Introduction and first post

Dharma Police

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Feb 6, 2021
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Hi everyone, new member here. I've posted a few times already, and thought I should formally introduce myself. My name is Chris from Los Angeles, specifically Highland Park, a northeast suburb of LA. I was born in Jakarta but was raised in the U.S. This year will mark the 11th year I've lived in Indonesia.

Anyway, this is a two-parter (a 'sekalian aja', if you will) as I'd also like to know how you guys stay sane during the pandemic. No judgment if you still travel, spend evenings out, do naked Zumba on your balcony, whatever.

See you around the boards!
 
Hi and welcome to the board. Hope you stay a while!

The pandemic has so far been relatively ok for me. I am not much of a socializer, to begin with, and coping just fine staying mostly at home. Having a decent-sized garden helps, and I've been cultivating all kinds of vegetables, both in soil and hydroponically. We have 3 kids, and several kinds of animals to keep us busy (a dog, 4 fish, a soft-shelled turtle, a gaggle of chicken, and 3 birds that we kept after they fell down from their nest).
 
We have 3 kids, and several kinds of animals to keep us busy (a dog, 4 fish, a soft-shelled turtle, a gaggle of chicken, and 3 birds that we kept after they fell down from their nest).
Gasp, no cicaks?
 
Hi everyone, new member here. I've posted a few times already, and thought I should formally introduce myself. My name is Chris from Los Angeles, specifically Highland Park, a northeast suburb of LA. I was born in Jakarta but was raised in the U.S. This year will mark the 11th year I've lived in Indonesia.

Anyway, this is a two-parter (a 'sekalian aja', if you will) as I'd also like to know how you guys stay sane during the pandemic. No judgment if you still travel, spend evenings out, do naked Zumba on your balcony, whatever.

See you around the boards!
Evenings out for me...mask on and armed with surface sanitizer, BMOU (Bring My Own Utensils), and hand sanitizer. Same like you....this year is my 11th year too. Amazing how long I've stayed relatively sane all these years considering things I've survived (Jakarta culture shock, corruption, etc).
 
On whose advice do you say you are sane? Very difficult to prove... sanity. As a test there have been sane people faked insanity to get admitted to mental institutions and then found it difficult to prove their sanity. Or put another way.... how do you know you are sane?
 
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Hi and welcome to the board. Hope you stay a while!

The pandemic has so far been relatively ok for me. I am not much of a socializer, to begin with, and coping just fine staying mostly at home. Having a decent-sized garden helps, and I've been cultivating all kinds of vegetables, both in soil and hydroponically. We have 3 kids, and several kinds of animals to keep us busy (a dog, 4 fish, a soft-shelled turtle, a gaggle of chicken, and 3 birds that we kept after they fell down from their nest).
Thanks, dafluff.

My wife and I are also homebodies. I'm more extreme than her. After about 6 months of social distancing, she couldn't take it and started inviting friends and family over. Plus we had a small Christmas gathering back in December. I on the other hand would do very well as a prisoner in solitary confinement.

You're lucky to have space for pets and gardening. We live in an apartment. I mean, there are a lot of benefits to apartment living during this time. For instance I can go on long walks around the property, and the big pool helps my daughter shake off any cabin fever setting in. We all love pets though, and would love to keep some. I guess it's true what they say - the grass is always greener on the other side.
 
We have been hanging out at home, flicking between laptops, telly (him not me), gardening, cooking, household maintenance & playing with the dogs mainly.
There are days we have no problem & days where the boredom gets overwhelming.
I have to make a super exciting trip to Jakarta soon, wow! Hours of sitting in the car on a road away from the house. If i don't take hubby along with me there will be pouting :D
Anyhow nice to 'meet' you.
 
@Banana72 you're a little more cautious than us bringing your own utensils. I'm a hand-sanitizing maniac though. Plus, I make sure the mask I wear to supermarkets are the high-quality KF94 ones.

I know what you mean about adjusting to life in Indonesia. I just remind myself that whatever inconvenience or loss of personal freedoms I experience here, had its equivalent in LA / America. I tend to engage in too much rosy retrospection at times. California became an unbearably awful economy to live in when I left, and it's 10x worse now.
 
Thanks, good to meet you too.

Oh god, television. Have you seen this meme about Netflix @Bad_azz ? It just says "I finished watching Netflix". That's how I feel. Sitting down binge-watching a series is making me feel anxious now.

Even before corona I was getting back into fitness, but now instead of weightlifting I focus more on calisthenics and stretching. Also, walking. I do a lot of walking in the morning. Getting some sun during the rainy season is a must. I used to work out listening to aggressive music, but now I listen almost exclusively to jazz. It's very conducive to cooking, which I also enjoy. Nothing like a little jazz to help me forget the blues, no pun intended.

Haha, ah yes, the notorious macet. Thankfully it hasn't been an issue for me since May of last year. I've been working from home since then. The money I saved on gas alone is enough to perk me right up!
 
Another homebody here. Having said that, this is probably the least social period of my whole life, as seeing others out and about without masks has actually been a good excuse for me to not good out, an excuse I didn't really need.

I read a lot of webfiction. If anyone is looking to fill a spare month with binge-reading, I've got a recommendation. Should be at around 7 million words now. Really one of my favorite stories ever. Here's a link to the first chapter. https://wanderinginn.com/2016/07/27/1-00/
 
According to Pak Google, "1,000,000 words will take about 55.6 hours to read for the average reader".

7 million words therefore works out at more than 16 days of continuous reading. Crikey.
 
According to Pak Google, "1,000,000 words will take about 55.6 hours to read for the average reader".

7 million words therefore works out at more than 16 days of continuous reading. Crikey.
She has been posting it for about four years now. It starts off with short chapters/posts, but the longer ones can be in the 40,000 word range. It's a full time job, with her 4,200 member Patreon pulling in somewhere between $8,000 and $39,000 a month (graphtreon). Probably in the middle of that scale, since the $5 a month tier lets you read a chapter ahead.
People like it enough to pay to get the next, chapter a few days early, when they could just wait a few days to read it for free. It isn't even prone to cliffhangers...
 
@Banana72 you're a little more cautious than us bringing your own utensils. I'm a hand-sanitizing maniac though. Plus, I make sure the mask I wear to supermarkets are the high-quality KF94 ones.

I know what you mean about adjusting to life in Indonesia. I just remind myself that whatever inconvenience or loss of personal freedoms I experience here, had its equivalent in LA / America. I tend to engage in too much rosy retrospection at times. California became an unbearably awful economy to live in when I left, and it's 10x worse now.
I gotta revise my earlier statement...we actually don't always bring our own utensils..in the beginning yes (wife is way more germaphobe than I am), but after a while we just use the restaurant's and ask for a hot water in a glass instead.

Yeah sorry about living in Cali...(I used to live in Oregon and ya know how much we love you Californians!). Actually after many years living here, for me the so called 'inconveniences' gradually disappears...thanks to gojek, tokopedia, online banking (if it works), better internet (if it works), more Western style restaurants, malls, grocery stores definitely make life much much easier than when I first got here ten years ago.
 
Hey @HappyMan. I sub to a few YouTube podcasts, and only recently heard of Patreon. It's pretty amazing what some of these podcasts and vloggers make. Joe Rogan is upper echelon, but I've watched some guys who surprisingly make a good living at it. I won't name names, but this one I'm thinking of is a rather dull personality, yet he's stayed free at some impressive hotels from his travel vlog channel.

Go figure. For the content providers who aren't that remarkable, I guess it's a matter of consistency. They say success has less to do with talent than it does tenacity, after all.
 
I gotta revise my earlier statement...we actually don't always bring our own utensils..in the beginning yes (wife is way more germaphobe than I am), but after a while we just use the restaurant's and ask for a hot water in a glass instead.

Yeah sorry about living in Cali...(I used to live in Oregon and ya know how much we love you Californians!). Actually after many years living here, for me the so called 'inconveniences' gradually disappears...thanks to gojek, tokopedia, online banking (if it works), better internet (if it works), more Western style restaurants, malls, grocery stores definitely make life much much easier than when I first got here ten years ago.
Hey, hey, hey I went to college in San Francisco. I'm one of the good guys. Do you get homesick, especially for the nature? That is one of my biggest gripes about Indo life. I'm not expecting Central Park level, but man alive the city parks here are rinky dink and laughable!

I swear, if it weren't for Gojek (I rarely shop Tokped) I would've left by now. It wasn't that long ago that I'd go on absolute missions to get what I needed for a night in. Can't imagine if that was still the case. Fun fact about internet: when I worked near Semarang, it was very fast and stable. Too bad the mati lampu would have me looking like Kevin Costner in 'Dances with Wolves' though.
 
I’m not sure I can maintain my standard of living in SF unless I’m working for big tech, it’s so expensive that a family of four is considered low income if they earn less than $117,400 a year. That income here in Indiana would put you at 76 percentile.
 
Hey, hey, hey I went to college in San Francisco. I'm one of the good guys. Do you get homesick, especially for the nature? That is one of my biggest gripes about Indo life. I'm not expecting Central Park level, but man alive the city parks here are rinky dink and laughable!

I swear, if it weren't for Gojek (I rarely shop Tokped) I would've left by now. It wasn't that long ago that I'd go on absolute missions to get what I needed for a night in. Can't imagine if that was still the case. Fun fact about internet: when I worked near Semarang, it was very fast and stable. Too bad the mati lampu would have me looking like Kevin Costner in 'Dances with Wolves' though.
I do get homesick, that's why (however expensive it is) I always make my annual trip and whenever I'm back 'home' I usually do nothing but meet with friends, do grocery shopping, buy stuff like we don't have here (although throughout the years Indonesia has improved in terms of what we can buy here). I definitely miss the breweries and wineries although I drink way less now than before.
 

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