the handy vellum notepad

Although I was at work and within reach of a couple of blocks of post-it, several notebooks, a computer which could have been used to send an email to myself and a phone on which several different methods of reminder-creation could have been employed it was still quickest and easiest to scribble on my arm, though I had to use a fine felt-tipped Berol instead of my preferred pen for this sort of thing (which was sitting on top of a notebook at home at the time), hence the ink-creepage further illegibilating the text. I even remembered to complete one of the two tasks indicated and at least thought about the other, though I ended up not doing anything about it after reconsidering how to achieve the required effect in a less preparation-intensive way.

My A-level biology teacher once saw me writing a note on my arm and was (apparently genuinely) appalled that I would expose myself to the risk of absorbing potentially toxic inks through my skin, though I hadn't been aware that the ink in a Pilot Hi-TecPoint V5 (this was before the V7 was available, at least in the stationers of Lincolnshire) was particularly able to penetrate the skin and perpetrate evil within the body. Also, this was from a man who did not warn his sixth-form class against eating their lunch at their desk at lunchtime despite the fact that they were the same desks people had been spilling formalin over and possibly dropping bits of dissected rat onto during the rat-dissection component of the course. Obviously the people in his class who took biology knew this but they'd probably passed any squeamishness seeing as one of the double-biology periods (including those in which we were slicing up and spread-eagling dead rats against a corkboard) was spread over the mid-morning break when people leery of eating immediately after trying to cut the mesentery off the read wall of the abdominal cavity went hungry, even though the canteen was at the other end of the school from the biology lab.