Welcome, Tamara!

Your reasons for learning japanese sound very inspiring, I wish you all the best for this linguistic voyage.
I’m a newbie myself (mid-Season 2 right now) but I can highly recommend Aikibujin’s guide for setting up Anki (linked above) and also to basically immerse yourself in Japanese content as much as possible while working your way through TextFugu.
I, for example, am watching a lot of Anime recently which obviously have English subtitles, but instead of just reading those I try to recognize as much as possible in what is being spoken. Often it’s just a single word, sometimes a partial sentence, but this creates a very strong motivational effect for me. I feel like I am actually starting to learn the language. I also frequently visit Japanese websites and just try to read anything I can. I try to recognize as many Kanji as possible and attempt to guess what e.g. a link leads to before clicking on it.
It’s a really rewarding experience which motivates me greatly to learn on.

Maybe this is a personal quirk of mine but it might help you too. Augment the learning material TextFugu provides with the films and books you like and just try to really “get in there” :)

You should check out memrise. They offer several collections of vocabulary, both single words and helpful sentences. Many of these are kanji-free, too.
Beware though, there is no guarantee as to how correct everything is. But it certainly is a good resource :)
Here’s one for food vocab, and generally everything Japanese you can find here.