Introducing the Bento Hoodlums

Last week, I found some of the cute little 2″ Domo Qee toys on eBay and was lucky enough to score three of them; red, brown, and green. They arrived last Friday and I immediately began having photo fun with them, something I’d seen on the Flickr group Domo Domo Domokun. I opened them up and immediately gave them food names, which made the kids go crazy for them.

The red one is Kamaboko, the brown one is Tonkatsu, and the green one was Shiso until Baby Girl made me rename him to Wasabi. I liked her suggestion way better anyway! It seemed they were going to make a great addition to our home.

But then… then I went to give the kids a bath and when I came out, they were attempting to make a break for it. In their hands were some of my bento food picks!! I really don’t know how they managed to do it since I have these in a sealed box with snaps on the side, but they did it somehow. It’s a good thing I caught them in time. I think Kamaboko could have really hurt herself with that huge shamrock pick. After this incident, I decided to call them the Bento Hoodlums.

The next day, Mr. Pikko was moving an old female betta from the bathroom into the tank with our two new fish and she started going on a rampage against the newbs. The Hoodlums thought this was fantastic entertainment.

They stood outside the tank cheering on the old girl, though I think Wasabi was rooting for the new fish.

We went to Grandma J’s house for a birthday party and there’s a big box of Thomas trains there. The Hoodlums were getting bored, so they launched a sneak attack on poor Thomas the  Tank Engine.

As you can see, he was taken completely by surprise. I think Tonkatsu might have farted on him for extra insult.

Later, we were eating cupcakes and before I could stop him, Wasabi had hopped up on top of mine and starting stomping his way through my frosting, laughing maniacally the whole time. He wasn’t laughing too hard later when I was scooping frosting out of his shoes though, so we’re even.

The Hoodlums have been a nice distraction from the ultimate sadness that is the loss of Pikko’s name in Final Fantasy XI. I’m slowly getting over it, but I think the wound will be reopened when I have to actually do the renaming later on today when I log into Lakshmi for the first time.

I woke up at ten to five this morning to be there when Garuda went down and logged out at Bomingo Round, my usual fishing spot for moat carp in Windurst Woods. I didn’t have the heart to make a bento today. I just didn’t feel like it after the server went down and so I went back to bed.

I’m anticipating a lot of name chaos later tonight when the servers come back up, but I also hope it’s not that bad. Knowing how painful it is to lose a beloved name to an inactive character, I really don’t want to see others go through the same thing. Through all of this, I have lost a lot of respect for Square Enix, since they appear to put more value into a non-paying customer versus a paying customer. I don’t know how this will affect how I do things at ZAM, but hopefully it’s something that I can get over eventually.

After talking it through with a friend, we’ve decided to stick it through until Wings of the Goddess is completed and after that, we’ll likely leave the game. I had never thought I’d ever lose my character’s name, so it really sucks to end up leaving under a different name, no matter how cool it is. I started as Pikko and I wish I could have ended as Pikko without having the price tag of leaving friends behind. I suppose this is just how it’s meant to be though. The name can now live on through this blog and Yum-Yum Bento Box.