The news is in, we're having a ......

Boy!

Okay, probably only like six of you didn't already know that. News seems to travel very quickly these days.

In other news....

My daughter has her first boyfriend, which makes me wonder what, exactly, they are teaching in that school. She told us last night at dinner that she loved - yes, she actually used that word - a boy at school. She also said she loved her teacher. Today, when my wife dropped her off, the little boy ran up and grabbed her hand and ran back into the classroom to play. I told my wife, when we learned we were having a daughter, that life would be difficult. When you have a boy, you have one penis to worry about. When you have a girl, you have EVERY penis in the world to worry about. And so it begins.

Nightlife in Jakarta is interesting. I don't mean bars and clubs, I mean the animals you hear in the middle of the night. I always know what time it is by the sounds I hear coming from outside the house. At 8 PM every night, it's time for the bats. They have a shrill screech as they take flight and try to catch as many mosquitoes as possible. We see them, flying their erratic, drunken flight, if we take a walk after dinner. At 9 PM the frogs come out. It took me quite a long time to realize the noise we were hearing was a frog. For a while, I thought the noise was one of the kids in the neighborhood with a noisemaker. The best way to describe it is to imagine the sound a donkey makes "HEE-haw", give it the voice of Disney's Chip and Dale chipmunks, and have them say "F--- me". We laugh every time we hear it. The other, more unfortunate, noise, seems to occur every Sunday night after 8 PM. It's a siren. Brief, blippy, bursts. BLOOP........BLOOP. Spaced a minute apart. Luckily, it usually shuts off after about an hour.

Two last pieces of news. I've activated anonymous comments for my blog. You no longer need to login to post a comment. We are also communicating with everyone on Skype. If you want to converse with us via video - and for free - send me an email and I'll send you our Skype info.