Field Notes, and Lots of Them!

This is what was in my birthday package! OK, so I went a little overboard. I think I'm set for awhile.

Got some Expedition Edition notebooks, some Drink Local notebooks, some America the Beautiful notebooks, and some pencils. These are my first Field Notes, so getting so many varieties was just plain illogical, but...I couldn't make up my mind, so. Here we are.

I haven't yet used them, but the Expedition Edition will probably be where I start. It's just so eye-catchingly BRIGHT on the front and subtle in the back. And the paper is...weird, but intriguing. Supposedly it's water and tear proof. It's very different from Rite in the Rain paper: thin and sort of silky to the touch. But then, I believe Rite in the Rain is specially treated paper, whereas this is not really paper at all. Fascinating. It's dot ruled, which I like a great deal.

I also really like the covers on the Drink Local notebooks. They have a soft grippiness that puts me in mind of Rhodia's "soft touch" covers. And they came with this nifty coaster.

The America the Beautiful notebook also had a special token: in this case, a decal with each of the notebooks represented. (They are very pretty notebooks.)

There are a lot of neat little details with these notebooks, one of the most fun being the specification list they each come with.

The pencil has its own list, too! I'll be giving one of these a good hard trial run in the next little bit here.

Monsters and Musgraves

Sometimes my desk looks like I killed a large, blue-blooded monster and tried to mop up the evidence. (In reality, this was just an unfortunate incident with a sample of Private Reserve Electric DC Supershow Blue--luckily most of the ink made it into a pen!)

And sometimes, even though I can't draw, I doodle monsters. Like this guy. (Apologies to Hank Sr.!)

In other news, I already broke my pencil buying moratorium. You knew that was going to happen, right? It's my birthday Monday. I used that as an excuse. That and the free shipping on Amazon orders over $25.  Has anyone else tried the Musgrave Test Scoring 100 (especially Speculator)? If not, I may pass some out. I'd be curious to get your thoughts.

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!

The Art of Letting Go: Another Pencil Post (Plus)

Aw, it's a little *baby* Golden Bear!

1. Pencil Post
After a few weeks and some seventy-five composition book pages (albeit with a certain amount of white space factored in), the Golden Bear I was using dwindled to a little over three inches long. I set it aside in favor of this week's favored pencils, primarily a General's Cedar Pointe and a USA Gold. But I keep wondering if I'm selling it short. (No pun intended. Sorta.) I mean...it still writes. It's doing all it can. Doesn't it deserve my using it to the best of my ability until I absolutely cannot hold it anymore? (I'm not sure if these questions are pure sentiment, Catholic guilt, or my partially-Scots blood...)

For those of you who use woodcase pencils routinely, how short do you let them get before giving up on them? And what do you do at that point--toss 'em in the garbage without a second thought? Save them up for a once-yearly ceremonial funeral pyre? Hoard them as pocket pencils even though you know deep down they may never be used again? Take them out in the woods and set them free in the wild? I'm curious.

2. Plus
Has anyone else noticed that Blogger recently added a sort of rudimentary statistics application to their dashboard? It's not super powerful, but it gives you a vague idea of how many hits your blog gets and where the traffic is coming from. Also, it shows you which recent search terms led people to your site. And thus it was that I discovered a few days ago that if you searched Google for "inane bunnies," my site was the first one to pop up. Woo-hoo!! I'm number one! Oh...wait...what? Inane bunnies?? Really? (Sadly, I've since slipped to third or fourth place...)

On the bright side, Inane Bunnies would be a good name for a band.

And yes, there are days when it might even be a good name for this blog.

Also, today is my birthday. You know you're getting old when you can't actually remember how old you are and have to do the math three times before you believe the number you're coming up with. For the record? Thirty-four. Eep.

Birthday redux typecast

The one musical artist I did discover this weekend was actually by means of the Alphasmart Flickr group: Gordon Bok was mentioned by one of the frequent posters, and I looked him up out of curiosity. I like what little I've found. Actually, he also got played in my Pandora mix, somewhere in the realm of Stan Rogers. He's a Mainer with a great slightly-rough-around-the-edges baritone voice who sings everything from sea shanties to ballads to original songs. I'll be looking deeper into his music.

Ah, and now we're back to Silly Wizard. I <3 Andy M. Stewart. *sigh*