I'm coming home October 17.

I have a blog post sketched out, and partially written, entitled Learning to Read. In a nutshell, it's about being illiterate and unable to communicate with other human beings here in Japan.

I have wanted to write a lot more here. But it's really exhausting. I refuse to post anything that's unfinished, and I don't want this blog to be an online public diary ("Dear diary, today I got up and ate Special K for breakfast. Then I took a shower. Then I had to decide whether to wear my blue skirt..."). If I sit down to write, I might have a finished piece in two hours. Longer if I have to deal with pictures.

I have been doing a lot of cooking in Derek's apartment. Pushing his "kitchen" to its maximum culinary capacity. He has a sink, one gas burner, a toaster oven, and microwave-shaped appliance that functions both as a microwave, an oven, and a broiler. I didn't believe it until I baked in it. I'm on a bread kick. So far I've made pizza dough and bagels. The pizza was good, but I think I can tinker a bit with the recipe and make it better next time. The bagels were a failure, unfortunately. I also made homemade ricotta cheese, and used it in lasagna. With Barilla no-boil noodles. But I did make a homemade bechamel sauce for it. I learned how to make okonomiyaki, which is a sort of cabbage pancake with bits and pieces thrown in and topped with a barbecue-type sauce. And this morning I tried my hand at making tamagoyaki, a sweet rolled omelet. It was delicious. I'm going to have to perfect that one, too.

The big news though, that maybe I should have started with, is that I'm coming home on October 17. (Oh fine, I'll make that the blog title. Done.) The topic of cooking is directly relevant to this decision though. I have been away from home for nearly four months. And traveling the world is amazing. It really is. But the thing that I'm learning about myself is that the more I travel, the more strongly I feel the need to have a home. "Nomadic world traveler" is someone else's dream job, not mine. I'm certainly not yet ready to settle down with a job and a mortgage, but I need a break, and I need to go home.