By Scottie Andrew

Another sweltering summer is on the horizon, which means many of us will go to great lengths to pretend like we’re not dripping in sweat. I'm here to say — maybe we stop that. Let us hide our pits no longer. It's time we embrace sweat!

Sweating is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s the natural process by which our body cools us down! It's physical proof that we've been working hard! It’s a free way to glisten! So what if your clothes betray a bit of sweat? It’s hot, and we’re alive. So rather than stay inside until the fall, I’m just going to perspire through it and try not to let it bother me (or others; I'll wear perfume to spare us all). Sweat will be my favorite irremovable accessory.

Here are some good things that happened this week.

Kangala Wildlife Rescue

One hot dog to go, please

Valerie is HOME! After more than 500 days on the run through the Australian bush, the miniature dachshund with a wild streak was finally reunited with her owners this week. And if her family feared that their dog had gone feral in her time in the wild, those worries evaporated with a friendly flick of Val’s tail.

"She was wagging her tail, making her little happy sounds, and wiggling around with joy," said Val’s human mom, Georgia Gardner. "I held her and cried and cried."

As you’ll recall from last week’s newsletter, little Valerie absconded during a camping trip on Kangaroo Island in November 2023. Her owners feared the worst for poor Val until surveillance footage showed the tiny dachshund was alive and thriving. (Dachshunds were bred to stick their snouts in burrows to sniff out prey; that Valerie did not explore a burrow belonging to one of Australia’s countless venomous species is a miracle.) 

After weeks of luring Valerie to an enclosure using her owners’ dirty laundry, volunteers finally captured the wily pup last month. Now, she’s ready to return home to New South Wales with a bit of extra muscle and a lifetime’s worth of adventures. (Also, be sure to click the link to the full story, because there's a picture of Val that I swear she's smiling in.) 

Denis Balibouse/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

An Olympian (re-)earns his medals

When Gary Hall Jr.’s Los Angeles home went up in flames during the January wildfires, he grabbed the essentials before fleeing: His insulin medication and his dog Puddles. 
 
The American swimmer’s 10 Olympic medals didn’t make it through the fires. When he returned to the scene, he found the melted remnants of what was once a gold medal.

Hall Jr. earned them all back this month, though, when he traveled to the International Olympic Committee's headquarters in Switzerland, where all 10 of his medals, earned between the 1996 and 2004 Summer Games, were replaced. 

“I’ll do a better job of taking care of these,” he joked to IOC officials.

Surprisingly, some of the first people to jump to his aid after the fires were former Olympic rivals, like Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, he said. 

“That is what this (Olympic) family is about — rivals and friends,” Hall Jr. said. “I am just so appreciative to all of them.”

A family, indeed! But did any of them help Hall Jr. lug his very heavy, medal-filled suitcase back home?

Francis Augusto

Replant the world!

Ellen Miles didn’t know much about gardening when the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020 — "I just wanted the streets to be greener," she told CNN. So she started to plant seeds in neglected public spaces around her London neighborhood, from cracks in the pavement to abandoned lots. She realized she was practicing "guerrilla gardening," a type of urban activism that creates green spaces in unexpected places. 

"Think of it like graffiti, but with wildflowers instead of spray paint," Miles said.

Miles and her friends have planted flowers along sidewalks and next to bike racks, even spelling out words in moss to mimic spray paint. Not only are the acts of guerrilla planting beautiful for passersby hungry for more greenery, they’re a boon for pollinators and the native plant species they visit. Guerrilla gardens inject a much-needed jolt of life into busy city life, for all of its inhabitants.

Linda Leaming

Finding love and beauty in Bhutan

When Linda Leaming, a freelance writer from Nashville, decided to travel to the Kingdom of Bhutan, a South Asian country tucked in the Himalayas, she almost immediately realized she never wanted to leave. 

The air was crisp and clear, as Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country in the world. She shared her surroundings with ancient Buddhist temples and Bengal tigers. And the people she met were unbelievably kind: When she twisted her ankle, a stranger gave her a lift on his motorbike back to her hotel.

Three years after her first trip, she moved to Bhutan permanently, finding work as an English teacher. She fell in love with an art teacher there, Namgay, while practicing their English and Dzongkha, Bhutan’s official language. 

They’d been married for years when Namgay asked her if she remembered the first time they met. Leaming was shocked to learn that he was the stranger with the motorbike who took her back to her hotel when she couldn’t walk. "I guess it was fate," she said.

When friends visit her now in Bhutan, they find it almost as impossible to leave as she did on her first trip. 

"There’s a lot of anger and fear in the world," she said. "Bhutan is such a respite from all that."