• 🇬🇧 Leo went to his first English class over the weekend...and he had a good time. The first lesson was centered around "What's wrong?" and being able to respond with "I have a fever/cold/tummyache" etc... Leo was able to also notice the teacher speaks with a different accent than I do e.g. no hard r sound when saying "fever" and instead pronouncing it more like "fevah".
  
  Making English class part of his routine will definitely get him speaking more – already it's made some small differences. Maybe it's seeing/being with other kids his age having fun with English? Thank you to everyone who suggested it.
• 🥟 We picked up a bamboo steaming basket from Muji and it's changed my life. Ok, maybe not that drastic, but I'm loving it. Cooking using a steamer is quick and easy. Bop some pork buns, or some veg, or whatever in there, let it sit for a few minutes and it comes out perfect. No hassle, no oil no nothing.
• 🎥 Not really a movie, but the vibes of this video from hokuou-gurashi, a Scandinavian goods shop are exactly the vibes I'm aiming for with my steamer. Instead of rushing through to prep a breakfast or meal where you're constantly in front of the stove...use your steamer to not only cook some veg, but also warm up side-dishes. So much more relaxed.

A modern Hotline client for Mac, iOS, and iPadOS. Contribute to mierau/hotline development by creating an account on GitHub.

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• 🪟 I moved my desk to the opposing wall where it has been for 5 years, in front of a sliding glass door that we never go through. The room feels larger, I can look outside while working, and it encourages me to keep the shelves organized (as they now appear in the background-ish). Why did I spend 5 years looking at a wall when I could have been looking outside?! Which is to say, it's been a good change.
• 💩 TFG continues to do shady, illegal, and wildly unpopular things. I want to say that nobody deserve this, but also he's doing exactly what he said he would and they voted for him, so perhaps they do. Very glad we left just before his first term.
• 🇬🇧 I think we found a good English school for Leo nearby. It's not with one of the big eikaiwa chains, but direct with a teacher. We're going to go for his first lesson on Saturday and he's excited. I'm excited too.
• 📧 I've sent more email in the past 2 weeks than I have in the past 2 years connecting with readers of my blog. It's been kinda nice. I like how personal an email feels compared to, say, a DM on <social media>. I wanted to share a sentence I wrote in one of my replies that I think is worth keeping in mind as we're tempted to doom scroll our days away.
  
  > When I quit smoking in college the hardest part wasn’t the nicotine,  it was figuring out what to do with my hands when I had 7 minutes between class. Smartphones (and by extension streaming music and AirPods) are the same. We use them not because we want to listen to a song, we just need something to do between class…and it expands to fill the gap.
  
  Don't let the news cycle and the noise expand to fill every gap. Read a book. Bake some bread. Go for a walk. Create that space and protect your mental health.

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• 🇬🇧 Thank you everyone who reached out last week about improving Leo's English. As you suggest he needs to play with kids his age in that language and if he has a teacher, it needs to be not me. I found an English/Japanese Minecraft pictorial guide that he's opening everyday and reading. It also has a practical use – when he wants to search for an item that he doesn't know how to spell, he can use the index in Japanese to find the page that has the corresponding English word.
• 🍕 I went to Eatly for a quiet lunch with my wife. We split a pasta and a pizza. While eating the (delicious) pizza I noted, you can tell the quality of the product and simple ingredients because when you chew it, it doesn't just dissolve in your mouth like a slice of dominos. That in turn slows you down, which in turn gives your body time to signal that it's satiated before you've eaten an entire pie.
•  🏋 I find myself enjoying lifting weights more than running this past week. Perhaps because it's warm and I don't really need to change if it's just for a quick 20 or 30 minutes. I should probably find a program to follow, but I'd rather do something than do nothing while geting stuck trying to find the "perfect" routine. 
• 🗃️ After 5 years of feeling like we don't have enough "proper storage", despite having 2 nice tall (reaches to the ceiling) anchored into the wall steel racks from Muji, it finally clicked how to use them better so we have a "proper" amount of storage. When buying the racks, I also needed to buy storage cases (with drawers) that could be stacked in a uniform manner across the shelving. Starting to organize stuff into storage cases has made the house feel so much less cluttered... unfortunately I need to buy another zillion to fill the shelves.