Walk Report (AKA Yet Another Excuse to Scribble in Field Notes)

As part of my "walk more" resolution for the year, I thought I'd start keeping a notebook, because I'm a nerd and I like the idea of being able to look back on at least some of my data. Bonus: knowing I'll get to write something down with a nice pencil in a cool notebook is motivation to get my fanny out the door in the mornings.

Don't have a set format yet, but I'll get there.

The Persistence of Pencil

Something of a case in point: a childhood journal entry from the 80s, in which the pencil looks as clear as it did the day it was written, though the notebook wasn't always properly stored and the paper has seen better days.

If you'll allow me to go off on a mini rant for a moment here...occasionally I find myself wandering pen forums and get cranky at certain misconceptions.

Note to the Internet: STANDARD GRAPHITE PENCIL DOES NOT FADE.

It's graphite. It is, essentially, powdered rock. You could stick a lump of graphite out in the sun for a thousand years, and it's not going to bleach white.

Pencil *can* smear, of course. Especially if you're using rather soft pencil. If you have very soft pencil on a page that is constantly exposed to friction of some kind, you may end up with smudged, illegible writing. This is entirely different from fading.

Thank you. I feel better now. Carry on.

Pencilcast: Shadow Tale

Friends and Nemeses (and Emma)

I could mention that I did *try* to do a typecast version of the index card note, since you're likely getting sick of trying to decipher my handwriting, but my typewriters don't care much for these cards and after a certain amount of arguing with them, I gave up.

OK, some of you asked for mandolin samples.  This will teach you to be careful what you ask for.  Here are a coupla tunes:

1. Emma's Waltz, with a friend playing chords.  It's a little too slow.  Also, because I'm petrified, there are no dynamics or variations or that.  I do love this tune, though.  It's purty.

2. Lark in the Morning.  This second tune is one I've been fighting with tooth and nail: a four part Irish jig they play at the local Irish session pretty much every week.  I took an instant dislike to it and it became a nemesis of sorts: every time I tried to learn it, my brain put up an instant barrier.  "Uh-uh.  Not letting THAT THING in here.  No sir!"  But this past weekend I decided to put aside past differences and try to make friends with it.  It's rather growing on me now, though there may be a certain amount of Stockholm Syndrome coming into play.  This is an imperfect take, but it was also about take fifteen.  Good 'nough, I guess.  You get the idea.  Keep in mind that at a session, I'd be just one of a dozen instruments playing it...kinda boring with just mando, and you hear every stinkin' flaw.

I've gotten to practice a bit today, since I'm currently snowed in, and could potentially be so again tomorrow.  Pretty stuff, though!

Cowcast Continued: Ghost Cow?

I ended up doing one more day's worth of cow scribbling during lunch today.  I swear, I'll get back to regularly scheduled content (whatever that is) soon.

Spontaneous Lunchtime Pencilcast

A quick and dirty writing exercise inspired by Mike Clemens' latest post, in quickly and dirtily scanned format.

Milk crates full of memories...

Faced with housework, I procrastinate in every way possible. This weekend, I organized my journals while putting off vacuuming. After my move this spring, they'd been crammed onto shelves in no particular place or order, so I gathered them from the four corners of the house and arranged by date. (Mostly by date, anyway--for some reason, there are a few journals in 1997 that overlap. Apparently 1997 was the Year of Living Disorganizedly.) They span some twenty-seven years now: that little one all the way on the left was given to me for Christmas when I was six, when I was first learning to write.

And of course, once they were all nicely organized like that, I proceeded to yank them off the shelves (those classy milk-crate shelves...) and look through them. Some are in better shape than others. The colored journals I favored in the nineties fared the worst: the blue fountain pen ink I used in some entries vanished, and at least one journal was the victim of temporary storage in a damp basement. And there are large gaps in the record: I tend to write more when there isn’t as much going on, which means that most of my entries, especially those in the most recent journals, are mundane daily details and rambling. Their value is in the writing of them: they help me process my days and sort out thoughts, and many may never be read again. But other content makes me smile, or laugh out loud, or get a little weepy. Inconsistent though they may be, they contain a lot of memories, these books.

There is evidence of my long standing fascination with office supplies:

Translation: John and Jim got a car. I got crayons.

There are birthday reports:

I recall this as one of my best birthdays *ever*, especially the bird seed, strangely enough!

Book reports:


I’ve waxed poetic:

I was twelve when I wrote this entry, and apparently hadn’t yet learned appropriate apostrophe use in its vs. it’s. I guess I’ll cut my young self some slack....

I’ve attempted artsy:



Sometimes relatively casual entries make me smile, looking back. Stumbled across this comment about a conversation with my brother as I was flipping through...


A wedding and several children later...I’d say it turned out pretty well!

I’ve recorded thoughts on births, deaths, current events, pets, books and music, bemoaned my own bad habits and worries about the present and future. Reading through these, I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed in some ways, and how little in others. It’s kind of fun to revisit once in awhile on a rainy afternoon.

And speaking of revisiting and rainy afternoons, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I picked up the gloriously restored Olympia SG-1 from Blue Moon Camera.



Happy rebirthday, big guy!

Pencilcast: Freudian analysis, anyone?

The Sound of One Fat Man Praying

This could also be subtitled, "Why I'll Probably Never Be a Saint...."



On Wednesday mornings from six to seven, I have Eucharistic Adoration. Six to seven. AM. What this means is that every Tuesday night, I set my alarm clock for five o'clock, and every Wednesday morning I wake up at five and spend at least five or ten minutes arguing with myself about actually getting up in time to be at the church at six. Maybe next week I could tell the man who shares the commitment with me that I accidentally slept through my alarm, or didn’t realize it was Wednesday. Or I tell myself I have a headache--just a little one, but if I get up now, it’s gonna get worrrrse, really it will. But eventually I stumble out of bed, trip over the dog (who is WIDE AWAKE and SO EXCITED because he's going to have the same DOG FOOD(!!!!!) he had the night before extra EARLY today!!!!!), wade through the cats, take a shower, and race out the door knowing I’m going to just barely get there in time if I do get there in time at all, and resolving to do better next week. See subtitle above.

It’s actually surprisingly busy there most Wednesday mornings. The parish men’s group meets at six-thirty, which allows even those with busy work schedules to make it at least some of the time. Not only do they get a good sized crowd, but quite a number of the men come early to stop by the adoration chapel before the meeting. It’s inspiring to me how many come as much as an hour or so early just to spend time in prayer early in the morning. It can also be a little distracting, lots of people coming and going, at an hour when I’m still getting it together.

So this morning, I had just run in (literally, late as usual), signed my name on the list for the six to seven o’clock hour, and had been kneeling there for maybe five minutes, when a man I hadn’t seen before came in and went up to kneel on one of the kneelers at the very front. He was middle aged, paunchy and balding, but very well dressed in a nice suit, and carrying a nice hat (hats are a wonderful, wonderful manly accessory, incidentally...but I’ll save that subject for another time). Perhaps because of the nice suit and a general air of authority, his portliness seemed more distinguished than anything else. And a line popped into my head, “You can forgive a fat man a lot for the sake of a good suit.”

It means nothing. It’s not a very good line. And it's probably not very kind. But at six-ten this morning, it was all-important. I desperately wanted it saved for posterity. I had dreams of writing a story around it. I wanted to shout it to the world, post it on facebook and Twitter, even though I don’t even have a Twitter account. It could not be lost! But, with my early morning not-on-coffee brain flickering from thought to thought like a radio on scan, I knew I couldn’t hold on to it unless I stopped with the rosary and recited that sentence over and over instead. (See subtitle above). This obviously wouldn’t do. I sat there fidgeting for a long, long moment, trying to tell myself I could remember this one short crucial sentence without thinking about it constantly for the next fifty minutes, and then I finally gave up and took a pocket notebook and pencil from my purse.

As I might have mentioned a time or two, I’m completely paranoid about writing in public. Writing by hand helps because most can’t read someone else’s handwriting instantly, so reading over someone’s shoulder tends to be more difficult. But even so, I admit as I was writing that sentence, I had my hand sort of cupped over one side of the page, so “You can forgive” and “for the sake of” were visible, but the “fat man” and “good suit” were hidden. Because those first bits almost seem suitable for writing in a chapel. I am...a hypocrite.

At least I could move on once it was written down. Eventually. I dove into some St. Francis de Sales, who is, as Speegle mentioned recently, the patron saint of writers. Hmmm...I wonder if he ever suffered the same sorts of distractions?

Maybe there’s hope for me yet?

It's the most dangerous time of the year

I'm an office supply junkie, totally, and it seems like you can't go *anywhere* these days without encountering large bins of such things at discount prices. Even the grocery store isn't safe: they've got piles o' paper and pencils even in the frozen foods aisles.

Thus far I've managed to restrict my purchases to a small stack of Wal-mart composition books (currently a quarter apiece) and a package of USA Gold wood-case pencils (last of the Made in the USA wood pencils, so far as I know!), for a grand total of about three fifty. But I somehow found myself at Staples today, wandering around with some fancy(ish) Pentel mechanical pencils in an 0.9 width, which I don't currently own, plus a packet of leads, and a couple Black Pearl erasers. I don't need them. I put them back. But it was a struggle.

I've kind of been in a graphite mood, if the above paragraph didn't convey that strongly enough. Some time back, Speculator of La Vie Graphite sent me a very generous sampler of all sorts of pencils, mostly wood-case. I played with them for a bit, and then they got shuffled aside during my move earlier this year. But in the last few weeks, they're all I've been using for journaling, and even for notes at work. The joy of pencils is a little more subtle than fancy pens, I suppose, which makes them all the more appealing. I'm really enjoying cycling through them over and over, noting the slight differences in feel (some are smoother, some have more "grit", which isn't necessarily a bad thing) and even within the same grade, some are darker or lighter than others. Some have that wonderful cedar aroma, some have cool colored wood. (Rhodia!) My current favorites are a few basic Pentel mechanical pencils (hence the near miss at Staples), Helix Oxfords, and yes, the cheap USA Golds, despite the fact that they're a little thinner than what I'm used to and do have a certain amount of that grit I just mentioned.

So...on that note, here's my first ever pencil cast, about--what else?--pencils, of course. I cheated: this is just a recent entry from my journal, scanned in (rather poorly, I might add). Yes, I yammer on about this stuff even to myself.