Monochromatic Oink

I finally get to move into my new window office tomorrow! I can't wait! It is south-facing, so it will be nice and bright in there. It is going to be as close to heaven as an office life can be.

I spoke with my new officemate about the furniture arrangement. She's currently crowded into one corner of the office, so as soon as the other two people are out of the way we're going to rearrange her furniture so that she has half of the office and I have half. That's only fair, right? There is one minor problem though. At some points during the day, the sun really glares on her monitor, so they've rigged up a sun screen of sorts using - of all things - orange "out" cards that you use to indicate that a file is missing from a drawer. It is truly ugly. I went over to Uwajima to see if they had anything that would work better and/or look better. I found one or two solutions , but I have others in mind, for which I'll have to hit a few department stores.

On the other hand, I found things that I totally did not go over there for but I medically needed them. One is a midnight blue tea pot. I like to buy loose tea, brew it by the pot, and get all hyped up on it. There's a tea shop nearby to feed this new addiction. Another thing I found is a Japanese tea cup with The Great Wave on it. The third thing is... harder to explain.

My company buys office supplies by the crate. I don't need to buy my own. But why would I want to use yellow squares to write notes when I can write on white squares with pairs of black and white piggies that are saying "Boo" on them? I wouldn't want to, of course! And that is why I blew five bucks on white squares with pairs of black and white piggies that are saying "Boo" on them. Apparently these pigs are quite big in Japan (incidentally, that's a song by Alphaville) from a company called San-X, apparently responsible for Hello Kitty and other well-known icons of cuteness. They're called MonokuRo Boo. MonokuRo means monochromatic, and Boo is really Buu in Japanese, the "oink" sound a pig makes. They're adorable and stupid and useless, since they don't actually stick to anything, but they're cute and they make me smirk (sometimes smiling is just too much work), so they're going to live in my line of sight until I get bored of them and use them to make tiny paper airplanes to throw at my co-workers.

And speaking of spending too much money on crap. Uwajimaya currently has about a thousand really cool things that I really like, but have nowhere to put them or money with which to acquire them. For example, paper lanterns with a water colored cherry blossom design. Night lights with Japanese artwork on them. Kimonos. (Well, maybe I do need one of those... someday.) A Samurai helmet. All kinds of food I've never tried. Chopsticks. Sake sets. I could go on and on, but you should probably just pay them a visit. You've got to see the stuff to truly covet it.