You can tell how happy Cassy is at the moment from some of the photos above. As we slowly wind down the year here, high school kids graduating and middle and lower school kids and teachers fizzling out on the run down the home stretch, the finishing post can't come quickly enough. This will be my last blog post till mid August when we return after our "summer" break in Australia. All the fun of shutting down our lives here for a couple of months starts now!
Cassy has compiled a great list of things that need to be done before we fly out next Sunday. Mostly mundane, but all necessary, many of them revolve around the "girls", their supplies and their carers. We also have to do some rent payments, credit card reminders and various other temporary shutdowns or postponements. We've managed to cross a few things off the list already, but have a pretty full week of doing the rest of them.
A very annoying and untimely distraction has been the breakdown of our air-conditioner in the bedroom. Just when the temperatures have soared into the high 30s, the unit in the bedroom has decided to leak water inside at an alarming rate. We've had it fixed twice beforehand and had been previously advised that it was on its last legs, but it has come at a very inopportune point! Our solution has been to keep the main unit going in the loungeroom, open our door but close all the others and hope a little cooler air filters through to us. If we keep the fan going as well, it seems to be working OK, so we'll try that for a while, at least for this week.
We zipped over to the deliciously tempting burger haunt in Shilin, Burger Ray, on Saturday after our shopping run. We've reached our annual point of no return I think: exhausted after a week's work, we've found it hard to rally to do anything much at all on the weekend in these last few weeks! It was superb and tasty and fresh and they've obviously realized the hypnotic beats played at ear-splitting volume were all a bit too much: the thwump-thwump staccato is still there, but you can actually now have a conversation as well! Our grocery shopping trip was mercifully short and resulted in very light and relatively empty bags as the shopping and food commissioner runs down supplies for our imminent departure.
Cass had her final Book Club meeting of the year at one of their preferred restaurants, Sonnentor, on Thursday evening. As usual, she got all sorts of gossip and caught up on the latest and greatest in this strange little community of which we're a part. The girls also selected all their books for next year, many of which have already been sourced and loaded onto Kindles and iPads. She also had her last extra duty of the year, helping out at the middle school BBQ which preceded the dance on Friday night. I spent Friday evening with a succession of likely fellows at various establishments around town for the purposes of drinking beer and watching various codes of football: as usual, tall tales and mostly true were the order of the day!
The air has been heavy and moist, afternoon thunderstorms have dumped prodigious amounts of water in rapid bursts of fury and the sun has variously roasted and cooked. The flora and fauna in the parks and beside the lanes and roads have flourished in these conditions and we've had multiple sightings of "The Moop", (even to the extent of large, roughly fashioned nests high up in the canopy of park-side treetops) as well as the very rarely spotted Taiwanese blue tailed magpie, which has brought a little nesting family to camp in our park, even dive-bombing Cassy "Aussie magpie style" the other day!
Freakishly and frighteningly, I'm supposed to receive an award at the recognition service on Friday afternoon for long service to the school: the scary aspect is that it is for 15 years service. I'm just going to let that fact sit and try not to analyze that too much, except to say that we definitely have exceeded our original two year plan! We're both looking forward to our trip back home, but as usual, we'll also miss our Taipei Life...see you soon!
Photos: blue magpie, flora, graduation, cool car, happy Cassy. I'm reading the third in the Dennis Lehane Coughlin trilogy, World Gone By and Cass continues with her Ferrante. Video is of the incomparable Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monestero Maggiore in Milan which was just a stroll from Da Vinci's The Last Supper...what a day that was!