Indonesia, baby.

This is my first post since the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Did I fall off the map, you ask? Kind of. My guy got a call that Saturday, one week ago today, asking if he could come to Indonesia immediately to help out on a film.

Do you remember the scene in Ghost Busters where Bill Murry’s character says “if somebody asks if you’re a God, you say yes.” That’s always been my take on travel. When someone says “hey, would you like to go to ______,” you say yes. It won’t always work out, but I always start with yes – I want to go.

So when Daniel told me he would be gone for the month of December, but would only take the job if we (me and the kids) could come with him, I said yes, only half believing it would work out anyway. And here we are. We arrived Thursday morning after about 30 hours of travel. Talk about whirlwind. I still can’t really believe we got all four of us here for such a long stay on such short notice. And just in case you’re thinking about robbing us while we’re here – let me just say for the record that we were able to find a house sitter – I wouldn’t be announcing all this to the world if we hadn’t.

So far, it’s awesome, though the jet lag has been pretty rough on the little one and (as if that wasn’t enough) he seems to have come down with the chicken pox. We’re staying in a hotel on the island of Batam, just a short ferry ride from Singapore.

The most wicked storm just passed over. I mean, it’s probably just another day in paradise for anyone who lives here all the time, but it kind of blew me away. The thunder and lightning and deluge of rain that came out of nowhere were amazing. Three hours ago we were in the pool and I was worried about getting sunburned through my spf 50.

Because Janet Fitch taught me well, and because I was lucky enough to have both kids down for a nap, I took some time to write about the storm as it built, rattled the windows and eventually passed over, and the process of getting it all down made me miss my fiction so much.

I’ve enjoyed the other writing that I’ve been doing, but there’s something so engaging about writing a scene. Teasing out just the right words to paint a unique time and place – the sounds, the smells, the light. I just love it.

So that’s what’s up with me. I will make every effort to keep up the blogging, but frankly, we have a lot of exploring to do. You’ll have to forgive me if I put aside the cyber world for a while to indulge in a slice of real world that I’ve never seen before.