80% better from the cold now. after a while i realized that instead of hot baths, if my head was most of the problem, i could just use hand-warmers on my head. except after i finally got my wife to go to the store to find hand-warmers she didn't buy the "sticky" kind because they "sounded scary" so i had to try taping it to my head, which didn't really work. now i'm chewing on a big chunk of ginger and i reaaally hope i'll be totally fine by this evening so i can do my homework and go to the middle school tomorrow...

at least i'm healthy enough to read in bed and stuff now. all these previous days i couldn't even do that!!

cold keeps getting a bit better then a bit worse, but at least i got a tiny bit of plegm out for the first time today (also managed to halfway teach my wife the word "plegm", which she didn't know before). now all i have is the cough left really, but the cough's getting worse. managed to look online for "natural cough remedies" and every single one is either honey or bone broth soup, so my wife is going to buy some honey... honey in japan is "really expensive" but, thinking about it, it's actually the same cost as in sweden and it's just that in japan (or just my grocery store) they sell it in smaller containers. and it's all liquid honey, not solid like i bought in sweden.

reading more of harry potter, every few chapters i figure out some more grammar and words so it's pretty nice. i think the translator might have changed for the second book because they seem to be doing more localizations than the first one (which had basically none). now i figured out that ex. かける just means "start" — in grammar books and stuff it's explained in a really weird way like "in the middle of doing" and "not yet finished" and "on route" and whatnot but it really just seems to mean start:

電話 を かける - "start a phone call" = call someone
かかって 来い - "start to come!" = come at me! bring it on! start attacking me already!
出 かける - "start to go out" = leave the house

those were phrases i knew it in but didn't understand why it was that way before. now i've in this harry potter chapter i've been seeing it in stuff like "start to ask a question" "start to fight" and so on so it suddenly clicked.

got some advice from a classmate (who just got a job at a convenience store) on how to call when asking for job stuff, you basically just see their add somewhere, call and say もしもし、募集 して います か？ "hello, are you hiring?" and they'll take care of the rest. she's the only one in class who's passed JLPT N1, and says it was like "everyday japanese" and thus actually easier than N2 (businessman japanese) should be. she says she never studies japanese, she already knows all the kanji meanings from chinese and so it's never really been a problem as long as there's been kanji, but it means she only reads and can't speak/listen.