August 2023

As a language learner, I need thinking time. So sometimes I’ll say that one single action happened and I’ll finish the sentence, no chaining, as I think on how I’ll say the next thing. That definitely seems to be a pattern I need to break though if the thing following is a “and then this happened”. Not chaining seems to signal that what I’m saying amplifies, or is equivalent to what I said last. I’m adding information to the last sentence, not moving on. It probably comes across as incredibly unnatural when I end a chain and then talk about something new. The content is obviously intended to be one event after another, but the pattern I’m speaking with suggests the 2nd event more fully describes the 1st.

I’d just popped into Phillip’s house, bringing Alice and Millie along because they were driving Mum crazy whilst she was trying to homeschool with the intention of finding out how Philip and Natalie were doing and talking about something related to our discourse analysis write-up. I’d just gotten the girls comfortable when there was an almighty crash coming from our house. I looked over and chuckled to see our solar hot water heater had crashed through the platform it was on.

There have been a few emails going around offering puppies to new homes here in PNG. I wanted to take one, but Gerdine homeschooling mum and mother of twins said no way. Life was hard enough and we just couldn’t add a dog into the mix (and what would we feed it?). Seeing this settled opinion I decided to aim a little lower for pets.