I ought to do a commercial, in the spirit of this one, to sell televisions right now.  I can imagine me saying “my hair is brown, my eyes are blue and my skin is well tanned.”

The problem is my hair is turning white, my eyes change between green, blue and gray depending on what I’m wearing and right now my hands are blue and my fingertips are orange and black. (If that doesn’t send people running for higher definition televisions, then nothing will. I could also wear a green shirt and say it’s blue, although that wouldn’t work in Japan. (More on that in another post.)

This technicolor finger painting happened today when I was refilling a couple fountain pens and, well, things got weird.

I had no problems with the black ink at first, but then managed to grab a piece of blotter paper in the wrong way and blackened my finger tips.

The same thing happened with the dark blue ink I used for the second pen.

Then, I refilled a third pen with a more turquoise shade of blue. In this case, I tested the wetness and dryness of a spot on my cleaning towel and discovered it was, in fact wet, and my fingers were suddenly blue.

At that point I decided to wash the towel and, by default, my hands. This involves running it under warm water and squeezing out the ink.

Unfortunately, the ink, despite being water-logged, was still persistent enough to make my hands an interesting shade of blue.

This is one of the risks of using, not only fountain pens, but fountain pens with bottled ink. If you’re not careful, you end up wearing your hobby. You can also end up wearing colors that you weren’t using. The orange comes from an ink I wiped on the towel yesterday.

Now I’m faced with a dilemma: do I wash dishes to help clean off my hands, or do I just go to bed and the let tomorrow morning’s shower take care of the ink.