Year End Recital

This Friday was a holiday in Indonesia:  Waiki, the Buddhist New Year.  The shortened work week became quite a long week for me.

This week, we completed the cutover to an outsource provider in India for a major portion of MIS and other administrative functions.  My team will be building the system that we will eventually use in the combined organization to manage support requests.  To close out on the system design, we had a meeting on my Wednesday night that did not end until after 11 PM.  I didn't fall asleep until 1 AM.

Thursday morning I had a tennis lesson at 6 AM. Normally, that's when I start work. This week, however, my daughter had her year end recital in the morning. That started at 8:30, so I squeezed in a tennis lesson. As expected, my daughter made us very proud parents with six different performances that required four costume changes, learning the songs and choreography, and even playing a musical instrument for two of the songs. The video below is a portion of her performing in the Spanish-themed flamenco routine. I'll put together a DVD of her entire performance, for anyone who is interested...let me rephrase, since this is the Internet - anyone whom I know personally that wants a DVD can get one.

After the show, we all went to lunch to celebrate and then I went to work.  After work, I joined up with the group that plays rugby on Thursday nights.  We normally share a field with another group that plays Gaelic football.  They didn't have enough for their game, we didn't have enough for ours, so we combined the groups and played an hour of each.  I think I prefer Gaelic football.  The game is a much better fit for my "always move forward" instincts.

Friday was my day off from work and I slept in as best I could with two young children.  In the afternoon, we took a brief shopping trip to Jalan Surabaya, the antique shops where I learned the hard way about buying things with which you are not familiar a few years ago.  I did a much better job bargaining this time, only buying items with which I had a familiarity.  We added to our growing collection of uniquely Indonesian artwork.

The above items join this artwork we already owned:

Saturday we kept to our tradition of taking the kids somewhere fun and made a return visit to Lollipops, where my daughter did the bungee trampoline and zip line.  Many of you commented that she is fearless.  That's because I only show you the pictures of her when she isn't scared. I have others where her confidence is not so high (meaning, it's the first time she's doing it).

Today (Sunday), we're having some friends and their kids over for a visit to use the pool and socialize.  Our maid will make a traditional Indonesian meal of Gado Gado, Nasi Goreng and Lumpai.

Six more days until we leave for our European vacation!