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Everyone continues to be sick. On Sunday, Rowan’s coughing became quite violent and Eri took him to an emergency clinic to see if it was something that required hospitalisation. The attending doctor didn’t think it was anything serious but they did mention the possibility of it being some form of pneumonia. My initial reaction was that it couldn’t be pneumonia but the symptoms seem so strange (persistent chest congestion, fevers that come and go in the case of the kids) that maybe that’s it?
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Hopefully I didn’t pass something on to Brandon when I saw him over the weekend. Incredibly the last time we met up was in 2015! That was before Emma was born and, according to the calendar entry I have for it, was only a couple of months after we’d moved to Tokyo. We’ve been chatting for so long since that it’s hard to believe there hasn’t been at least one meet-up in the interim. With any luck, we’ll get over to Singapore sometime in the next couple of years and we’ll be able to hang out over there. It was great to see him and I wish I’d been able to stay longer.
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A couple of weeks ago James wrote in his weekly update about finding a constructive way to help improve his son’s behaviour. This is a problem that we struggle with as well. James is looking to adopt a more positive approach and I wonder if that’s something I should try.
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I had intended to start walking around without a mask more often now that government guidance has been relaxed but my niggling cough has caused me to keep masked most of the time. I haven’t been out that much but based on my anecdotal observations it definitely looks like the vast majority of people continue to wear masks all the time.
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I am making steady progress on the podcast backlog that built up while I was listening to all those episodes of 22 Goals. Last week I meant to mention that I quite liked the episode of Hit Parade about Christine McVie. Sometimes I think about dropping this podcast but this was a great example of why it keeps hanging around: I know Fleetwood Mac are a Very Important Band but didn’t really know anything about them. Although the episode keeps the focus on McVie, in some ways that helped flesh out the history moreso than if the episode had been about the Buckingham/Nicks era.
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I usually think about the differences between American English and British English as being about spelling and vocabulary. Dr Geoff Lindsay has a great video about a grammatical difference between the two dialects. It’s probably a bit long (17 minutes and 39 seconds) but if you’ve got an idle interest in this kind of thing—or just 20 minutes to kill—I recommend it.
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I finished La La Land and thought it was fine. The best thing about it is definitely the opening number (YouTube) and while that sounds like I’m damning with faint praise, I did enjoy the rest of it too. That may have been 90 percent because I love Emma Stone.
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At the risk of someone making a ‘2016 called’ joke, my recommendation this week is ‘Another Day of Sun’ (Apple Music).
