Cerita Umi Bakrie

Sabtu pagi yang malas. Mengingatkan pada sabtu beberapa waktu yang lalu. Saat itu sayup-sayup terdengar suara penyiar dari radio yang terpasang: “Sabtu pagi setelah libur lebaran, rasanya masih malas kemana-mana. Kalau selama ini kita terbiasa dimanjakan dengan segala kemudahan belanja di supermarket dan hypermart. Bagaimana kalau pagi ini mencoba suatu yang lain, misalkan ke pasar tradisional? Pastinya banyak pengalaman menarik yang akan diperoleh”. Kontan saya mesem-mesem sendiri. Namanya perempuan, belanja bisa jadi salah satu kegiatan favorit. Salah satu teman saya ada yang semangat sekali dalam hal belanja berbelanja. Apalagi kalau ada iklan potongan sekian persen dari berbagai department store. Wah, pastinya dipaksa-paksain untuk menyisihkan waktu untuk mengunjungi biang pengiklan itu. Konyolnya, salah satu alasan favorit dia untuk belanja adalah, “ Lho, gue dikasih duit sama suami. Kalau nggak dihabisin ntar nggak bisa minta lagi. Daripada duitnya dia jatuh ke orang lain, men...

People sometimes put their milestone on New Year’s Eve. I put mine on the New Year Eve and on the celebration day of marking the end of fasting month or Ramadhan (Lebaran - , surely it is not a word based on Arabic, more likely coming from Javanese). The first, in term of career or professional development and the latter usually to rethink my personal experience. For me, both times is great time to review what I had done all year: What gained, what lost, regret, failure, success, next step, etc. Granted, the year between lebaran it is not the same length like the usual year we use nowadays (that’s why several years ago we experience 2 Ramadhan in a year), however, knowing that a year has passed you by surely worth for a stop and re-think the way you are planning to walk. Lebaran is a time for family, just like Christmas for the Christian, it is also reunion time – a once in a year meeting with extended family members with whom you will not see again until the next lebaran (if you are...

My schedule for today is writing a paper to be presented at the Indonesian Herpetologist Seminar next month. Too bad … within minutes I got lost … so much data, got confused and … the SPSS decide to freeze ….! So instead of working, I browse. Starting with reading Koki ( a community blog part of Kompas), moving to Wimar Witoelar blog, hopping to the Naked Traveller, then checking out on A. Fatih Syuhud blog and then decided to open google. Actually, I started by googling some research papers … just to make amend of wasting my time in the internet. Somehow instead of putting amphibian or something like that I ended up putting one of my friend’s names back in old Townsville day. Lo and behold … I got his wife blog! It’s sure nice to know good things about my old friend Doug Woodhams. I remember him as a very young postgraduate student (got his PhD at about 24 yrs – in his recent photograph in his wife’s blog he looked much more mature), very smart and very religious (it was the fir...

It was one of the worst imaginable nights I ever felt in the field. I was in Cibeureum, Mount Gede National Park for 2 days. My team has already camped there for 3 days when I arrived in the first day of January 2007 with Lutfi, Nuryani and Dian. Wempy's team (Inggar, Lubis, Boby) has surveyed Surya Kencana (around 2300m asl) for 4 days before returning below to Cibeureum and Telaga Warna (around (1300 m asl) and joined Fitri's team around Christmas. The first night, I joined Fitri's team and do some search on terrestrial transect near the walking bridge. We found three Leptophryne cruentata below the bridge. I was so happy. That night after the survey, wind began to howl. When we woke up in the morning, all our gear that was left outside was scattered all over the place. The day passed quickly, we even managed to find a secluded area where we found lots of L.cruentata ! Then night came, along with its fierce wind. All trees were swaying dangerously, and we knew for s...

It was nearly midday when suddenly Fery brought me three bleeding toad ( Leptophryne cruentata ) in separate bags. "Where did get them?" asked me curiously. It was rare to find them, least at all during the day. Later I learnt that after finding some tadpoles in the nearby waterfalls three of my students Fery, Yazid and Lubis decide to search further. Bingo, in one of the waterfall they found lots of toad well hiding in moss covered rock crevices. So, we (I, Inggar, Wempy, Neneng and Fitri) decided to come along, guided by Lubis . Jeez, it was really cold! The water temperature is around 14 degress Celcius and with all the water spray from the falls it is impossible to stay dry. But, it was WORTH it! Congratulations girls and boys! We found their home base!

Being a big Land Rover’s fan, one of the first things that Nano did upon our arrival in Bogor is to hunt for one. Less than 3 months since we arrived, we got a green 1983’s Land Rover. Yes, it is a monstrous thing but it did come handy if I need to go to some inaccessible place to do my survey. Unfortunately, last year the petrol prices soar to almost double. Since the LR loves to drink a lot of petrol, we bought (actually I insist) another car for everyday use. This time a Daihatsu TAFT Hiline, which is more efficient but Nano grumble that “ … it is not too powerful as the LR”. We still have the LR but use it rarely. Nowadays, half of Nano’s energy goes to farming. We rent a land near our place. Previously he had hundreds of home range chicken, but after the chicken got stolen little by little (it started with 5 chickens, and several weeks later 20 missing) he decided to sold almost all to the market during last Idul Fitri. He still got several chicken though, plus 4 fishponds. So I ...

It's breeding time! Of course, I did not refer to the famous ulama in Bandung, Aa Gym who choose polygamy (much to the dismay of lots of Indonesian moslem communities), which as my friend dr. Mangatas pointed out is a wrong term. It should be bigamy, or maybe if Aa Gym decides to have more than 2 wives he can then use the word Polygamy afterward...... Anyway, here is breeding season in the world of frogs. Although it is known that most of tropical frogs breed all the time, but we have seen that for some species breeding occurs only during rainy season. This year we have a very long dry spell, even for West Java especially Bogor where we don't usually have dry season (what we have is a heavy rainy season and a light rainy season). So it's been a while since we found a pair of breeding Rhacophorus reindwartdii . Even though rainy season began early November, we did not hear any male calls in our Faculty of Forestry's arboretum. We have a population of about 20 individ...