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Last week of Staycation

My old team got turned down and it has taken/is taking me a while to find a new team. So I took the 3 week long staycation to reset. I haven’t really taken a vacation in a year, like many people, and was hoping to explore Taipei with S now that the kids are finally in school and there are new things to explore. Unfortunately, S has been having a pretty nasty ear infection.

On the plus side: The kids are in school, so I still get time to myself.

I got a Breville oven imported from the States via eBay. (Though now I’m looking at the Anova oven. We know someone here who has it, and I might eventually get over my social awkwardness to ask if I can see/play with it.) It has definitely been worth the investment. I’ve made cakes, cookies, and focaccia in it. It’s also an air fryer and makes fantastic fries and chicken nuggets (a favorite with the kids–and the adults). I discovered popovers! And 9″ focaccia, which I’m sure “real” Italians would probably find silly.

Dovetailing with that, I’ve decided to reorganize my recipe “book.” I thought I had maybe 30 recipes, but I actually have closer to 100. So I got the most important ones and will be slowly converting them over the rest of the week.

And I’m working on a recipe tool to read and convert my recipes with multipliers. That way I can easily adjust things for my small oven. But still keep the recipes in a human readable format. I don’t want to have to install an app/tool every time I just try to look at my recipes.

Another plus of being here is that going to the doctor is cheap. There are literally 3 ENTs at the intersection where we live–which granted, is close to an MRT stop. We don’t qualify for NHI yet, so we self-pay for everything. S’s visit and a week’s worth of medication cost about 950 TWD (about 35 USD). In the US, this would just maybe cover the copay.

We also finally got our food budget down! Back when we were super stressed and didn’t have energy to even figure out grocery shopping, we ordered delivery everyday and spent over 2000 USD a month on food. Well, now we have stuff to make our own food, we’re on track to spend at or under 1000 USD this month. This is great for our FI plans.

So that’s it: the first update in a restart of the blog. I had wanted to bring something *great* and ~awesome~ but then I would just procrastinate. So I figured I’d dive in with something mundane. Expect little or no pictures, since I’m really not the photo type, but I’ll do my best to make the content somewhat interesting.

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