House Construction (Not Ours)

A month ago our house was in the middle of some nice fields. Since then people have started building 5 houses around ours. I mean, right next to on each side. Pretty soon we'll be in the middle of a neighborhood. So today a truck asked to use our driveway to turn around in since the road is barely wider than one vehicle. I said yes and he entered our parking area. Because of the weight of the truck and all the sand it was carrying, it sank into the ground. Here's a picture of the truck. They are shoveling the sand out so they can lighten the truck enough to jack it up and get it out. Gotta love our soft driveway.

Stuff to do

No rain today thankfully. Seeing as it is the end of the month and the end of the quarter, there are plenty of reports to do. Maybe I should write a poem or an ode to reports seeing as I love them so.

More on the weather

So true to form, it rained both Saturday and Sunday. Luckily there was a break for a few hours on Saturday so I went to the beach and got a few rays of sunshine before heading back. Just when I got back it started pouring again. I wasn't so lucky today for Ultimate Frisbee. We had been playing for about half an hour when it started pouring. We stopped the game due to the really high wind and I offered to give a friend a ride home before I remembered that he lives on the other side of town from me and the field we play at. So I drove him home on my motorcycle in the rain and got even wetter than I was. The upshot is that My bike got a good cleaning from the rain. I guess I did too.

Downpour

It has rained straight the last two days which wouldn't be that big of a deal except that first, its the dry season and second carpenters don't tend to build cement houses when it is raining. So we haven't gotten a lot done and all the roads are turning back into mud. I'm sure there willb e some flooding as well.

The folklore for Aceh is that if it starts raining Thursday afternoon (which it did), it will continue raining the whole weekend (which is has so far). We'll see what it looks like. I was planning on going to the beach on Saturday and playing ultimate frisbee before church on Sunday.

UPDATE: Apparently I've gotten it wrong. If it rains all day friday (which it has), it will continue to rain all week (we'll see).

Family Update

My older sister, Niki, has a few new waterfalls behind her house in Kauai because of the dam bursting. She's fine though and my parents will be visiting her after tax season.

Congrats to my brother, Paul. He has finally passed the last section of the CPA exam. That means he is now a Certified Public Accountant, like our dad. That means he can also now sign his name, Paul Knutson CPA.

My other brother, Ben, just bought a new car since he crashed his other one. Its really cool looking. Its a Saturn Ion or something like that.

My little sister, Valerie, has a new boyfriend, Jacob. Everyone I've talked to says he's really cool and that she really likes him. Gotta love LeTourneau for matchmaking, at least if you are a girl.

Tremblers a plenty

I don't know what happened but after a couple months of relative calm, we've had about 5 small earthquakes in the last 3 days that I have felt. There was also another tsunami in an island somewhere in central Indonesia that killed a few people and destroyed some villages. Haven't heard a lot more on that though. I hope this isn't leading up to anything major.

Baywatch here I come

WE had a beach barbeque yestderday at a beautiful beach not too far from here. I invited a bunch of people from other NGOs to join us and when we showed up on the beach, we found a makeshift lifeguard stand and two of my surfer friends standing guard over the beach. They have decided to start lifeguarding and hopefully developing a lifeguard program since an average of more than one person a month dies at this particular beach. When the food was ready, I took their place as lifeguard for a half hour while they got some food and socialized. It was another awesome day at the beach and if you are wondering, no I didn't have to save anyone.

Strange Earthquake

We just had a really strange earthquake. I was sitting on the couch at about 10:15 PM watching Morning Call on CNBC when it felt like a car ran into the side of the house. Most earthquakes here (and there are still a lot) feel like a bunch of shaking and bumping. This one was just a big jolt and then it was done. At least I hope it was an earthquake. I'll find out in the morning. Time for bed now.

Store Wars

Okay, I'm a huge fan of organic foods. Now what I mean by that is probably NOT what you are thinking.

Here is the main definition of Organic:

Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms.

Organic is the antithesis of synthetic, which means produced in a lab from chemicals. Pretty much everything we eat is technically organic except maybe water. The term has been hijaked lately to mean food grown in a certain way. Really, anything grown or gotten from a living organism is organic. That means that ALL eggs, fruits, vegetables and meats are organic. Technically, gas and oil are also organic since they are derived from living organisms. That is why we designate some oil as synthetic, because it doesn't come from living organisms. It is created artificially in a lab. Maybe some oil producers should start marking their oil as "organic."

Thats my rant about Organic Foods. All that being said, the following is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while.

Be sure to watch Store Wars

Rant on Ruby

Sorry for most of you who wont have a clue what I am talking about but I just need to rant a little about Ruby, the programming language. I have very fond memories at how easy Ruby was to learn in college for basic stuff and so every time I want to write a simple program to solve a problem, I start with Ruby. What I always forget is that every time I do, I get frustrated by a couple of limitations that always end up making me switch to another language. Those limitations are the lack of multidimensional arrays and a deep recursion stack limit. I always seem to run up against those limits. I've done it again and will try Python.

Breaking Hearts

"Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God."
--Bob Pierce

When I was in college I had to go to a lot of chapels. To be honest, I didn't really want to go and rarely remembered anything that was said. The one thing that I remember is the quote above by Bob Pierce. I thought it was a good motto for life. I couldn't remember who quoted it though and yesterday when I was doing some research into Samaritan's Purse, I found out that it was Bob Pierce who said it. He was a co-founder of Youth for Christ, founder of World Vision and finally founded Samaritan's Purse which as you know is who I now work for. How cool is that?

Hooked on Sudoku

A little over a year ago, my dad mentioned a game called Sudoku and said that it was really fun. I didn't have time then to try it out but I was bored the other day and decided to find some trivia and mind games. I ran across Sudoku on Braingle and have become hooked. If you've never heard of it before, there is a grid 9x9 and the object is to fill all the cells with numbers 1-9 such that each row, column and 3x3 sub-grid only has one occurence of each number. It's amazingly addictive. Plus it's like a workout for the mind. Gotta keep that muscle in shape.

Corregidor

When I was at Faith Academy visiting my old elementary school, I ran into an old friend named Peter Beck. We decided to go to Corregidor together. For those of you who don't know, Corregidor was a major US Navy base during World War II and a sight of some major battles.

Anyways, so we decided to get a cheap ride over and overnight it camping out on the beach. That was the plan anyways. When we went to buy tickets, the only operating boat was Sun Cruises and they didn't sell passages only. You had to buy a tour package. So we decided to do that and just eat the cost. Well, we only bought a one day tour and just figured we could come back the next day. When we asked, they told us that we would have to pay for a return ticket as well. Grr!!! But they had a special that had a hotel room and a return ticket the next day for less than the price of the unconfirmed return tickets. Needless to say we decided to do that. We ended up in an airconditioned hotel room with hot showers. Thats better than my house in Aceh and I was expecting to be camping on the beach!

Okay, so we got to the island and started to take the shuttle tour around the island that we had paid for but about 10 minutes into the 5 hour tour we decided not to continue. We got off and hiked around the island off the tourist paths for several hours and saw lots of really cool stuff. I'll explain more in the pictures. By the end of the day we were completely exhausted, dirty and ready for a nice shower and bed. Boy did it feel good. we saw so much the first day that there wasn't a whole lot to see the second day so we just hung out by the beach and relaxed. To put it more accurately, we were too sore to do anything.

Without further ado, here are some pictures:
This is a picture of Peter and I waiting for the ferry to Corregidor. Interestingly enough, we dressed with very similar clothes and the same colors. Fahion faux pax? Nah, we're guys.

This is a picture of the main part of the base. You can see how the structure is crumbling. This one is in a well kept area. We hiked through the jungle and found many more old buildings like this with lots of vines and trees all over the place. Plus when you find them in the woods, you can explore the buildings and don't have to worry about them telling you not to. They like to warn you about falling debris. Oddly enough a softball sized chunk of concrete fell off once and hit me on the leg. Luckily it only broke the flashlight I was carrying and just hurt a little bit. Good thing it didn't hit me in the head.

This picture is me coming out the opening of a shaft in the ground. It looks really cool but didn't actually lead anywhere. We found much more interesting ones but none that looked as cool from the outside.

This is me in a tunnel like many we climbed in. There were lots of these small Japanese styled caves around the island. One of them we climbed in and it had a degree of decent around 60 degrees. It was made of dirt too. Climbing down was basically an effort not to slide down with a torrent of dirt. We weren't even sure if we could get out. Turned out we could though. There was another tunnel that opened up onlo a cliff face. Really cool. You just come to the edge and look down 200 feet to water. These caves are why we were so dirty after the day. I still have dirt all inside my shoes and cell phone.

There were tons of battery installations on the island. This is one of the larger ones we found. The plaque was partially destroyed so all we could read was ***** battery. This confirms that it was a battery but not which one. As far as we could tell on the map, it is Cheney battery. Of course with a gun that big, you have to ride it.

Back in Indonesia

I arrived back in Indonesia last night and flew up to BA first thing this morning. I got off the plane and was immediately working. I've had a really sore throat for the last couple of days but didn't think a whole lot of it. I was walking around inspecting houses this morning and then came home. Now I'm really starting to come down with something. I don't know if it is related to the sore throat, what I ate for lunch or just sunburn/heat exhaustion. Whatever, I'm not feeling real good.

Because of this I'm sorry I don't have the energy to post more pictures and stories about my trip. I promise I will as soon as I have the strength to do so.