Plevyaks in Bali

This afternoon, Rams completed the online portion of the PADI open water diving course! He wants to do his open water dives in Mexico with friends and be able to dive in Bali. The online portion is about 12 hours of videos and quizzes, and it is such a relief to have it done!.... Next is the pool work with his buddies in May!

Today I got my final vaccination until July.   Now I can focus on diseases that have no vaccine yet!  A big one is Dengue Fever.  For those of you unfamiliar, it is very common (it's found in Florida) and can result, if it presents as hemorrhagic fever, in one bleeding from ones orifices and internal organs.  Subsequent infections may be more severe than the initial one. John has declared that if he gets it once, he's heading back to SF without us! Sniff, sniff. Check out this episode of Hypochondriactor for a humorous dengue story: https://hypochondriactor.simplecast.com/episodes/steve-zahn-dengue-fever To recap, it is best to avoid Dengue Fever.  It is spread by mosquitos 🦟 .  DEET is an effective, but toxic repellent.  The natural repellents work to some extent but are stinky.  But there is a new product in town that beats them both: Picaridin .  It is as effective as DEET but is non toxic on the skin, odorless, and lasts 12 hours....

Wow, we have we learned a lot about staying healthy while traveling in parts of the world with less developed infrastructure.  Did you know you can get Rabies from the lick of a friendly dog AND it is 100% fatal without treatment?  Fun Times!  The great part is that there IS a preventative vaccine and we are getting it! There are a number of illnesses common in Bali that we don't give much thought to here.  Rams is up to date on his "childhood" vaccinations, but John and I needed boosters for Polio, HepA, and HepB.  We will all get Typhoid, Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies shots, Covid boosters and Flu when available. We feel so greatful that medicine has advanced so far and is available to us.  But OWW, our shoulders are sore!

It's weird to think about leaving your life as you know it, even for a short period of time.  An unanticipated result of accepting admissions to The Green School was an ever growing list of things we want to do, Before We Go (BeWeGos for short.).  This week's BeWeGo is seeing The Mullers!  Tesla and Rams met in kindergarten.  So, we drove up to Ashland Oregon to spend some time with these awesome friends, newly relocated to the US... before we go.

The sun in Bali is strong that close to the equator and our Northern/Eastern European skin has next to no natural protection, hence our deep dive into sunscreen.   California Baby was our go to, but Rams hates the thick texture and won't wear it.  KINESYS was our fav spray, but is not reef-safe which feels environmentally irresponsible.  Rams and I are also sensitive to fragrances (Tide gave Rams a full body rash after his surgery.) So, our new fav is Blue Lizard out of Australia.  I have long appreciated the sun protection innovations of those melanin-challenges Aussies...Mal and I rocked Australian-made shorty sunsuits at the beach long before they were available at Target. The best feature of Blue Lizard is that the white bottle turns Purple when exposed to UVrays.  Stupid parents don't have to tell Rams to slather it on.  The lotion tells him.

One of the very first things we did after accepting admission to Green School was load up the Duolingo app to learn Bahasa Indonesian.  Indonesia has thousands of islands and many local languages. Upon becoming an independent country, they didn't want one group to be perseived as favored over another.  So they chose as the official language, a version of Malaysian.  So far it seems to be a well ordered language and Duolingo has gamified the learning process.  The downside is that John and I are as invested in "winning" Duolingo as learning Bahasa Indonesian!

 Over the last few weeks as we have told folks of our plans, request have come in for a blog, so here it is.  Check back for news and photos here.