I’ve had so much fun playing around with the images from my new book, パリのヴィテージ (Vintage Paris). Lots of amazing textures and pretty things in that book, and a bit sweeter and more pastel colors than 花とストロベリー (Flowers and strawberries). I think 花とストロベリー is still my favorite book with all the radiant colors (some of the stock images have been used to make the layout of sushibird.com), but パリのヴィテージ shares a good second place together with the Dover Sea life. I used to think it was a bit silly paying for stock images when you could find so many free resources on the internet, but it is like buying a huge package of inspiration, and it has been totally worth it. I think I have close to all the books I could want right now, but I still would love a resource books with gemstones and sparkles. I haven’t seen one that I liked well enough in that category to buy yet, so tips are more than welcome!

I am a very lucky girl, my partner made me breakfast yesterday morning. One of those small things that makes me really happy ♥

Bad awful mobile pic, I am sorry. But the content is gold. I think these words alone made me ace my keigo-test back in June. If you can just remember to at least replace these words with their more polite counterpart and make it a habit when speaking in keigo, it will free up some more brainpower to try to remember the rest of the grammar and special words. I love cheat-sheets err… cheat-pictures, I mean.

When I don’t have much time, I love fiddling around at Polyvore, I made a post with more pictures back in February. I know most people use it to put together outfits, but it can be used for other things, I love making little collages of sparkles and birds. It is really neat, and very quick to put together things as well. Above is the latest one I made, and here is a couple more:

Okokok, I know I should not buy any more resource books, but then I found this one, and I just had to have it. Beautiful, no? All the images in the book are ready to use high-resolution png and jpg. Instant love.

The metro in Tokyo is not always full of people, just look at how Kichijoji looked when we went to buy spices the other day. Almost empty, in the middle of the day.

Finding a Kaldi Coffee farm in the middle of.. somewhere turned out to be easier then we thought.

I never get tired of looking at all the delicious plastic foods.

And finally, we found it! I wish I  could take pictures inside the stores here without shooting from the hip and pretending like nothing happened. The Kaldi Coffee farm has lots of foreign goods. It is probably not very interesting if you are European or American and you are only in Tokyo for vacation, but if you live here, you get happy seeing all the fancy little bags of stuff you can not get anywhere else. I caved in bought a pack of Potatismos from Felix 😉 We also got a ton of spices (homemade curry galore to come!), delicious blue cheese and parmesan, not to mention salsa and nachos. Bliss!

I haven’t been able to blog as much as I would have liked to this week, but I have a really good excuse, I got my one of my wisdom teeth extracted. I am in the national health insurance program in Japan, so the final bill was incredibly cheap. I don’t understand why Norway does not have a similar system when it comes to dental programs, seems like teeth are not part of the body in Norway? Anyhow, I wanted a check up just to make sure everything is fine and dandy, and called the dentist to find out how long I had to wait until I could get an appointment – they booked me in for 4 hours after the phone call. Once the check up was done (no cavities and clean teeth!) I wanted to book another appointment to get my wisdom tooth extracted. I thought I might have to wait for a couple of days/weeks for an opening, but oh no, 24 hours later I was back to get the little sucker pulled out. The waiting time was so short I almost did not have time to build up the usual amount of ungrounded dentist-fear. If you are not impressed with the efficiency yet, I could mention that my appointment was at 18:00, and at 18:15 I was done and out of there, local anesthetic included. And it didn’t even hurt as much as I thought it would.

You know the saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees”? I think that in Nishi-Shinjuku you can’t see the city for the skyscrapers.

I made a new comment  form! And it even works! I wrote earlier about the beautiful web forms I have seen lately, so I wanted to make my own. I still have to fix the submit-button and style it up,  but at least the plundering with the form itself is done.

A couple of goodies I have found or rediscovered on the web during the latest week:

1. This amazing kinetic sculpture of San Francisco. You _have_ to see the video. It is absolutely gorgeous and incredibly impressive!
2. Earth at night. Wow. Look at how lit up Japan is over there!
3. Go make these cute page corner bookmarks!
4. Here is a rough guide about how to order food in Japan if you do not speak any Japanese. Usually I think various guides often contains a lot of odd tips, but this one seemed pretty straight forward and down to the point.
5. Melvin the machine! If you enjoyed playing with dominos when you were a kid, you will love this.
6. Japan has glowing green mushrooms! Maybe the radioactive levels are through the roof after all 😉
7. I generally dislike theme-restaurants and cafes, they are usually more expensive and the quality of the food is often so-so, you pay for the experience, basically. Still, I saw this Alice in Wonderland restaurant, and I almost, just almost, want to go once just to see what it is like.
8. I know I  have linked her before, but whenever I feel out of inspiration, I check out her site. The one and only Linn Olofsdotter. Love. I also like the way she describes her workflow, watching movies while she works, doodle instead of sketching. Sounds like the perfect workflow to me!
9. DaisyDisk is a great utility for mac to find out what files take up most space on your hard drive. Really neat info-graphics and very useful.
10. A bit old, but an interesting 12-minute video about “Japan – the strange country”. It focuses mainly on the negative points about Japan, but it is still an interesting little tid-bit of information.