milkypink [dot] net

Yesterday it finally got up to around 45F, and in celebration of the coming spring, I opened a bunch of windows in the house.

The fresh air really helps my motivation to do things, especially cleaning. This may be part of the reason why I’m really unproductive in winter – the house barely stays warm as it is, if I were to open a window, even for a few minutes, all would be lost… ( ｉдｉ )

Laundry is the easiest task to tackle, since even though I don’t air-dry much anymore (I have too great a love of warm cloth coming out of the dryer to avoid it) I do hang up blankets to let them air out periodically. Plus, with fresh air, I naturally think of clean clothing~

Cleaning flat surfaces like tile are also much easier to deal with when there’s a nice breeze moving through the room. I do try to avoid using harsh chemicals anyway, but it can feel so stuffy, not to mention all of the junk that gets kicked up into the air during cleaning…

The cats enjoyed it too, I think, and spent the hours with open windows racing around the house. XD

Unfortunately today has been rainy and gross, and kind of chilly out…

For the past month or so, various health problems have prevented me from continuing my 365-day blogging experiment as planned. Since the weather will likely warm up in the next month or so (or at least, it better!) I may feel up to writing more.

Unfortunately the same problems that kept me from blogging also delayed my kanji studying… (- -；) So I’m still stuck on the final test of level 4.

Lately I’ve been interested in making 弁当 (bento) again, reading all of the entries at Just Bento (justbento.com) and now moving on to Just Hungry for other various recipes XD Whenever I get into a cooking mood, I find there are a bunch of utensils I don’t currently own that would make my cooking life a lot easier… however this time, I’ve run into a problem of having a full set of almost-no-longer-usable pans, which is quite a problem. It’s not as though I don’t use pans to cook on a regular basis, but it hadn’t become so apparent until recently that replacing all of them would become mandatory, not optional. I’d like to get some better quality stuff this time so it will last… but we’ll see what happens. (I rather think pans should last more than say 5 years, don’t you?)

Been pondering the budgeting aspect of things recently as well. Tracking spending, reducing spending (the ban was completed without any issues, by the way!) thinking about saving… Fortunately I’m not hit as hard as others during this downturn but it’s still quite depressing.