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!