Capability: Brown

The colon indicating, of course, that I am not claiming to be reworking the entire landscape of a nation, but that my personal threat level is very low.  And only a threat if you’re one of the things I mean to accomplish– generally I’m a benign presence and a threat to none.

There is not one of my conscience-soothing grids to offer, because the entire holiday period was taken up with holiday activities.  Were this a food blog, I’d have plenty of stuff to offer, what with the cooking and eating of things accomplished over the week of absence.  However, since it’s an (intermittently) fountain pen and (increasingly) writing blog, I have very little to contribute.  As to the latter, I glanced occasionally at the note book in which a first draft languishes unregarded since the 23rd and I thought writing thoughts about that novel I mentioned that’s now leaning across the partition separating the pilot from the cargo and whispering “Are we there yet?” with increasing force.  Cowboys & Lovecrafts isn’t a completely untouched field, but I may actually be able to do something marginally original with it.

As far as pens go, there was a little actual production.  I produced a huge disappointment for a client, which I should confirm with an email as a permanent situation, in discovering that the glue holding the section in his Esterbrook J wasn’t letting go, but I had managed to release the glue that was holding shut the crack in the section.  I also prove myself fully capable of wonders and blunders in the very same pen.  But let me press a mental image on you first.

Imagine, if you will, a pen somehow dropped in such a way that the tines curl in toward the feed and also cross over.  It is as if the pen, angered at its ill treatment, is starting to make a fist.  This was the state of a pen the chap at The Paper Umbrella handed me back at that clinic; stock that had to be withdrawn from his shelves, which I said I’d make something of a project of.  The project would be to uncurl a flower bud made of thin steel, returning it to the specific shape of a pen point without inducing stress cracks in the material.  Mental picture formed?  Great!

Because I if I had taken a picture of it in that state, it you would have a real basis of comparison, and then this might be impressive…

Oh, look. A blurry picture. It is an alien, or bigfoot?

…rather than a mere testament to the sort of peaks of incompetence I and the old camera (much easier to mount on my teeny tripod) can sometimes achieve.  This is more on me, since if I had looked at the picture before rushing the pen to its home, I could have tried another.  However, photographic goonishness aside, I take a leaf from Leonard McCoy’s book in feeling that getting this pen back into functional shape is very nearly like curing a rainy day.

That is, by the way, an excellent sensation to start a year with.

Today’s pen: Pelikan M600

Today’s ink: Diamine Prussian Blue (which does a great job of standing in for Pelikan blue-black, as far as looks go).

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