Moving Along Rapidly

The project (as the invention has come to be known) is moving along rapidly at the moment. A few months ago, it became obvious that with the sheer bulk of administrative tasks to complete, The Inventor was making little progress with the actual tasks of inventing (which actually, at this stage, is running various additional bench-top tests and designing equipment for the small-scale plant, for which a shed on the property has already been allocated). So, I decided to accompany him to the lab twice a week to assist with some of the more mundane tasks in the office, and aside from organising his filing cabinet, office space and paperwork, I am doing some regular communication and financial tasks and assisting with various jobs that are numerous in the early stages of a new company, like creating a website and various procedures and forms. He has also had invaluable assistance from an engineer from our partner company, a man with 30 years' experience in plant design, who regularly comes to assist The Inventor with design and system modelling issues. We are also rushing towards the employment of various additional staff, the first of which started today. By the end of the year the planned staff will total at least five, from engineers to a driver. With these additional staff, progress will grow exponentially, and The Inventor will need to learn new skills as his role moves from “Jack-of-all-trades” to managing a team of professionals, all devoted to making an idea from his head become a commercial reality.

I know some of you would like more information about the science and how it's progressing, and I apologise for being so vague at the moment. With a lot of things “up in the air” and my blog receiving numerous visits from total strangers, I must be intentionally light on facts. Hopefully as we become more advanced in the work The Inventor is doing and as we draw closer to the stage of commercialisation, I will be able to divulge more about the project, what has been achieved and where we are headed. Until then, please be content to know that everything is steaming ahead at almost uncontrollable speed, results are pleasing and we are managing the pace well.

Sunday Exploring

Today was a very different, relaxed and enjoyable Sunday. We decided to stay home rather than driving to Ipoh today, as I have been getting quite tired and a little run-down. We have been quite busy lately, and we also haven't been getting a lot of sleep, so a quieter day was in order. The lack of decent sleep has been in a large part due to the adoption of our little black cat, which we have named Possum. The name, courtesy of fellow Australian Dame Edna Everage, is a reference to the spectacular fluffy “feather duster” on her rear end, a tail which for a Kampar street cat is unusually complete, long and possum-like. She was starving when she landed on our doorstep, but after four weeks here is now growing well though still small. The lack of sleep is the result of the vet not wanting to spay her until she is healthy enough for the general anaesthetic. She is now in her second round of being on heat in two weeks, the yowling and unsettled behaviour being very disruptive to our sleep (and probably everyone else in our neighbourhood, as we live in a townhouse).

Having decided to skip church and Ipoh, we got up fairly early so we could have a bike ride before the heat of the day. Bikes loaded into the tray of the D-Max, we drove a few kilometres up the main road and parked by the bridge over Sungai Kampar (Kampar River). From there, a dirt road leads along the river, and I had explored it once before for a short distance. Our goal today was to continue along the road until the end, and we had a delightful time exploring the kampongs, tin-mine lakes and farms along the green, quiet road. We called “pagi” to all and sundry, raising smiles and replies from the friendly Malay women and men who worked or relaxed outside their homes. After some weaving and turning and agreeing with little concern that we were probably going to become lost or at least well off-course, we emerged at a major road we knew, and interestingly very close to where we had expected to emerge, despite the road we had traversed being unmarked on any map we have access to. After more weaving, exploring, side-tracks, pedalling and “pagis”, we found ourselves back at the car with surprisingly few hiccups. Getting off the beaten track and into nature for the morning (actually, only about 80 minutes, as it turned out, though we had been prepared for longer) was so relaxing and enjoyable, after a rest, a nanna nap and a late lunch of Japanese-style pancakes, we decided to do some more exploring in the D-Max. For three hours we drove here and there, discovering a new development at the back of Bandar Baru which looks like a new city and will house thousands, and then a short-cut through more farming land that will offer an alternative route to Gopeng once the roadworks are finished. Our curiosity, always active, led us down a number of green, shady side-roads and we discovered parts of Malaysia that we never knew we right behind our home. The most interesting were a large fish farm, and a Chinese kampong that we suspected to be one of the “new towns”, fenced villages which were established in the 1950s to house Chinese inhabitants during the communist threat known in Malaysia as “The Emergency”.

The last exploration of the day was to finally explore a road that we have been interested in since a “land for sale” sign appeared some months back. We wound up a rough dirt track, thankful for the high clearance and four-wheel drive, until I dared drive no further, then we clambered on foot up the weathered and eroded remains of road through the wasteland of the of the forgotten subdivision. Now on the market again, we dreamed of building a house there high on the hill looking away from Kampar towards the solemn hills cloaked in deep, dark rainforest, hills that reminded us so much of the dearly-beloved ancient neighbours which hang over our home in Smithfield. As we completed the drive home, the panic returned as I remembered the long list of jobs that I had allocated for Sunday, but this was a day of outdoors, relaxation and exploration in which google had no place, and for that I am happy. Tomorrow life can crowd me in once more.

The highs and lows of visa acquisition

I know that I told you about our trip to Singapore in late October, when our first tourist visa expired after three months, but I have failed to add any updates since, including the exciting news that we now have visas until June 2015, the inventor on a working pass and me on a dependant's pass. The process was slow and frustrating and consumed a lot more of the inventor's time than it should have, but finally we have the pass and can concentrate on the work that should be done. 

The three-month visitor's pass that we obtained in October was due to expire in late January, which was bad timing for us, with so many visitors coming to see us for the big birthday celebrations. So, instead of dashing to the border for a short trip again (a new three-month visitor's pass is usually issued on your return), we decided to visit the immigration office in Ipoh and paid 100 ringgits each for a two-month extension to our visitor's passes. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though we were a little dismayed to have the pass take up a whole page in our brand new passports. Later, we decided it was a bad idea, as it was to prove problematic, and we know a Canadian lady who also had problems returning after having an extension pass in her passport.

The extension allowed us to stay until late April, when we once again had to leave the country. Our daughter Timeka was staying with us at the time, working gratis for the inventor, helping him every day at the lab. We decided to make a nice trip with sightseeing, and chose Siem Reap in Cambodia. The trip was delightful, and we found the Cambodian people friendly and the food lovely. We only had two days there, but managed to have our fill of ancient temples, as well as a sampling of culture, silk weaving, massage and shopping. The most famous temple is, of course, Angkor Wat, but we also enjoyed Bayon Temple with its hundreds of Buddha faces, and especially Ta Promh, exotically entwined in the roots of enormous fig trees, mysterious and exciting. The trip was more expensive that we had anticipated, and twice we visited the ATM to get more US dollars for our transactions there. The local currency is mostly used for lower-value transactions and to give change for less than one dollar (US coins aren't used). Transactions under one dollar US aren't common for tourists- cheaper items will be offered in multiples for a dollar.

Resting briefly in a cool doorway at Ta Promh- it was an exhaustingly hot day.

An alarming number of disabled people hang around Siem Reap, drawn by the opportunity to work for tourist dollars. Few of them beg, preferring to play in small orchestras like this one, or sell books or other nick nacks to tourists. Many are the victims of Khmer Rouge landmines, which are still claiming lives and limbs.

Cambodia is so close to Malaysia, but worlds away culturally and developmentally. While airconditioned taxis exist, tuk tuks are also prolific and cheap.

We landed back in KL airport just before midnight on the Sunday night, after an enjoyable weekend away. We had hoped that the immigration officials would be tired and happy to stamp our passports once again, but this was not to be. Timeka had no problems getting a new tourist pass, and I also was granted one after a brief discussion on the topic of the whole-page pass. The inventor, however, was not so lucky, and the lady that he approached was reticent to allow him passage into the country at all. He was marched off to another office, and returned not too much later with a 28-day pass. Immigration had figured that if his working pass was imminent as he claimed, 28 days would be sufficient to complete the necessary paperwork for this. As the 28 days ticked past, however, it became obvious that we were not going to have the paperwork and bank account for the newly-created company ready for his employment pass. Company registration was complete, but we still had job descriptions, company structures, job offers and numerous other paperwork to create, and each visit to Putra Jaya by the office girl resulted in new information and new list of papers to procure.

21 years goes so quickly!

A rare mothers' Day with my Mum, daughter and sisters.

The inventor's pass would expire mid-April, just days before we were due to fly to Australia for our son's 21st birthday party. We decided that the easiest course of action would be to fly a few days earlier, especially as the inventor was achieving little work while being consumed with the task of acquiring a visa. We flew to Australia and had a very busy time visiting family and friends in Brisbane, Cairns and the Gold Coast, then paid yet more money to alter the return flights, the inventor to stay a few extra days for a specialists appointment and me another week to help Timeka move house. It was to be almost another month before everything was completed for our long-term visas, which arrived in Kampar with little fanfare but great excitement on our part. The very last problem we had with the visa acquisition was in offering our original wedding certificate at Immigration Department. The original was not sufficient, and the poor girl from KL office had to travel across town to the Australian Embassy to acquire what immigration wanted, which was a copy of the certificate, stamped to verify that it was a true copy. Malaysians are certainly fond of "chopping", the term they use for a rubber stamp.They've obviously been taking lessons from either Australia or Great Britain in the refinement of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork.

We now have no good excuses for another international trip, though we would like to take a short trip to Vietnam, so maybe will break with tradition and actually take some of the public holidays that are coming up after Ramadan. The Moslem month of fasting will start on the 9th July. Hari Raya is the celebration at the end of Ramadan, and the four-day weekend will be in mid-August, so for now we will be looking at some hard work and hopefully some good breakthroughs in the lab.