so i've noticed that the more "japanese" my house becomes (=japanese house decorations), the happier i get. i just glance in the kitchen and wow, look at that super cute japanese hand towel! etc. now i own some clothes i actually really like and it's the same thing - glance down and wow, i love this jacket! i sort of understand why everyone's families actually have decorations and stuff now. it's just that, as usual, the "american decorations" and "swedish decorations" aren't my type so i never realized.

yesterday it just really hit me, this is the first time i've EVER had a place with my own decorations (not "mom's christmas decorations that we're forced to put up" etc), the first time i've gone on a real shopping spree (wandering around shopping all day on a big sale day). it feels like i suddenly made a huge step in being independant and adult-ish somehow. and i get really happy if i get to actually say something besides "yes, thank you" to the shop attendants, even if i'm embarrassed and messing up at the same time. even just saying "good day!" feels a lot better than not saying it - despite that japanese people don't say ANYTHING, not even thank you most of the time.

for my wife, she actually (barely) fits in a japanese size medium in the plus-size section. before coming to japan she thought she'd never be able to fit in ANY japanese size, let alone "medium". frankly speaking even if she were supermodel skinny she wouldn't be able to fit in a normal medium just because there's no breast space on japanese clothing... the other problem tends to be that the shirts are too short (right now the trend is "wide yet short shirts; wide and long trousers"). the other thing is we thought it'd be almost impossible to find plus-sized clothes but here we just stumbled across half a store of it by accident!

some more new year's goals:

1. make 1 tiny craft a month (ex. coin purse) to try and sell on etsy. i'm going to try making stuff with really traditional japanese patterns so some people will actually buy them... also i think i'll feel like i'm making a better use of my time if i do crafts i can only do while i'm in japan.

2. read 1 harry potter book a month until i'm all done. i was already planning on doing it anyway, but now i read online that someone passed the JLPT N1 (started studying a year in advance) but the ONLY books they'd read were the first 2 harry potter ones which "helped them a lot on being able to read fast enough to pass the exam". i felt kinda like, hah! i've been reading one of those a month without even thinking about it, if i read all of them...!!

3. REALLY need to start making all my own sushi. we can eat it from certain shops but it's kinda expensive for what you get (1,000 yen for two people's worth), and we always sleep badly afterwards and i'm tired of it. the problem is if you make the same thing yourself you need to buy like 5 different types of fish, make an omlette, get cucumber etc and i think i have to buy the various ingredients, cut them into portions and FREEZE them all then pull them out when i need them. i'll have to look up if you can freeze sashimi and stuff... hopefully with that i can quit buying sushi at sendai station and save some money...

took another first step in saving money... at the store, 19g of spice (=one glass shaker bottle) is around 120 yen i think. on amazon, 100g is around 340 yen + 600 yen in shipping. unfortunately i couldn't buy all the spices from the same place so i had to pay for shipping twice and got 700g for a total of about 3,500 yen. in the end it didn't save a TON of money but it still saved some. we only really use these 3 spices (cinnamon, paprika, chili powder) + salt so hopefully we're set for a good long time now...

also bought a hand-crank radio-and-emergency-light for 500 yen + 900 yen shipping. i've been wanting a radio so a hand-powered one is perfect for saving money + i probably should make an emergency kit sometime. next all i need is a hand-crank phone charger... hmm, maybe i should've bought that at the same time... if you can get a hand-crank 3DS charger that'd also be great.

i'm also going to TRY to ONLY buy meat that's on sale from now on... even though the sales here are usually only 10-20%. and i'll stop buying frivolous stuff like chesnuts except for if they're on a huge sale (like today's: 50% off). i want to check out what's actually the most expensive foods we eat per amount but i can't understand the receipt because it's all in katakana and not always what the item actually is (ex. a brand or something instead of the food name).