The weather here continues to blaze infernally by day and to settle uncomfortably into a still moist blanket at night. We again are thankful that we live in an age when air-conditioners are plentiful and efficient, and we're luxuriating in our time indoors, both at work and at home. The forecast for the week ahead is similarly awful, so we'll just soldier along a little longer.

The heat is really quite prodigious. We've been having exclusively cold showers for weeks, partly to try not to heat our body cores at all before we walk to school in all our finery. Cass seems better adapted with a glowing sheen the only sign of heat distress at the end of our 15-20 minute walking commute. I, on the other hand, find myself ruing shirt colour selections as the sweat soaks various areas in contact with the skin. My morning routine is to stand straddled above the air-conditioning vents at the back of my room for 5-10 minutes until the kids arrive!

We were very proud of a tiny achievement on Saturday. We managed to find our way across to a rarely visited section of the city to get a new air-conditioner remote after receiving a text of the address from a helpful Carrefour employee. The south-western sections of the city eventually develop into concrete jungles of cheaper and denser apartment blocks sandwiched between snaking overhead expressway systems with commuters hurtling towards the airport or the satellite suburbs further afield. We negotiated the first section of this expressway's eight lanes each way and variously guessed and intuited which of the many options we should take, all the while careening along on a protesting "Blackie"!

Spat out upon a slightly calmer thoroughfare, we were able to locate the Sampo service centre and a very helpful girl magically produced a replacement for our broken remote. All the addresses and instructions and conversing were relying on my increasingly rudimentary Chinese, hence the pride: strangely, I'm truly getting worse each day that passes! Job done, we negotiated our way back through the labyrinth and headed towards some mid-afternoon snacks in the form of the made-to-order gourmet burgers of Burger Rays. Looks like an interesting Italian place has sprung up next door during the summer too, so we'll check that out at some later date.

After already doing the bread shopping and the grocery shopping in the raging midday heat, we were satisfied with our forays outdoors. Time to watch the Wallabies get thrashed....but no! They actually produced a spirited fight in the Dunedin indoor stadium....we half expected a pitch invasion from Ross! We indulged in some shocking TV binge viewing on the weekend as well. During the course of the latter part of the week and through the weekend we caught up with all 6 episodes of the latest season of "Game of Thrones"....wow, what a trip! No spoilers in case you haven't watched but are intending to. Suffice to say, the series has lost none of its cachet: it might have gained some!

Photos are pretty sparse, with just a few enforced photos when I realized we wouldn't have any: I really need to just snap myself into action and develop some far better habits, perhaps by viewing things through a different filter. OK, I've descended into awful punnery, so I'll just shut the self timer and put the lens cap back on and have a good hard look at myself (a selfie?)!

(The last photo is the result of Cass changing out all the bags of desiccant in our wardrobes...they've changed from pellets to water over the summer!)

According to the leading English language newspaper in Taiwan, The China Post, we've never endured a hotter, longer streak of weather in this country! Here is the article. We felt a little better after reading this as we'd been suffering in the heat and felt a little pathetic: had we really not acclimatized to the end-of-summer heat after all these years? We're just thankful every day that we bit the bullet and committed to our two new air-conditioners at this time last year as I think that the old rattlers would have really packed it in trying to battle against this type of unrelenting fire.

I went down to Uli's on Friday evening before watching numerous games of NRL and AFL. Wal and I had a good catch up about all sorts of things: the last few times we've been down there we've been interrupted a little by "special guests": who are always welcome, but it meant that we'd not had a chance to get down to the nitty gritty.

Cass had arranged to meet her good friend, Kristin, at their favourite haunt, Sonnentor. They ate a delicious meal and had some wine smoothies, which to me sound quite nauseating, but I'm told they're very tasty! Kristin had been traveling around the U.S. for a great chunk of the summer, so Cass was able to hear all about that. They swapped stories for some hours and eventually closed the place down!

Our faithful computer Mr Fixit, Dick, was due to arrive on Friday evening with some replacement parts for the computer, but as we were both out gallivanting, he made alternative plans for Sunday night. He managed to cobble together various drives and sound cards to get everything working again, especially my overworked DVD burner, which had been offline since Dick's other fixes. I'm nearly up to speed again on the home front and I'm slowly coming to terms with the new school software.

Seems a neat segue to the IT conundrums at work as I'm working on at least five new software platforms, one of which is also new to the division. The lower school has scant need for the computing power of some of these new platforms and the most I'd done was some work on Google Drive and Docs. Now, I'm getting up to speed with Office 365 in all forms, OneNote online, Canvas, the school's blogging platform, PowerSchool, Sadlier Connects, MyEnglishLab and a slew of other subsidiary platforms and websites. It's no problem, but just takes a little time to get used to, especially with so many new programs needing to be learned all at once.

We crawled out from our air-conditioned cocoon on Saturday to get around a few shops and watched a little bit of football and generally pottered around. Similar raging heat on Sunday wasn't encouraging us to get out and about in the wider world, but we decided to head across to Shinkong Mitsukoshi's "Wovie" cinema to see, "Baby Driver" in the middle of the day. Wow, what a blast! It smacked of Tarantino and Coen Brother's all mixed together with some wild action scenes and cartoonish elements. It reeked of cool and had a pulsing, eclectic soundtrack to boot. We both loved it and it made our day. A+ from us!

Still trying to get used to taking photos again as part of my daily routine, so there are slim pickin's today! We're both plowing through (slowly in my case!) Paul Auster's "4,3,2,1" It's long!
Photos: two girls, Virg looking cute trying to get some Anchovette, Uli's, my new classroom and the invasion of Gloria Jean's into Taipei!

What a dizzy whirlwind the past couple of weeks have been! After a couple of months of rest and recreation, we hit the ground sprinting, as is always the case, when we arrived back in Taiwan. There were household essentials to be bought, modified and repaired, processes to be adjusted and bills to be paid. When we eventually got things vaguely livable on the home front we fronted up to the biggest change we've experienced in the last 16 years of our professional lives: new division, new procedures and new classes for yours truly, with Cass having to re-assure her delicate new colleague that everything would turn out OK in the end!

As usual, we were physically assualted by a freight train of heat as we exited the terminal at Taoyuan Airport earlier in the month. The unrelenting heat battered and exhausted us day by day: we were so thnakful that we'd upgraded to new air-conditioners last year. Virg'nMary were ecstatic to see us (or at least we like to think so!) and although noticeably skinnier and more frail, they were alive and kicking, seemed to be in good spirits and sharp of eye and mind. The computer had decided to have a major meltdown, so we've only got it half running, all photo software and downloading capability disappearing into the ether. Hence, no photos of yet, but I'll update in the next week or so....check back! One of the AC remotes had a hissy fit and refused to cooperate, but luckily the other one can service both units, while my phone went totally postal on me: that's a wound yet to be healed.

So, after putting out various spot fires on the home front (almost literally in the scorching heat!), we visited our battalion of shops to source and re-stock our food supplies. Reasonably satisfied that we could survive for a few days, we hunkered down inside and luxuriated in the cool, only venturing outside when it was absolutely necessary or when the awful brunt of the burning day had faded into evening or night.

Nothing, however, could prepare me for the shock of my new position. At times over the past week, I've felt conflicting emotions of euphoria and despair, running the gamut of emotions in the spectrum in between. It was exciting to be joining a new division, there was no doubt. The freshness of approach, the civility of colleagues and the welcoming embrace of so many was palpable and genuinely expressed. I was loving being treated like a responsible adult and professional, one who only needed clear and explicit instructions once to be able to perform a task capably and with the minimum of fuss: how novel!

It was difficult to brush off years of the opposite type of approach: I kept wondering when pedantic further instructions would come or when superiors would feel the need to check on whether I was doing my job properly. That didn't happen, in fact, quite the opposite. Colleagues were keen to ease my transition, no more so than my darling Cassy, who is now essentially my immediate boss, particularly for the regular Grade 8 English curriculum! She has eased a lot of my tension by delineating each day's activities and getting materials ready. This class, while the most important, is so well planned and organized, it's my easiest to teach.

My more frustrating times have basically just come from unknowns. There are so  many different items of administrivia with my Grade 8 homeroom kids and all my other classes, that it has been slightly overwhelming at times. I've needed to get myself linked up with photocopiers and printers, sign up for and do a crash course in various new administrative and teaching platforms. There are numerous tools that I need to learn and use, while at the same time, get my head around three completely different and gargantuan English programs for grades 6,7 and 8. I'm slowly getting there!

Don't get me wrong: this is the greatest thing to happen to me for more than a decade in a professional sense: I'm rejuvenated, happy, excited (and a little terrified!) and re-energized. I'm glad to be back teaching more mature kids...I've been down with the littlies for long enough. I suspect each day will continue to bring challenges, but I'm really looking forward to it. One thing I can tell you is....I wont be getting bored in a hurry!

We both feel quite exhasted when we get home each day, and our summer of bliss is fast receding in memory. We had the most amazing time back home: our daily routine of relaxed meals wrapped around our daily "job" of our six kilometre coastal walk was interspersed at times by visits to family and friends, sharing experiences of theatre and meals and parties and re-unions: all great fillips for the soul.We're back on track now...next blog, next Monday!