Should I stay or should I go? Finally, I know!

Today I finally decided on where I will be for the rest of 2008. As originally planned a million years ago I will come home at the end of September (rather than staying on for an additional 3 to 6 months as was tentatively planned).

I am so pleased to have made a decision, which in general I am quite terrible at doing, but in the end this was an easy decision to make. In short, life here is full of adventure, wild times, and great opportunities (like meeting the PM...stay tuned), But the other side of that coin is illness, long hours and cold showers. The ups definitely make up for the downs, but only for so long. The roller coaster is a blast but you've gotta know when to get off (hopefully before you start to spew).

Truth be told, I don't know what I will do when I get back to Melbourne, but I have a bucketful of exciting ideas and three months to figure out how to pull off just one of them, so I'm not too worried yet.

I only clarified this decision this morning, and I'm already nostalgic and teary about the things and people I will miss. I'm really pleased to be able to spend the last three months here squeezing the crap out of all the goodness and then go home on a high note.

Big Picture photos

I found a great website via Frontal Cortex with photos of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, taken from a helicopter that flew overhead. These photos are incredible...so incredible that my first instinct was that they were staged...Boo Sarah for your lack of faith.

But the photos of the Amazonian tribe were not the only things worth checking out on this site, The Big Picture. The photos of volcanoes and earthquakes are amazing, but my favourite is the series of photos of indigenous Brazilians who gather to protest the building of a new dam. I was shocked at the unexpected and gruesome turn it takes! Had I read the text I would have seen it coming. I'm glad I didn't read the text.

Birthday donuts

I missed posting yesterday, which really isn't allowed if I want to meet my posting goals for 2008. But here's the odd thing about it: I didn't post yesterday because I was bored. I was SO BORED that I couldn't be bothered doing anything. I was immobilised by boredom! That would have to be the worst survival response I've come across.

Today I am back on track and will post some pictures my friend just gave me of my birthday in April. We went to the German restaurant, which is actually not really a German restaurant (but it does have weiner schnitzel on the menu, which makes me about as happy as I will ever be).

My housemate Sas came back from Jakarta the afternoon of my birthday and brought krispy kreme donuts as a birthday cake! Thanks Sas! Here we are eating them.














There was a lot of drama surrounding the distribution of donuts.














This is me saying "Sas, let's be best friends so you bring me donuts every year".

TWO cute babies.

I hereby present the eagerly anticipated photos of....

THE CUTEST TWINS EVER BORN!

Oliver













Liam












This photo of Liam makes me laugh every time I look at it. I'm sure I'm being stared down by him. Like he's truly disgusted in me. You make me sick Sarah.

I asked Jess's approval to post these pictures this morning, and her response was "YOU'D BETTER!" I think that means she likes the kids and wants to show them off.

Note that I didn't even need to frame Jess out of these pictures taken only a matter of hours after she gave birth to twins. I will admit she does look a little tired. Maybe "I stayed up watching House too late last night" tired.

Colour Quiz

Seen on How About Orange...

Colour Sense Game. Apparently you can discover your colour personality.

Let me know if you think it works for you. (I'm going to do it again later to see if I get the same answer the second time round).

Added later: I keep getting White Spaces as my primary pallet but my secondary pallet keeps changing.

How babies and language collide

Photos of babies have begun to filter through and I can't wait to see them in real life. But I must wait two weeks (12 days to be exact) until I go back to Australia for a short visit. This could very well be the longest 12 days of waiting (especially because work is busy with many laborious and pretty dull tasks before then). But two things this morning are making it OK to wait.

1. Beck has duly informed me of the madness at the hospital when 20 big and small people all try to fit into one hospital room. I don't mind the idea of arriving when the storm has passed.

2. This morning I am finally enjoying Bahasa Indonesia.

I've learned one interesting thing about myself this year. I don't like learning new languages. I can hear the gasps around the world as I admit this (especially damning for someone who is all about international relations). It seems that everyone, especially Australians who often haven't learned a second language to fluency, longs for the opportunity to learn a new language, or relishes the opportunities they have. I'd assumed that I was the same...that hanging out in Paris, practicing ordering a croissant for 12 months sounded fun. But I've realised that I'd love eating the croissant but that I will learn the minimum language required to get it.

I thought I was just bad at learning languages, and I think it's true to a point, because I always want to translate the English thoughts in my head, even if those thoughts include idioms that no one will understand, and I struggle if I can't directly translate a sentence from the other language into English. But the truth is that I haven't been too bad with Bahasa (although if I'd studied I would probably be fluent by now). No, the most limiting factor to my success with languages is laziness. At any given moment I would much rather convey my thoughts precisely rather than practice using a language I still don't understand well. So if there is an English option I take it.

But this morning something was different. I was reading an email in Bahasa Indonesia which usually I would skim, or even copy and paste it into an online translator if it especially important and I was being especially lazy. But this morning I was feeling diligent and persisted with every word in an email that wasn't even directly written to me. And I understood! I learned new words, clarified the meaning of few others and genuinely understood a reasonably complex discussion between two people! But the real breakthrough was this: I enjoyed reading and deciphering and understanding it! This has been the missing (crucial) link to my language study.

How does this make the wait to see babies easier? It means that the daily struggle of working in a second language is eased, and moments of frustration that inevitably lead to "I don't want to be here I want be home playing with babies" are fewer and farther between.

And so the family grows

Yay for Jess, the babies are here! And in two weeks I get to see them!

The babies are commonly known as Oliver Benjamin and Liam Peter. I congratulate Jess and Mark on coming up with four good boy names all at once.

But here's the bad news...Someone has already secured http://www.oliverbenjamin.net/

Liam's internet career is safe for now, but someone better get onto securing that domain quickly.
I don't want to accuse Jess and Mark of bad parenting before the children are even a day old, but could you argue that not googling your child's name before the name is formally assigned to said child is negligent?

Just in case someone reading this blog is weird, I don't really believe you should google your child's name before they are born. I mean, if you want to go right ahead.