Puzzling

It's been another crazy couple of weeks.

Making mango hard tack candy

My supervisor was out of town the last couple of weeks, so it was just me in the consular section to manage all of the interviews, U.S. citizen services, managing the consular section, etc. My days were very full as many people were trying to get visas to go to the U.S. for the holidays and U.S. citizens trying to get their passports renewed or extra pages before traveling for the same time period. One day last week so many people were on vacation from our small post that I was technically the one in charge of the whole consulate. Good thing everyone pretty well knows their job and nothing really exciting happened. I mostly just had to sign more papers than usual and remember combinations and passwords. On that note, I counted up in my head today something like 17 passwords and/or codes I have to know just for my work. That doesn't count my own personal passwords and codes for my own Email and bank accounts and so on. After 4 months I pretty well know most of what is essential for me to know and I'm starting to work on really doing it right and well and more quickly. Sometimes things don't go as I would like and people complain, but sometimes I do things exactly right and people complain! It's been fun in its own way to be the only one I can go to and to have to just figure it out. But it will also be very nice to have my supervisor back to take a little of the pressure off.

Cheese Puzzle - difficult!

We got any of our last minute preparation done for Christmas in time to make it enjoyable and memorable for our children. Thanks to my wife and on-line shopping, she pretty well had it all organized and under control. We just had a bit of a scramble for a couple of gifts that were taking a little more time to figure out and we had some unexpected visitors over this weekend. We planned on having the missionaries from our church who are serving in our church branch come over and also my supervisor who was just getting back from out of the country on Christmas Day. They came, which was great, but we found out that the President of the Indonesia mission of our church was going to be in town for a change in our branch presidency. We couldn't imagine them having Christmas dinner by themselves in a restaurant so we begged them to join us for dinner and they accepted. We had a good time talking, eating turkey, potatoes, coconut cream pie, and so much more. That was on Christmas Day. Earlier that day, I had an interview with the mission president and, probably luckily for this branch and my family, was called as the 1st Counselor in the branch presidency and not the president. The president has been the president of this branch a couple of times before and the other counselor has been the branch president as recently as about a year ago. We'll have fun doing our best to build up the leadership in the branch and reactivate people.
Our children were happy with their presents, we played games, watched videos, made candy, ate candy, put together puzzles, went to the mall, played Christmas songs on chimes, and had a good time. One of the best things this last week since my children were out of school was that one of them came to lunch with me every day last week. It was fun to introduce them to "Es sop jambu merah" which is a bowl full of shaved ice and strips of red guava on the bottom. Very refreshing in the 90+ degree holiday season weather. Yeah, the temperature really doesn't change very much around here except that it's a little more rainy right now. Anyway, I really enjoyed eating lunch out with them and showing them where I work.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Mall Week

Let's hear it for another 4-day week! Tuesday was a holiday, (Islamic New Year), so it felt a little like I had two Mondays this week and two Saturdays. Made for a little disorientation, but I can certainly live with it. For some reason this week was mall week for me. I was there a couple of days this week and several hours altogether. On Saturday, my oldest son and I were there from about 10:00 until about 1:00 and then we went back for a couple of hours that evening! We looked around, ate, got haircuts, got lost, discovered places and stores we didn't know existed. We thought we had entered another dimension or something. We even decided on a whim to try a little fish therapy place in the mall. For less than $3 each we put our feet in a pool for 15 minutes that had ultraviolet light shining in, and the best part, hundreds of little fish that eat the dead skin off your feet. I was the first to put my feet in and within 2 seconds my feet and legs were completely covered in little brown fish who were literally nibbling at my toes. I almost couldn't stand it because it tickled so much. It was decent entertainment, that's for sure. And I'm not sure I've ever cared about this, but I think my feet really are softer and more beautiful like the signs promised! The only troubling thing about it is that I couldn't help get an image in my head of piranhas and how grateful I am that these fish aren't larger, have bigger teeth and like live flesh.

Fish therapy - yummy dead skin!

Okay.
In other news, today I gave my first talk in church in Indonesian. I was assigned to speak for 15 minutes. After writing my talk out and making the Indonesian sound reasonable, I had no idea if it was that long and didn't have time to do anything about it. I only had past experience to go on knowing about what needs to go into a talk to make it that length. I was a little worried when I saw that I was the last speaker since I don't feel I am quite to the level of being really good at flexible with my talk in Indonesian yet. But in the end I had almost exactly 15 minutes to speak--just what I was assigned. And the best part is that my talk with a couple small items added in finished just in time! What's even better is that I think that they even understood me.

Starting the holidays

I wasn't feeling very well last week and must have fallen asleep before posting anything. In fact, my wife and I have talked many times about how since moving here we feel tired and go to bed earlier than we used to. I'm not sure all the reasons, but some of it, I'm sure, has to do with the timing of day and night. Every day, all year, the sun comes up and goes down at just about the same time. It comes up around 5:30 in the morning and goes down around 5:30 at night. Every day. I think I already said that. I remember in winter time at home in Utah, when the sun goes down earlier it just felt like time to go inside and when it's dark and when it was dark and I was home it was so easy to get sleepy. And when I was on my mission in Russia it was hard not to feel sleepy in the wintertime when we rarely saw the sun. So that's one thing, but really it starts getting light even earlier. Now we are getting up before the sun comes up, like around 4:30 a.m. to exercise, study scriptures, eat breakfast, and so on and then, for me, get to work by 7:30 a.m. You might say, "duh," when I say this might also be part of the early evening sleepiness. But I still think it has to do a little with the sun since it comes up so early.

On other notes, my favorite holiday came and went. It was a little different from other Thanksgiving Days I have had, but it was still good and much better than the last one. (I had "swine flu" over last Thanksgiving and really missed everything and felt like I was dying.) This Thanksgiving my wife made pies and I made the turkey. Thanks to my mom sending an oven bag, the turkey was still nice and moist and tasted pretty good. All of the food tasted good. We had the missionaries over and I think they enjoyed having a traditional American Thanksgiving just as much as we did. Even the missionary from Canada enjoyed it; he said they have pretty much the same there.
I finally got my bike tire fixed and have been able to ride it a few times. I even rode a little with my two youngest who just learned how to ride a couple of weeks ago! My oldest son and I have gone two Saturdays in a row exploring around on our bikes. We rode over to a nearby neighborhood where there are a few cattle and goats out in the empty spaces where homes haven't been built yet. The last time we went for a ride we were very hot, since it's always around 90 degrees, and it felt nice to cool off with a swim in the pool near our home.
Is it really December already?