Math department dinner last night – great colleagues, super food, and a late night in the pool! Thanks to all who made it (including our principal party crasher)!
I had the chance to attend an Indonesian cow racing mud spectacle this weekend, and had quite the time. Pacu Jawi is a festival marked by, well, basically cow-surfing through flooded rice paddies. The riders typically grip the tails of two cows that are yoked together with wooden slats, and then hang on for dear life as they are stampeded through a flooded rice paddy. Outstanding stuff!!
After spending a few days at the cabin, getting things ship-shape, I drove down to the Grand Tetons to pick up Susan and the kids. We spent a day in the park, and then motored to Cokeville to stay with sister Karla and her family. Rob, Grandpa Joe, and Yia Yia were all there too, so we made quite the reunion out of things.
We had a loud 4th of July, and just spent some good time hanging out with each other.
Saying goodbye is never easy, but a get-together with friends makes it that little bit easier. Marcia is off to find her way in the world, and we were glad to send her off in style!
I got to accompany a group of 8th graders on a week-long trip to explore local communities in Indonesia. We flew up to a series of islands just south of Singapore and spent 5 days learning about the local ways of life, mostly centered around fishing. We hiked, swam, boated, and interacted with kids at a school. All in all, a pretty good way to spend a week in May!
Our trip started at the port city of Batam, where we flew from Jakarta. We hopped into boats like these for our trip to the island at which we were staying.
Loved the colors of the painted wood boat against the seawater.
I thought it was fun to try to take wake pictures. Not sure how coll they are, but here’s one anyways.
We passed stretches of green mangroves and blue sky.
Between the water and the sky, fishing villages a built on stilts due to the varying tidal levels.
We finally pulled up at the Telunas resort – our home away from home for the next few days.
Ahh – the view from our dining area towards the beach.
Our resort lights up as the sun starts to set.
The evening boat comes in.
Watching the last rays catch the water.
Here is a view of the resort at night from the beach.
Steam rising from the jungle as the morning heat rises.
Playing on the beach were all sorts of crabs. Here, two of them are hanging on to each other.
We took a trip through some mangroves for a jungle hike, and I thought this red soil was pretty dramatic.
Peaceful mangroves reflected in the river.
We hiked through the forest to a waterfall, but got absolutely deluged by rain. When we got to the falls, they were too torrential to use for swimming.
So if you wash your shorts but don’t rinse them well, go trekking through a tropical rainforest, and then get caught in a torrential downpour, you really will get streams of lathered up laundry foam running down both legs.
The service component of the trip was doing work at a local school. Because the boys were all expected to be fishermen, the students were mostly girls.
We ended the week with a self-designed pizza party cooked in a wood-fired oven. Yum!
We hippity-hopped up to JIS’s cabin in the mountains for the 3-day weekend with a group of friends who we’ve done this with for the past 2 years. Despite some early issues (like a 3-hour traffic jam), we made it up and spent a few days eating(!), drinking, and conversing. Good times!
In addition to all the cool diving that we did, we also had the chance to see some pretty extraordinary sights over spring break. This album is all from our “above water” camera, to complement the diving shots posted the other day…
We took a few snippets of video of our dive to Manta Point. Here’s a 2 minute look at what we saw (with bonus narration!). Susan, Alea, and Breck are all in here (if only fleetingly).
We headed to the Indonesian island of Flores for a week in the sun. One of our “must do in Indonesia” items was to see Komodo dragons in the wild, so that was the impetus for this trip. The first pictures, however, will be from our diving adventures. We left from Labuan Bajo and went under the sea on 3 days (only 2 with a working camera!), and saw some wondrous stuff.
Check out who showed up for dinner at the Groovy Gecko last night? Don’t worry, no escargot was served, and the kids named him “Gustav.” New family pet, I guess.
Cool class happening today: gave an assignment that kids had to present to their parents. One of them and his mom got on Skype to show it and get feedback from dad – who’s stationed in Afghanistan. Kind of a neat little thing…
Mathcounts in Singapore got off to a bit of a rough start, as one of our students was turned away at the airport due to visa issues, then we had a flight cancellation, and finally a broken bus, the team finally made it and was raring to go. Late night studying and quick trips to Subway were all the rage for our kids.
Here’s the team in all their glory after today’s competition. Mathcounts can get rough…
