A blog about as organized and focused as my brain is.
Posted in Personal
The interest you all showed in an update to my experience driving stick shift surprised me. I wrote the first post about 1¼ years ago, and there have definitely been some ups and downs in that time. Let’s start with the lows, shall we? Then we can end on a positive note.
Posted in Personal
As it is for many, my journey to self-love has been long, with many walls and speed bumps along the way. I also still have a long way to go to love and accept my own body the way I do others’.
Somewhere along the way, though, I discovered my own, personal cheat code: decorations.
My first tattoo was on my hip. At the time, I wasn’t super fond of the area. But, after my tattoo had healed, it was like it’d flipped a switch. How could it be anything but fabulous when I had such a cool tattoo?
Granted, this is more something I realized in hindsight. At the time, I was so excited to finally have a tattoo that I didn’t pay any attention to how I felt about my hip. After all, there were, unfortunately, plenty of other areas I disliked back then.
Posted in Fountain Pens
5 years, 8 months, and 19 days after buying my first fountain pen, I purchased pen number 199. Granted, I haven’t kept all of those pens. Between selling, gift, breakage, and loss, I currently own 121 pens, of which 110 are in regular use.
But, the main point is that my next purchase will be pen 200!! That’s huge, and deserves an appropriately special pen.
Because I wasn’t carefully cataloging my pens yet, I blew right past pens 50 and 100 — although, by sheer dumb luck, #50 was my first 18111 pen. And I didn’t think to save 150 for a special pen, so 200 has to be awesome.
Posted in Fountain Pens
I’ve owned a decent number of pens in my time in the pen world. And I have many pen friends. This idea came to me as I was considering one of my most recent additions to the “for sale” pile. That said, I give you There Was A Pen a short story I wrote with illustrations by Pensloth, AKA Jim Crawford.
Posted in Fountain Pens, and Reviews
I’m back with post three, so you know what that means. My pen arrived! If you have read my previous posts (1, 2), I suggest you do so to know how this pen came to be. Be forewarned, there is A LOT of pen porn in this post. And you can click/tap any image to view it larger. I take no responsibility for pen envy, pen lust, or pen purchases resulting from the content in this post.
Posted in Fountain Pens
It took me quite a while to get into Sailor pens. I didn’t buy my first until October 2019 — 2 ¾ years after buying my first fountain pen. Not gonna lie, I’m still pretty pleased with that initial Sailor purchase — the Tequila Sunrise. It was, is, a worthy first Sailor purchase.
I’ve bought 13 more Sailor pens since then, all in the Pro Gear family, 10 of which I’ve kept. Not a bad ratio, and compared to my total pen purchases, not too terribly many. However, it does encompass the most fountain pens I’ve purchased of the same general model. It ties with TWSBI 580s, at 11, for most fountain pens I own of the same general model.
To be honest, I’d likely own more Sailor Pro Gears if they were less expensive and more easily purchased. But, fairly often, the ones I found interesting were from super small runs through stores that don’t sell online. And we all know what eBay sellers do to prices. But I digress…
I’m back with the second entry in the chronicle of my Día de Muertos pen. If you read my first entry then you know that this means I received permission to share the mock-up images for my custom pen.
Be forewarned, it will likely be a while before my next update. I’ll explain why I think so a bit later. For now, let’s pick up where I left off.
Posted in Fountain Pens
As I’ve stated previously, my current pen rule is to be more thoughtful with my pen purchases. I’m doing my best to purchase pens that will make me happy to own, not just happy to buy.
It can be difficult sometimes. Pens may have misleading marketing photos — I’m looking at you, Sailor Pro Gear Slim Red Supernova — or zero size reference, for example. So, pens you think will be be fabulous may turn out to be not so great, or even totally wrong for you.
The question then, is what do you do? My plan was always to immediately return any pen that didn’t make me 100% happy upon unboxing. I put that plan in place after the Red Supernova debacle. In theory, it was a great plan. In practice, it hit a major snag the next time a pen didn’t meet that standard.
Posted in Fountain Pens
Watching Coco gave me a greater appreciation for my Mexican heritage. Since then, I’ve been trying to fill in cultural gaps leftover from childhood; like the appreciation and understanding of Mexican art.
One of those glorious art styles is centered on Día de Muertos. The riotous use of colors alone is enough to capture my attention, but combined with macabre imagery and joyous celebration, it’s definitely in my top 5 favorite art styles/themes.
Posted in Personal, and Random Reflections
Some of you may know that I used to be terrified of driving. I didn’t get my license until a couple of months after my 29th birthday. And learning to drive really only diminished my fear, it didn’t eliminate it. In the intervening nearly 4 years, I’ve hardly driven at all. In fact, I didn’t drive on the road at all until December of last year.
That’s because we only have one car, and it has a manual transmission. Jim tried, right after I got my license, to teach me to drive stick. But, he’d driven stick for long long that it was all muscle memory for him. He had trouble explaining to me what to do. And he loves his car so much that it freaked him out when I keep stalling it out.
