cleaned up more stuff, made small gift packages (= tea + patterned napkins) to hand out to special people i meet in japan, now i've started cleaning out my phone of all the "japanese reference sentences" i was taking screenshots of (i have like 300 screenshots and need to grab the sentences and put them on the learning_japanese comm)





It's just free wrapping paper you can get at the grocery store (they change the patterns every so often and there just happened to be a nice-looking one this time).

finished reading my first NON-MANGA book in japanese; it's meant for 4-5 year olds and is about a talking cat who's insulted by everyone for being fat and lazy. runs away from home, makes a cat restaurant that sells food made out of clouds (= daydreams), the restaurant flops because daydreams don't make you full, then he goes back to his owner in the end but at least he loses weight. when i first checked it out months ago it had a bunch of words i didn't know, but by the time (= this week) i finally got around to reading it there were almost no words i didn't know.





Now the bulk of the stuff I have to prepare for the exchange is just all my computer stuff. Sell old broken laptops, fix up the one I'll hopefully take with me, remove all the files from my smartphone and factory-reset it then give it to my wife's sisters, remove all the files from everyone else's computers that I have scattered around and delete my user accounts and move everything to that newly fixed-up laptop...

My wife has a ton of stuff she doesn't want to throw away. By a "ton" I mean it all fits in our room but to me almost all of it is junk: Kid's toys (just toss), old drawings (scan and toss), bits of fabric (just toss), videogame cases (toss the cases, keep the games) etc. She keeps going "but I HAVE tossed a lot of stuff!" and I think you need to stop looking at the amount that you've tossed and start looking at what you have left and where you're going with it. If we move to Japan at the end of our stay, I don't want to take a plane flight back to Sweden PURELY in order to come here and toss boxes of my wife's stuff and then go back to Japan. Or, I don't want to pay like a thousand dollars to mail all of her stuff to us and then have our tiny cramped one-room apartment be full of.... crap like old Barbies. Have maybe 5 toys max: ALL TOYS. Not 5 toys out of each possible category of toys. Crafting stuff (scissors, thread, whatever)? You can rebuy that when you actually need it. I'm trying to get it so all of my belongings are actually able to go with me to Japan: Not leaving ANYTHING here in Sweden. So it's frustrating. Especially frustrating because we already know her parents are going to fill our room with junk while we're gone, they'll probably move around anything we have left and make it so lost we can't find it even if we do come back to get it, and it already happened exactly like that when my wife moved to Iceland so I don't get why she's still thinking she can just leave stuff here with her parents.

When I left the USA I brought 1 backpack, 1 suitcase, possibly 1 cardboard box (hard to remember) and I left 1 cardboard box at my dad's place (which is still there since I've never had the money to visit those guys). The goal is to have even less than that when I go to Japan, because at the time I didn't know stuff like how easy it would be finding household goods (towels etc) in the new country and I had no scanner so I couldn't toss my physical books. But my wife really isn't on board with it.