Fun Loot from JetPens.com!

Hello! The dust at my day-job is finally starting to settle after the holidays (or, "the annual holiday retail apocalypse", as I've been calling it) and I'm getting time to get back to my blog at long last. I got an order in yesterday from Jet Pens, and since I didn't have much else to talk about, I thought I'd share. (FYI, all the links you might click on in this post will open in a separate browser window or tab.)

First, let me ask everyone (out of my perhaps half-dozen subscribers, ha ha) a question. I have this YouTube channel I like called "Irish Girl", where a young Irish woman enjoys comparing cultural differences between people in Ireland & America and recently said one of the things she has noticed is that a lot more people in America drive a manual transmission car than elsewhere in the west. She found this odd: "why wouldn't you want a simple-to-use automatic transmission?"

The answer she seemed to be getting from people who preferred their manual-shifting cars was either "I like total control over the function of my car", or "I simply enjoy doing the manual shifting."

I myself used to drive a little stick-shift pickup truck, before it got dramatically plowed from behind and rammed into the car in front of me in a 7 car pile-up...in some truly absurd circumstances...back around the year 1999, which ended up on the local TV station. Where, I might add, some wretched shrew of a TV anchor mocked me on the evening news after I'd appeared on camera. (If you try to go looking for this, don't bother...it was the "pre-everything is digitized & uploaded"-era.) I too enjoyed driving my stick shift, before that.

Do you think that the enjoyment us pen-nerds (er, pen enthusiasts) get from the tactile sensation of handwriting vs. more digital methods of communication, is kind of the same thing? Is this something in our universal subconscious we've not noticed before? We enjoy the feel or heft of a pen or even a freshly sharpened pencil as we write something in a nice notebook; isn't this kind of the same thing that happens when you enjoy driving your stick-shift car?

Deep thoughts, right there. You're welcome. Here are some really cool notebooks.

Jet Pens helpfully offers free shipping for domestic (USA) orders of $25.00 or more. I've added one or two of these inexpensive A5 sized Midori Color Paper Notebooks to a few Jet Pens orders in the past to nudge my total up to that point. This time, I was just ordering some more Tomoe River letter writing paper; the rest of my order was just these filler items. :-) I picked up 2 more of these notebooks, as if I needed any more blank notebooks. I've now got 5 of the different colors these are offered in.

I, uh, don't use them for anything; I hoard them like a weirdo and keep them in a neat stack on my bookshelf, because I don't want to "mess them up". Is that wrong? It's okay to tell me if that's wrong.

Here's the inside of two of them, in the "minty blue" Blue-Green color, and the Yellow color. The paper is wonderfully smooth, and matches the color of the cover. They have 56 pages in them, and are said to have been inspired by delicious French macaroons. :-) You can color code each of them by a different subject. They're fun, and only cost $3.25 USD (as of today's date).

From left to right, this is a cheapety-cheap yellow Kutsuwa HiLiNE Highlighter Pencil, a Pilot Envelope Address Writing Pen, and a Sakura Gelly Roll Classic Gel Pen. And no, Jet Pens isn't paying me to "plug" this stuff. :-) You see, I was getting tired of my traditional, office supply store highlighters smudging everything I wrote, and leaving black ink crud on the tip of my highlighter, so a while back I ran across this alternative form of highlighter on the Jet Pens website and added it to my wish list. Sigh...I paid nearly $4.00 bucks USD for this sucker, and only to find that, thus far, it works little better than the ink-based highlighters. It does come with a nifty built-in pencil sharpener for a cap, though. Here's how it performed on some different writing samples, scribbled into my cheap walmart Exceed notebook:

I admit that this might not be the best paper for this test, but the results were disappointing. From top to bottom (and if you click the photo, you'll get to see a bigger version of it, up close), that's a Retro 51 Tornado fountain pen with Noodler's Heart of Darkness Black ink, a Retro 51 Rollerball, a boring-sauce ball point pen, an ordinary #2 pencil, and as a "different ink-test", my Conklin All American Southwest Turquoise pen with Monteverde Caribbean Blue ink. Would that ink stand up better than the Noodler's uber-black? ...No. The highlighter pencil smudged both fountain pen inks, well after both inks had been allowed to dry. It's fair to say that highlighters weren't really made with fountain pens in mind, though.

The Pilot Envelope Address Pen is a different story. This is now the third one I've bought (one of them went to my sister), and I do recommend them. They're specifically made for writing addresses on envelopes, by using a sort of grease-based ink that is much, much less prone to getting obliterated or smudged if your envelope gets wet (rained on, dropped in a puddle, soaked in the tears of some despondent postal worker, etc.) while in transit. Think of it as an added safety measure. I've actually had a hand-written letter, using all fountain pen ink, get somehow utterly drenched by the U.S. Postal Service with no explanation, with the only remaining legible info on it being my pre-printed address label, which was how they knew how to return it to me. The envelope, and all the pages in it. were a colorful, blank, crinkly mess. What on Earth the USPS did to my letter to absolutely soak it like that will forever remain one of life's little mysteries. Since then, I've been writing most of my addresses with these pens.

The last one is just for fun...people have been after me to try a "white liner" for writing on dark paper or thick kraft paper. You can do fun things with these:

I did this on the bottom of a cheap paper grocery sack, so this is a less than ideal example. The fault is mine, not the pen's. By the way, that's actually the zip code for Schenectady, NY, USA. I don't really know anyone up there.

Ever wondered what "zip code" means, when every other country on Earth calls it a "postal code"? It stands for "Zone Improvement Plan", which was formally adopted by the USPS in 1962 as a way to more efficiently get mail from Point A to Point B at a time when the U.S. Population was increasingly large and spread out, and when hand written letters were at an all time height of popularity for communication with now far-flung friends and relatives. Now you know.

One more bit of fun, which I want to offer thanks to my dear pen pal Cheri (whose other contact details shall remain private), who sadly, just lost her dear husband to a long illness. She is a superb friend and a dear lady who is a jewel among pen pals. For my birthday a few months ago, she sent me a care package with all kinds of goodies in it, including these FUN little Blue Horse single-subject, old-school notebooks:

She sent me three of these to play with a few months ago, and one of them is already being put to good use to keep track of my ongoing, months-long "Arkham Horror" game. The other two are on my bookshelf with the lovely Midori notebooks, waiting for me to come up with a properly respectful use for them, because I don't want to "mess them up" either, without a good purpose in mind for them. I love the old-school, wide ruling in these:

That about does it for now. I apologize for the slow updates; Christmas was brutal. I'm going to go drive past my sister's new house on my way home. She and her husband officially got the keys to it today, and fulfilled a life-long dream to own her own home at long last. And, it came with an extra dining room table. I've already told her that this will, of course, be used for "family game night". :-)

Have a good evening.