ALL my belongings fit into ONE (medium-sized) suitcase!! books, clothes, electronics, everything. my backpack will be for food/entertainment for the plane trip and sensitive stuff like my laptop and important papers, but i could actually fit those things into the suitcase too if i wanted. i'll just have to double-check that i won't be over the weight limit. i wasn't actually aiming for this when i was cleaning (among other things you can actually bring 2 checked bags), it just turned out that way.

it seems like switching from a student/"dependant" VISA to a work VISA is super easy, but getting a work VISA (or any VISA at all really) from scratch is really difficult; so as long as i can still go to all my classes schedule-wise it won't actually be a problem to switch to a work VISA partway through my exchange (which is what i was worried about — in some countries you have to completely leave the country, wait some months and come back). my japanese friend said now is the best time to get full-time jobs in japan since "everyone needs people", and if no normal place will hire me then to try at random American companies.

still have to:
• repair the old Mac i'm taking with me; set it up with programs etc
• remove files from all other comps/phones & put them on the old mac
• sell/send off some old books
• sew slippers and mittens for myself (i have some secondhand leather pants + sheep skin bits for this exact purpose), then toss all the rest of my fabric

i think that's about it for me. my wife still has a bunch to go through but we managed to get through 3 boxes of her stuff today, so we're getting there... she said she's actually been having nightmares about having too much stuff / people randomly giving her tons of extra stuff so yeah, let's clean!!!

updated the page about how my 3-year japanese degree is; i really need to fix up this site a little in general:
https://lusentoj.neocities.org/tutorials/jpgram/dalarnastudies.html

i've started re-reading the stories we read in class last semester; i can actually "understand" them now, like all the details, but back then i missed what feels like the majority of the plots except for the easiest story. part of it was how stressed i was during class time, but the other part was just my japanese level. no idea why we were giving such hard stuff to read, it should've been for people a semester or two after us! right now i'm probably two semesters ahead of the basic class expectations.

anime-wise, i'm focusing on jojo's bizarre adventures starting from yesterday because it really has a lot of words i don't know while still overall being easy to understand (as in, there are some series where due to the context, pacing, billions of characters etc even if you DO know the words you're still confused; jojo isn't really like that). read another completely random yaoi manga volume last night and i knew like 99% of everything in it, that's the second time that's happened now and it feels pretty great. if i get depressed about not being able to read novels or something i'll always be able to grab a manga.