The rainy season (musim hujan) blasted upon us in December just as I left for Singapore to renew my Indonesian visa. I felt that the house was ready for anything. I eagerly anticipated a few days of shopping and eating in Singapore while I waited for my visa renewal to be processed. Even though it rained the entire time I was in Singapore, I enjoyed myself confident in the knowledge that my retirement home was safe and secure should the rains in Bali be anything like they were in Singapore.

Upon my arrival home, I noticed that main road from the airport to my house one hundred kilometers away showed signs of flooding, but I had a car full of toys and clothes for the children and was looking forward to seeing them. Life was wet but indeed good, and retirement meant never having to say, "I have to go to work."

A mild drizzle was falling from the evening sky as I pulled into my driveway. As I opened the front door of the house, a stream of water rushed past me seeking lower ground. Soaked towels were scattered around the floor and water stains streaked the walls. But no human activity was evident on the first floor. I abandoned my suitcases and dashed up the stairs to the second floor, slipping on the wet tiles and bruising my knees as I frantically clutched the railing to keep from tumbling backwards. Limping out onto the second floor, half of my wife's extended family was rushing about with buckets, mops and towels trying to stem the torrent of water cascading down from the third flood. Noticing me, everyone smiled wanly and wished me welcome. I ran to the third floor stairs just in time for the electricity to flash out, flash back on and flash out once again. By the time I was able to find a flashlight and maneuver my way upstairs, I noticed that my beautiful, authentic rattan curtains were missing. Life was wet but surely good, and retirement meant having plenty of time to clean up the house the next day.
 

Apparently the north coast of Bali is visited by cyclones. I discovered this while questioning my wife and her brother about the location of my curtains and the tropical plants that I had lovingly cultivated in my balcony garden. The presence of cyclones was somewhat of a revelation to me after almost ten years of staying on the island during my vacations from teaching. I always managed to be off-island during the monsoon season and, of course, no one wanted to upset me by mentioning such an unpleasant fact of life in my tropical paradise.

Peering inside my study, I noticed my bed upended and the mattresses stained a deep red indicating massive water absorption. My computers, television, scanner and printer were piled on top of the desks covered with obviously wet towels. The power surged back on and the extent of the flooding was evident. Life was drier in Chicago, and retirement meant that I had no excuse not to repair the remnants of my former study. 

A total accounting of the following three days of monsoon madness were: three computers power supplies shorted out, one scanner capable of creating a rhythmic knocking as it vainly tried to advance the scanning mechanism, a printer that printed a series of numbers and symbols generally used to signify obscenities, a television that hissed when plugged in, a microwave that flashed "888888" and avoided  responding to programming, three rattan curtains shredded on the beach forty feet away, four beds that required three days to dry out, and seventeen roofing tiles scattered around the monkey's play area on the first floor. Life in Paradise was coming to resemble the Garden of Eden after the snake dropped in to visit, and retirement meant having no place left to flee. 

But, for the patient and the good, there are always solutions to problems. Humbled but hopeful, I headed off in my trusty Kijang to Denpasar to purchase new power supplies for my computers; I explained to my children that life would go on without microwaved popcorn, having only one television meant that we could watch it as a family and that using sleeping bags for a few days would be an adventure - they seemed rather doubtful. After purchasing my goods in Denpasar, I began making my way home in another downpour - life could be as good as ever, I reasoned, once I had my computers repaired and was back doing some editing and designing. The two-hour trip home stretched into five as the windshield wipers dropped off the car, one of the headlights suddenly faded to black, a tire blew out, and the ball joint began screeching. I arrived home drenched, tired and bleary-eyed from holding my head out of the car window in an attempt to visualize the road. Life in Paradise was a long, wet ride, and retirement meant living far from a freeway.

Eventually, my internet-connected computer was repaired, and I logged in to retrieve e-mail and ftp some updates to a webzine. Having no e-mail waiting was a surprise as I usually received several hundred a day from a multitude of listservs. Unperturbed, I logged in to the webzine server only to find that I was uploading an article at a whopping 15 bytes per second which rapidly dropped to zero. The connection timed out after twenty minutes of doing nothing. The ISP informed me that nothing was wrong with their server - must be me. After three days of playing with the computer and growing increasingly frustrated, I dropped by the ISP office to have a discussion about my problems only to find that a crowd of subscribers were there biding their time as they had no connections either. After a long discussion about our problems, the clerk admitted that the chief technician had left for a month's vacation and no one else really knew what was wrong but someone from Denpasar would come up within a few days to track down the problem. Seven days later, I received a backlog of 4,587 e-mails. The connection was still impossibly slow and trying to ftp anything anywhere was useless. Life in Paradise meant having no alternative ISPs, little technical help and a surplus of rain; retirement meant having a lot of time to brood about life.

Cyclones came and went, we storm-readied the house, new surge protectors and stabilizers were bought for our electrical equipment. The monsoons departed for another eight months. Power returned to its usual semi-reliable state; the ISP technician returned and repaired the server problem; the car was serviced and rehabilitated. Life in Paradise once again returned to the peaceful, tropical rhythms that I love, and when a call came offering me a job in Pakistan, I accepted in a flash.

The following is the first article Bruce wrote for the magazine:

• Reflections On An Expatriate Life ~ Escaping To Asia