Today is my last full day in Taiwan. I leave tomorrow on a late-night flight for Seattle. Doolies is staying for another two and a half weeks to finish shooting videos for The Dr. Julie Show. I will miss her terribly as usual. Since she moved to Seattle, our time apart has noticeably decreased. She’s still escaped me a few times, but overall I can expect to find her at home (or on her way home) most evenings. As I’ve said before and I’ll say again and again, having Doolies in Seattle is wonderful.

For me a full week is about as long as I can stay away from home. I’m a creature of habit, and at the end, as pathetic as it may sound, I enjoy sameness. A regular schedule helps me ward off my frequent headaches and keeps me leveled. While the P.H.D.’s (Post-Headache Days, for the uninitiated or forgetful) are wonderful, I’d gladly trade them in for headache-free days any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Yeah, I never got that saying either.

The weather has been amazing in Taiwan. That shouldn’t be so important to report. It seems most small talk always begins and ends with a discussion of the weather: too hot, too cold, rainy for longer than expected, sunshine in the rainy season, expect the world to end at any time and cats to befriend dogs and sheep and wolves to bed down together. It’s all inane—the weather, that is, and my writing, of course—and yet here I am, reporting on the weather patterns.

The weather has been in the 60s and 70s, and sunny most of the week. A torrential rainstorm did catch up to us on the day before our wedding photo shoot. Doolies was very nervous about the next day’s weather as all the weather predictions pointed to the rain continuing and it turning cold. It did no such thing. I caught a glimpse of the pregnant gray clouds after waking in the morning. The clouds covered half the sky, and I wasn’t sure whether they were coming and leaving. As you can see by our photographs, the clouds were leaving after an early morning shower, and the weather remained brilliant for the rest of the day.

When I saw the clouds in the morning, I ran over to tell Doolies not to get her hopes up about a good day for photos. During the day, the cameraman told us about a bride who had scheduled her wedding photos for the previous day. He said she cried the entire time because of the rain. I doubt Doolies would have cried about the weather—although, I have seen her get emotional over poorly written Chinese soap operas. And, I will now admit, the prospect of us not shooting the photographs outside did brighten my mood. But in the end, the weathermen were wrong and we got lucky. While the photo experience was as terrible for me as I hinted at yesterday, I know that the memory of pain tends to dissipate faster than the good photos and memories, and, it should go without saying, Doolies’s happiness.

Enough sappiness. I have at least 500 words left to write, and it’s time to jump into my next story idea.