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.