It is January 2004 now more than one year since I left America in September 2002. Life is normal as it can be. We are still not making enough money to pay expenses and Yuli is helping us some. The contract on the house at Riung Bandung just finished. I convinced Teti that we should move back into our house in Bandung that we own. At least that way we will not have to worry about renting. We have been here for two months now. I borrowed $1, 000 from a friend of ours to get moved in. We had to replace the water pump that someone stole from the house and I have painted most of the interior. My back is finally better. It hurt for a month after the heavy lifting of the furniture we moved. I had to do about 50% of the work to keep the people we hired motivated. We moved everything to here in one day. All of the money is gone as of today January 28. I just scraped up all of the change to check the Internet business. I made a few shipments that had been back ordered with money from today's sells. I am waiting for an advance from a man in Canada that wants me to build five web sites for him over the next six months. I gave him a special price of $200 each for that many and with the condition he would send me the advance. So far staying here has not been a problem other than a whole lot of cleaning. I have a check of $275 from Google.com that should come any day for advertising space I sold them last month. We still have our health and are happy that we are together. I have upgraded all of the web sites hoping to get more traffic rather than sells. Traffic means I get more money for advertising space, which is easier to deal with than real customers.
We got the money a few days ago from the webs site design that I am working on right now. The money is already gone. I bought some groceries and caught up some back order shipments. The business account is back even again. I am still waiting for the money from the Google account. I had a sale today but the item was out of stock so I had to refund the money. I had e-mail from a man wanting a quote for web design. I quoted him $400 for the site. It will take some time if he does decide to get a web site to finalize the deal. I also had e-mail from Stanley. He said he met with Yuli last week after she had called him to get back together. I am not sure when but after he met with her a day or two later he found her out with an old boy friend again. Stanley said he got into a fight and was thrown out by bouncers. I returned to the house around noon and worked on the new site for Ross from Canada. Teti has been cleaning all day. She cleans a lot. Tiara keeps her busy with making a mess and wanting someone to pay her some attention.
Feb 5, 2004
Money is still tight. I had one big order today from our collectibles section of the web site for $85.00. I cleared about $40.00 from the sale. I am still working on the web site for Ross from Canada. This takes up a lot of my time. I have to go to the local Internet cafes to upload the material and communicate with him. I think it is fun though that I can talk with him instantly by chatting. I can make changes to the site and he will tell me if he likes or not right then. I am still waiting for my mom to call and say that my money from Google is there. I have to go back to Singapore this month to renew my visa. I still have to pay for the extension the immigration office here in Bandung just completed. I hope I get enough money in time to pay everything. I do not have anyone to ask for help. I am sure that God answers my prayers. I believe he is always taking care of us because just when I think it is impossible to get out of a problem I always get a surprise to take us through a little further. I cannot understand why God takes care of me the way he does because I am sure that I am not worthy. But I know by the timing that it can only be from God. God works in Mysterious ways.
I decided again to try and get into the furniture business. I contacted three companies on the Internet. Just as I arrived back home one man Stuart called me. He owns the business klynnfurniture.com. He agreed that I could sale his products at the same price as he does on our web site and use his pictures as long a I bought from him. If I make sales he will cut my price some as a distributor of his products so I can make some profit. I had told him that Teti had family that owned a factory. About a week later he called and said he wanted to meet over a cup of coffee and maybe go see the factory. We met him and a friend of his, Peter at a local restaurant. After a few hours of talking Peter said he had to go pick up his children at the school. Stuart agreed to go out and visit the factory and see if he could negotiate some good prices on a recent order of his. It turns out that his normal supplier had raised his prices to a point he barely could make a profit anymore.
Once at the factory Stuart was very impressed with it. He talked with our family and was able to somewhat close a price for his order.

To Be Continued...