because I was too close and couldn’t reverse either. I had to resort to “Ten, nine, eight, seven,… move or I’ll push you out of the way.” She moved forward, but still stopped and held up the queue behind me. All in the interests of getting a bay on a lower floor! Why? There are lifts. What does it matter?

A woman came up to me after I parked on the next level and expressed her amazement at the awful attitude of these drivers. What is going on? Family values of politeness and good manners HAVE broken down, I’m afraid.

In this scanning process, one of the difficulties is working out which way up the neg should go in the scanner. Usually, it’s emulsion side down, but a lot of the time, which is the emulsion side?

I simply do the scan and work it out afterwards. In theory, getting the correct side of the film to the glass affects the focus point and hence the sharpness, but with these old negs, there’s so much bend in the film that lack of flatness overrides which side is correct. And they ain’t that sharp anyway. More on that in a minute.

Here’s an example. When I scanned this neg, I got this result:

When I er, flippered it, I got this:

Abbot’s Lager! Now I know which way is up. Or side, as the case (yok yok) may be.

Here’s another one:

Which way? And is that guy scratching his BTM?

When you look closer, you see this:

Copy watch, Mister?

First, aren’t those Wrigley’s Chewing Gum sticks in the back right side? With the arrow symbol. And those are cigarette packets front left. I can’t make out the labels, but those are chocolate bars at top left with the ribbons and bows.

Unfortunately, the point of focus is on the trousers. See how the stripes on his trouser legs are sharp, but the tray is soft? That’s the case in so many of these shots, I’m afraid. No autofocus in those days.

By contrast, here’s a recent digital camera shot:

Forget the content, just look at the sharpness, the perfect exposure, the perfect colour balance, the perfect focus and the depth of field. All with no effort on my part. We’re so fortunate now. Get out there and record history!

I’ve been scanning negs for the past month, as I said. These are from our dear departed Brisbane uncle Darcey. He served in the Middle East during WWII and was a newspaper photographer all his working life.

I’m sure his sons won’t mind if I post a few samples, because they’re too good to hide.

Ain’t that nice? Beautiful lemony colour. Don’t know who it is, but it’s Kodak colour negative film.

Somewhere in the Middle East, an army group.

A transport ship, to where? I’d be terrified at what was to come!

Original, ancient, authentic. Life in Palestine? 1941 or thereabouts, I would guess?

There were 80 negs to scan and I’m finished now. They are mostly 80mm x 105mm (3 1/4″ x 4 1/4″). I always enjoy doing it because each scan reveals a new scene and a new item of interest. This is history!

Yet on The On-Line Photographer today, a retired US pro photo-journalist was saying he tried to give his library of thousands of negs to museums and galleries but no-one wanted them! They wanted scans, done for free, but not the negs. He ended up burning the lot. His conclusion? The new generation is not interested in the past. Things are moving too quickly now.

Sorta makes you think, doesn’t it? History is bunk, as a famous person once said.

The mystery of The Holy Handtools has been solved. My brother has them. I must have passed them over at some time, but I have no memory of it.

However, if they do turn out to have value, I want my share! I am not renouncing that. We’ll see. Veeeeerrrry interesting, as they used to say on Laugh In.

It’s true. A “mate” assured me last night that his auntie’s daughter’s boyfriend’s mate’s brother’s uncle’s grandmother took her dog into Bali only six months ago and that I was worrying about nothing.

But I’ve posted the question on http://www.balipod.com this morning and I’m assured repeatedly that no four legged animals, including dogs, are allowed into or out of Bali. The ban has been in force for more than a year and may be reviewed in 2012, but even then will probably not be lifted until after Minnie’s demise.

Even if I took her legally into Java/Jakarta/Surabaya, she still has to be quarantined for 14 days. That means caged and exposed to other diseases and all the stress of separation.

This is too much. I am despondent.

I was stunned and annoyed today at a BP service station. (Service??? What service?)

I almost never use BP because they’re tied to Coles and I’ve found Coles supermarket vouchers are worthless. However, today I was in a hurry and had to fill up.

I pulled in and started to fill using the left-most hose, as I always do, in my experience the lowest priced ordinary fuel.

But I soon realised that the price was rising alarmingly and the hose I was using was NOT the cheapest, it was Premium Unleaded at $1.46.9c !!

BP has reversed the hoses, so that the left one is Premium Unleaded, the middle one is 91 Octane ordinary unleaded and the right one is Super Duper Highest Priced Ripoff fuel. If your car uses ordinary unleaded at the cheapest price, you have to grab the middle hose.

What a confidence trick! This is specifically designed to catch the unwary, as it did me. What else can it be? You bastards!

I stopped at $8.20 on the expensive stuff, went and paid for that, then went back to the car and started again to fill up on the lowest priced fuel.

This is BP, the company that puts profits ahead of safety, the company responsible for the world’s worst oil disaster last year, the company responsible for 22 workers losing their lives in the past few years (BBC Horizon, ABC TV last week).

That’s the last time I use BP and I suggest you avoid them unless you like being tricked. Be warned, anyway. I was going to do a car wash while I was there, but I drove away fuming.

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Crushed! Me too.

The bin was taken at about 9.30am this morning and I must admit, I got a bit teary. All that history, all those files, all those projects, all that effort over 25 years, gone in a blink. It had to be done, but… I have most of it in electronic form, I guess.

There it goes…  It was harder than I expected.

I’ve often thought that if I lost everything in a fire, too bad. Well, maybe I was wrong. It hurts.

However, look at it this way – if I were still here and died, someone would have to do what I’m doing now – clear the house. I’m saving you the trouble! My possessions, condensed down to a dozen boxes and a few suitcases. Easy. Be grateful.

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I also took a dozen boxes of books and DVDs to the Save the Children depot in Shenton Park today. I can report that it’s easy to find and easy to deliver to. There was no-one there, but they have tables for you to put the boxes on. (They should also have a bin in which to put your prepositions before they end sentences! :-))

Despite the warning that encyclopedias are not wanted, someone had left a box of encyclopedias! Terrific, mate.

I left an envelope in my boxes with three copies of a letter stating that although most of my DVDs are marked with my surname and driver’s licence number, I authorise SCF to sell them and raise money. I hope it’s OK.

Interestingly, they do want  what they call ephemera. That means show tickets, maps, restaurant bills (interesting ones, that is), all kinds of memorabilia. You may not think it of interest, but other people often do, so don’t throw it out! It may be needed for someone researching a book.

That’s fantastic, because I have a lot of that kind of thing. Americas Cup schedules and press pass, for example; P&O Arcadia menus from 1977; a 1974 London Undergound map, now changed quite a bit; Miss Universe 1979 pass, and so on. Heaps of things too good to ditch. Living history. This is good!

That ties in with my television items. I have a small collection of items from 40 years of TV Engineering – camera tubes, a dichroic prism block, 2 inch video cassettes, 1/4 inch audio cassettes, equipment manuals and so on. It won’t be thrown out, it’s going to the AMMPT museum (I hope).

I also have about 500 images from 40 years of working in the industry. They’re all safe and preserved, don’t worry.