Hi, James. Ben, how are you?

I'm okay. Sorry, we're a little late. I was making my customary cup of coffee.

And I ground the beans without realizing that the little thing that catches all the grounds was not in the machine, which meant I had grounds out of the counter.

Which goes to so why I needed to grind coffee in the first place.

And also, I should say, happy Chinese New Year.

Yes, happy Chinese New Year.

Well, I mean, I guess, well, technically we were kind of still in the middle of it.

But yes, that was last week.

So we were absent.

I was absent.

And we appreciate our wishes to patience. And we will unfortunately be off next week as well.

I will be traveling again. So it's just a little stuff to do on the road. And so I appreciate our listeners' patience.

I'm sure. Yeah. On the subject of traveling and Chinese New Year, actually, my sister lives up in Beijing, and my parents were there visiting her for Chinese New Year. And dad called me the night of, and he FaceTime me. And it was, I couldn't help but be reminded of the coverage of like one of the Iraq

wars where the reporters are in the hotels and there's just this massive bombardment all

going around. I was like, oh my gosh, it looks like a complete war zone there at the moment.

Yeah. I mean, the tradition is there's the New Year's dragon.

And, uh, and he's scared off by, by the color red, but especially by firecrackers.

So you set off firecrackers on, on New Year's. Um, so yes, it's very, it's cacophonous, I believe is the word. I would not want to be a New Year's dragon in Beijing on Chinese New Year.

It was nuts. No, I actually posted, I posted like a short video on on Instagram of like our neighbors like shooting some off.

And it's kind of funny because like we're on a relatively somewhat quiet street it gets pretty busy in rush hour

but um you know you're these shooting off like these you know bottle rocket type things that go up

you know a good 70 80 feet in the air in the middle like all these high rises and stuff it's just

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