It's oppressive in Taipei at the moment, the weather somehow matching our mood as time very slowly drips away. The skies gushed most of the weekend, yet we somehow, just by chance, managed to secret ourselves inside during showers and travel when there was a little respite. The temperatures are warm to hot, the humidity high and the comfort factor very low as the year slowly leaks away to our summer holiday.

Cass got her "Bookies" rallied for one more meeting before the end of the year on Friday evening, and Rhonda's hosting skills were appreciated as she cooked up some of the girls' old favourites. They "Skyped" Paige who was preparing for her day's work in Canada in the early morning, having a good look around her new apartment from some electronic visuals and catching up generally. I, in turn caught up with Wal and Shaun and we were joined by very special guest Trev, who had made the journey back from New Zealand to attend his long-time secretary's retirement dinner. We'd been sworn to secrecy about his visit and it seems we did a good job, as Jenni was completely bowled over when he walked through the door to surprise the gathering!

Cassy and I had a trip to the Thai restaurant down at Sogo in between downpours on Saturday and we had a delicious feast. We went to Uniqlo and I ended up making two purchases to Cassy's one, which was a little unusual: the fact is we're almost exclusively outfitting ourselves from this store these days, which is probably a little weird. Please let us know if we start to look too much like Japanese 20-30 year olds, which I think is their dominant market demographic! We managed to pick up some bread and cake on the way home and dropped down the driveway into the garage just as the bigger drops plopped and then bashed away on the corrugated iron awning just below our verandah.

On Sunday, we decided to get down to the southwest zone of the city to visit "Danish Warehouse" which has been storing our 1950s era Danish dining chairs. I reported a while back that we'd sourced three chairs through their online store and that Jack, the owner, had found another in Denmark to round out the set. Shipping costs to our place in Newcastle were prohibitive to say the least (mainly the Australian land component: the last 150km!), so we've decided to get them delivered here and just store them in one of our bedrooms.

The "warehouse" is really a very chic gallery with revolving exhibitions every couple of months and this month featured some unique and amazing hand made spectacles. The incredible aspect of these items is that they are all made from wood! Wood of all types were used to form very fashionable frames, one pair was even faced with a thin slice of shale! We were lucky enough to meet the artist and she guided us through the process of making them and showed off some of the pieces. After this little bonus, we paid Jack the remainder of the money for the chairs: unlike the airconditioner mechanics from years ago, they didn't beat us home this time, but they are delivering them today when we get home from work!

As we were in the general vicinity, we wandered the Shida Road student haunts for a while and thought we'd visit the ever-popular KGB (Kiwi Gourmet Burger). It was so popular, however, that every table was taken and we were forced to search further afield. After a few initially promising leads down this alley or that, we stumbled upon "La Pizza No. 2" which had a cozy ambiance and some really tasty food as a lunch time set. Still raining, of course, we were glad to burrow along under the city streets all the way home on the ever-slick MRT. One more blog entry next Monday and then I'll be taking by annual sabbatical (in a very rough sense of the word: I certainly won't be doing any academic training....quite the opposite!)

Photos: Some Penny Farthing style bike racks and wildlife sculptures in a local park, Chee Chee broke his arm and had his "cast" signed, a bespectacled Cassy readying herself for the Thai feast, and part of her Book Club crew on Friday night.

89 singing and dancing cast members, along with a dizzying tribe of extras and musicians and crew made this year's middle school production almost "bigger than Ben Hur" yet again. It doesn't seem possible, but each incarnation of the show becomes grander and more lavish than the last. It's production creep!

Cass once again gathered a crack team of make-up artists to  ably fill her room in the wings of the refurbished auditorium for preview shows through the week as well as the huge sell-out performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I snuck along to the big Saturday show in the few hours leading up and was witness to some excellent direction from Maestro Cassy and no-nonsense advice to get all the prima donnas shuffled in, primped and primed, then ushered out to await their stage entry. It really was a well-oiled machine, and each work station was busily blushing, lipsticking and eyelining at a rapid pace, as the assembled throng awaiting entry hummed and sang their lines while doing little pirouettes and pas de deux. Their hair, set professionally by the salon round the corner, ringleted and pinned, unmoving from great fogs of hairspray and their costumes fitted, fancy and bespoke from the finest of professional tailors: where do they go from here? Their weddings must end up being minor disappointments, I imagine!

Cassy's weekend was pretty dominated by play preparations and events, yet we still managed to get out and about on Saturday to the cinema and a new French cafe in the suburb. Mad Max: Fury Road was all I was anticipating and a whole lot more. Expecting a post apocalyptic excitement thrill ride, we got that, but also, an amazing allegory exploring survival, the fragility of the world as we know it and an interpretation of feminist power in a physically brutal setting. The new "Max", Tom Hardy, was well cast but perhaps not perfect. We heard rumours that the late Heath Ledger was in line for the role, but we thought that Sam Worthington might have been even better: surely we could have found an Aussie to play Max! Despite that minor flaw, we both thoroughly enjoyed the experience and two hours later we staggered from the cinema almost physically spent from the non-stop action and visual assault....wow!

We wandered across to the Jasper Villa building which now houses "Cafe V" where we lounged in opulent, velvet covered chairs and ate galettes and  gateaux while enjoying the treetops view from the second floor. From there, it was time to scooter down to the bread shop, get some supplies and get Cass home in time to return to school for the night performance.

On Sunday, I soaked up the Knights great win (at last!) while Cass was at the production and when she got home we went and did some food shopping before going to our "treat" restaurant just down the road, Wendel's Backerei. Cass usually books this in as a reward for the deprivations of a week away at camp, but it felt similarly appropriate this time too! We enjoyed a fine glass of red with our usual entrees of platters of both smoked salmon and mushrooms. Our main meals of wiener schnitzel and salmon/spinach lasagna were mouth watering and we lingered over the meal to have a bit of a de-brief of the weekend and enjoy the early evening light.

There's never a dull moment here and we get spoiled. I was wandering down the road to pick up some jeans from the lady who does alterations when I spotted the priest performing various blessings at the temple behind the school. Normally, I'd just have a look and move on, but I'm glad I stopped to take a shot: you can become blase about quite spectacular sights! Other photos: Cass and Youbikes in the rain, cute headwear for testing in my class, Cassy's famous vocab charts(!), four plump nestlings about to fly the coop (we hope!) and a grainy shot of the extremely elusive Taiwanese blue magpie. This guy actually swooped me while protecting its nest the other day, and a whole shutter of photographers had invaded the local park armed with telephoto lenses to try to catch some shots of its fledglings. Finally, Cassy and her girls hard at it!

It's not often that a dinkum Aussie movie arrives on the wide screens of Taiwan's cinema houses, which have their own peculiar prediliction for fast action, small dialogue extravaganzas that eliminate the subtitle dilemma of watching foreign language films. With this rare gem on offer for a limited time, we made sure we made the trip to the movies this weekend to see The Water Diviner, directed by and starring the execrable Russel Crowe. Although it wasn't our favourite genre and of questionable quality, it was nice to see a little Australian landscape, hear the sounds and watch some clever little cameos from some stars of the Australian small screen, along with the cruder, broader brushstrokes painted by Crowe in this shambling tale.

A movie that certainly will appeal to the Taiwanese demographic and one that I've eagerly awaited for years, is the much hyped and long anticipated 4th installment in the Mad Max franchise. The last being 30 years ago, by necessity, the actors have all changed, but I'm looking forward to the mercurial George Miller directing his own special way in another adventure of Max and friends. Interestingly, I note that The Toecutter from the very first film is making a re-appearance as the villain in this piece, albeit as another character. I get the vibe that Cassy is less excited about this whole Mad Max mania, but I'm sure she'll do me the favour of accompanying me next week to a viewing of Fury Road!

We lunched in the food court of the Shingong Mitsukoshi building at the Cafe India outlet, tearing ourselves away from the delights of Din Tai Feng for a weekend. It was very tasty and great value, so we'll bear that in mind for a quick meal before or after the movies in the future.

There's not much to be said about the Knight's awful performance on Sunday morning our time, so after we endured about 7/8 of the game and a hideous mauling by the cellar dwellers Manly, we could bear no more. After ringing Mum and having a very pleasant chat for Mother's Day I decided to make a run up to the steps. It was a perfect day for relaxing in the spring weather, but not so for charging up 1300 steps in the blaze of the early afternoon. I was a lather by the time I reached the top and took a bit of cooling down time along the top ridgeline track. There were suspicious rustlings and primal screams from the forest as the Formosan Macaque troop foraged and played, but they decided not to invade the track and cause unnecessary panic for the human population atop the mountain: maybe they were just celebrating Mother's Day too!

Later in the day, we decided to check out a brand new burger joint just a few minutes away by scooter. Embracing some definite industrial chic as well as some other quirky little elements, with 70s record albums on the shelf and over-sized photos of cultural icons framing a fake fireplace with cords of wood either side (bizarre in the Taipei summer!), the food ended up being very, very good at "Burger and Co." Cass had a lentil and mushroom patty and I had a regular one and I had the cheesy fries while she settled for the regular. We had a nice relaxing time soaking in the vibe on a lazy afternoon. Not content to rest on  that already weighty calorie count, we scootered across to Deh Shing East Road to a new cheesecake shop. Yes, they just sell cheesecakes and unlike the eponymous chain store back home, it is a tiny business with the ovens virtually in the shopfront itself. We selected a couple of pieces from the display as stacks of cakes piping hot from the oven rallied beside us on the shopfloor. Suffice to say that they tasted as good as they looked!

Cass is gearing up for one of the busiest weeks of her year as the middle school production looms large. Today is a typhoon make-up day here at school and as the typhoons earlier in the year didn't shut down the school, we're having a PD day here without kids today. (Ironically another typhoon is marching slowly up the island right now, and is due to lash its tail into us this evening.) As we're kid free, they have scheduled an all-day dress rehearsal, so Cass had to have all the make-up in place for today. Early reports are that things are going well, but I'll bore you with a full report next week!

Photos: Fury Road in English and Chinese, shots from the steps, Burger and Co and Cheese Mate.  I also embedded a screen shot of an internet speed test I did today: I don't think Australia will ever reach these speeds and still 26% of Taiwan has faster connections than this!
P.S. Our chronically lazy felines have fallen back to type: no more hissing at one another, but still managing to sleep most of the day and all of the night!

For some strange reason, I have a dearth of photos this week, which will no doubt be a relief to some, as endless photos of our dining out experiences must get a bit tedious. This probably also partly explains the lack of traffic on this site, along with mindlessly boring and verbose diatribe about the minutia of our lives (see?!).

So, in keeping with the above theme (the mind numbing boredom part), I'll describe what is a very significant day of the year for both us and Virg'n Mary. Once a year, the "girls" need to depart the peaceful sanctity of their luxurious home and travel to the vet for either a vaccination (each year) or a teeth cleaning and vaccination (every two). This year, it was the "big one" so we needed to plan with military precision the sequence of events to unfold during Friday and over the weekend.

Although not possessed with giant intellects, these two are well aware of the purpose of their blue carrier boxes. These seemingly innocent plastic carriers can strike fear into our cats at the very sound of them being lifted from their resting spots on top of a wardrobe. I literally tiptoed into their room and removed them to the bathroom on Monday night while Cassy distracted them. They were unaware I had secreted them in the bath...so far, so good!

On Thursday night they were sent to bed without supper and thus began their night of suspicions. This minor deprivation only happens when they are preparing for an anesthetic the following day. The next morning, anyone passing by might believe we were torturing them or cutting their throats, such was the volume of their complaints. We left for school with them crying, wary and hyper vigilant, lest the evil, blue boxes make an appearance!

We raced from our respective classes at 9 a.m., drove the car from the basement at school to home and stealthily entered our place. Cass slipped a T-shirt on, we grabbed the two slinking away from us in their room and managed to lock them, us and their baskets in our tiny bathroom before they knew what had hit them! From there, it was relatively easy as we crammed them into the carriers and whisked them down to the car, in and around to the vets, and organized to pick them up the next day.

By the time we procrastinated and held off collecting them for as long as possible on Saturday afternoon, they were reasonably unaffected by the drugs, but were huddled together in a cage at the vets, upstairs, and surrounded by cats and dogs in various states of infirmity. We bundled them up, re-caged them, then cradled them in our arms for the short walk across the main road and through the park home.

Even though they're still hissing at one another (which continues for about a week in our experience) they are remarkably lucid and non glassy-eyed for the experience. They've been extremely sluggish,however, even for them, and we've witnessed a bit of cute narcolepsy and drug induced deep sleeping going on!

We got some Maya Pizza for tea on Saturday night and entertained a few visitors for the "fight of the century" on Sunday, as Pacquiao fought Mayweather. During the fight, I was surprised to get a phone call from my sister Jen, telling us that her oldest child Patrick had announced his engagement: looks like I'll be able to fulfill my life's ambition to be one of those daggy uncles at a wedding after all! Seriously though, it was happy news, and although Jen might be a little intimidated to think she will be a "mother of the bridegroom" soon, I know she and Vince are stoked with the news.

End of year shenanigans are heating up here as Cassy had a great night out of fine dining at Le Jardin with her friend Kristin on Friday night. They wined on French champagne and dined on all sorts of exquisite French fare....we haven't been there for a while, but Cass reported that it was as superb as usual, a real authentic French gem in the heart of our Tienmu suburb. I had a few beers with Wol and caught some football and of course, we had extra conviviality hosting the boxing on Sunday.

Photos: just three, but the fuzzy top one is one of our annual delights. When the starlings start nesting under the eaves of the shops along our walk to school, we know that our summer break is nearly upon us. The tiny fledglings reacted to Cassy's wave and screeched into action seeking a morsel. The other is of a slightly drug wobbly Virgil resting at my feet...as it should be! Last one, still drug affected, luxuriating in her own fat on top of the lounge this evening.

Cassy is reading, and enjoying, Eleanor Catton's first book, The Rehearsal after being mildly underwhelmed by the much hyped Booker prizewinner, The Luminaries. I'm reveling in my re-reading of To Kill a Mockingbird: it's like a warm bowl of soup on a cold night! I also tried my hand at a Shakespearean sonnet, for what it's worth...