It's mid-October, and the weather is starting to change. It rained briefly while we were in Semarang, and it's rained briefly here a couple of times in the last couple of days. It's really hot at the moment. Yesterday the wind started unusually early in the day, and was unusually hot, strong, and unpleasant.

Meanwhile, the rice cycle here in Ngoto continues to roll by. Some of the fields near us are now on their third crop.

It's hard work, rice-farming. First, there's the ploughing (light ploughs are pushed by the farmers themselves; you fairly often see heavier mechanized ploughs trundling from site to site, and then turning their wheels into ploughshares, as it were; buffaloes are used only rarely). Then there's the planting (always done by hand). Then, when the crop is ripening, you have to be up early in the morning scaring off the bands of little winged looters that are for ever pillaging your crop.

After that comes the labour of threshing. Some people use a mobile threshing machine. Some of these have little motors attached, but many are pedal-powered. In many fields the rice is threshed by hand, which involves whacking each bundle of cut stalks several times on a hard surface. No need to visit the gym once you've done a few hours of that.

Finally, you have to deal with the straw. This is bundled up into small haystacks, and transported, mostly by bicycle but sometimes by motorbike, to the livestock whose feed it provides. Sometimes, on our way to work, we encounter whole platoons of bicycle-borne haystacks.

Once the paddies are cut and cleared of straw, it's time for quack teams of fertilizers to do their stuff. Not all the teams are as disciplined as the one Nigel describes. In fact, the lot we encountered this morning were downright wayward, and giving their ancient duckherd a really hard time. A breakaway group ended up in the irrigation channel, from which they had to be shooed by a helpful farmer.

In other news, we are sad to report a blatant case of plagiarism. We have frequently been cheered on our morning walk by one particular chicken's very distinctive crow. It is not so much cock-a-doodle-doo as cock-a-doodle-boo-hoo-hoo, and on account of this peculiarity we have named him the Tragic Chicken. Well, now someone has started to imitate him... Shocking.

This winged visitor landed briefly on our dishes the other week. But another new visitor to the neighbourhood generally appears to attract more negative attention. This is the transgender person who occasionally stops to buy her breakfast from Bu Nani. While she's around, Nigel reports, a deathly hush descends on the other customers. Transgenderism is generally not well regarded in Indonesia, and this is a very conservative neighbourhood.

And, finally, the perumahan committee has decided we will start to recycle non-organic waste... Watch this space.