Why did I leave lines blank? It has to do with three fun Christmas presents my wife got me.
To the left is the nib and section of my new Vista, next to my Safari. Pretty straight-foward. In additional to Safaris being cool pens, I thought a Vista would be fun for a few other reasons. One key one is being able to show my daughter (and others) how fountain pens work. Fountain pen companies have made "demonstrator" pens for years--I thought it would be fun to have one in my collection. There was one other use...
Part two is a black light flashlight. You may have seen these at the airport, when TSA asks for your papers and makes sure you don't have 3.1 ounces of juice. I wonder what my new pen looks like if I point the black light at it?
Why invisible ink? Very little reason other than fun. It could be simply sharing notes with my daughter (or others). Or writing my own gripe in my notebook. Or possibly putting an "easter egg" in some note that I write--if it happens under a black light, it will be revealed.
In any case, It is definitely high on the cool and fun scale! Isn't my wife great?
I couldn't resist. For $5, it can't be bad, right?
Perhaps you need a slap chop. Not convinced? Check out the new remix!
I made Chinese food for lunch. We had sweet and sour chicken (I hadn't put the sauce on yet), egg rolls, veggie skewers, and steamed rice. All was from scratch and yummy.
I confess I'm an office supply geek, particularly with fountain pens. I was pleased to find that there are communities of like-minded people out on the Internet (let's face it: what community is not represented on the Internet?).
I've been carrying around an A4 Clairefontaine notebook around for two years to take notes at work, and am about out of pages. Today I've bought it's replacement: a Rhodia spiral-bound notebook, also A4 sized.
One thing I wonder about as I write is how much ink do I use. I don't write a lot at work, so it doesn't accumulate a lot. However, a blank notebook offers an opportunity. I'm going to try to weigh the ink.
My methodology is to weigh the notebook empty, then weigh it again over the course of its use. Today, it weighed in at exactly 500 grams.
My methodology is probably not as rigorous as the Mythbusters, but to get a rough order of magnitude, it is probably adequate. The first gap is that I won't be using the same pen and ink. While I will use fountain pens 99% of the time, my pens tend to vary from broad to fine points, wet to dry writers (and the odd pencil thrown in for good measure). While it won't create an exact pages-per-gram measure that would be reliable, it would create an average.
My past notebook has a bunch of notes clipped in, post-its, etc. I will try to control for that by not putting on stickers (as I am want to do, and, prior to weighing in, remove any notes. Likewise, I will avoid tearing pages out of my book. I was able to do this with the Clairefontaine notebook.
The other thing that could throw off the experiment is that I'm not doing anything to protect it from environmental factors. It will collect any dirt, rainwater, or other things it may encounter being hauled everywhere. I could control for this by either carrying a second notebook around, keeping it blank save for the environmental factors, or to keep the notebook in home, in a sealed box, save for writing. As this is something I'm using for function first, I'll accept that error.
As a benchmark, I weighed a Lamy Safari with a loaded converter, as well as an empty one (typically, cartridges and convertors hold about 1 mL of ink, though it varies). The loaded pen came in at 18g, and the empty one came in at...18g. It's probably beneath the resolution and accuracy of the scale. Hopefully, 80 pages of notes will show some data.
I'll check in every few months, and post results (the new weight, how many pages were used, and an average number of words on a random sample of pages).
My daughter took this picture of me cooking with my phone.
Ever Wonder What the Emergency Lights Look Like?
