180,000 Plus

I have been getting to sleep later than usual this week and I fully attribute it to Halloween. Though that's not a perfectly fair accusation. Halloween is just a day that kids celebrate and on which the schools hold some activities. But the choice to work my ass of for these things is what's really keeping me from turning in before midnight this week. This is not a griping post, however. I'm having a blast!

Though we did some things at Higashi School, and had games and activities in each class, Arume decided to hold two separate events on Wednesday, one for junior high school and one for elementary. Having picked up my schedule for the week on Friday, I saw that my involvement was going to be pretty high. Junko先生 also asked me to take part by wearing my costume.

*cough* Uh, what? Costume? Oh...

And so I got to work. By thinking. What the hell could I come up with in a few days that would be original, funny, interesting, or scary, and not look like crap. You may not be aware, but I have a keen eye for quality, in my work or others', so a halfass costume was not a possibility. I continued to think by mentally cataloging all the clothing I had brought with me, all the little things lying around the house that could be manipulated, reshaped, or simply hung to my body, all the things I could buy at the 100 yen store. Somewhere in this process, while eating a bowl of cereal, it came to me.

A milk carton. But not just *any* milk carton - the one I see everyday at school lunch, the gakkou kyuushoku gyuunyuu carton, with its pretty little barn and silo, blue and white patterns, and helpful information about contents and methods of opening.

As we all know, cartons are made of paper, boxes they are really. It turns out that large orders of copy toner come in well-sized for wearing boxes - just a little wider than the torso and a little deeper, too. Working at schools, I'm surrounded by craft materials and larger than necessary pieces of paper. So I coated the box in white, printed Japanese in almost perfect replication, spent way too much time getting the barn design to scale, and devised a system to keep the box dangling at an appropriate height and to keep it from collapsing upon itself. After adding white socks, pants, shirt, and bandana, and don't forget the actual school milk, I was golden. Er, white actually.

It was a hit. I became Mr. Milk for a day, and my little carton (Milkie) was a source of puppetry and delight to the younger kids. Unfortunately, my method of dispensing milk chocolate treats to the kids didn't go as well as planned (imagine a box of milk "dispensing" chocolate treats...), but even if they didn't eat them, at least they got a kick out of the acting.

Waisu desu.

In other news, my car hit 180,000 km the other day, I've been in Japan for three months and it seems like three weeks, "unnamed" is going to "call me about dinner this weekend" (bleh...) and I still don't know where I'm going for the winter break. Odds indicate a trip to the Antipodean and then a few days on a tiny tiny island east of Okinawa to visit a friend.