Recording the revolving door of giving, getting and sharing pens

This week was a revolving door for stationery. I lent out a second pen. I gave away a bottle of ink. And two new bottles of ink arrived at my doorstep. Breezy.

My Franklin-Christoph 46 traveled to school this week in a Franklin-Christoph pouch. Those zip pouches are useful, and charming. My good friend, Shannon is only just finding her feet with fountain pens. Now she has her first-ever writing experience with a Franklin-Christoph pen.

I kitted the pen with a Masuyama F cursive italic nib. The crisp line variation should look great with Shannon’s looping cursive handwriting.

Monteverde sent me two replacement bottles — one each of Caribbean Blue and Gemstone Sapphire. The context for their shipment is over on last week’s post.

Huzzah for new bottles!

Customer service was lovely. Both inks smell appropriate. They were packed impeccably. And everything arrived within only a few days. I respect a company that works in good faith with its customers. Thank you, Monteverde and Yafa.

I note the comings and goings of my stationery in a Google Sheet. The same Sheet that you’ll find on my pen collection and ink collection pages. My loaned Lamy Safari is noted with who has it and when I loaned it out. Same for this week’s Franklin-Christoph pen enabling. And I struck out Sargasso Sea. I love the smell of detailed notes in the morning.

The joy of keeping records. Almost outshines the joy of pen enabling Shannon into the slippery slope of Franklin-Christoph.

This week’s Inked Tines update includes my most recent currently inked writing tools.

Toolset

Pens. No standout combination this week. The currently inked were a strong cohesive collection. Broad lines? Check. Narrow lines for detailed notes? Check. Accent colors? Triple check.

• Pelikan m805 (F Architect) — Feed. Daily driver. The architect side of the ground nib seemed wetter this week. As a result, lines were darker. Agate is far more legible on its dark side. Smooth and well behaved. EF side of the grind is quite dry. Task management, scratch notes, reading notes, meeting notes, lesson plan.

• Monteverde Rodeo Drive (1.1) — Feed. Wrote well on good paper. Wide, disciplined lines. Simply refused to lay down ink on cheaper copy paper. Primarily a highlight and marking combo. Excellent color for highlighting. Meeting notes (accent), scratch notes (accent), journaling.

• Franklin-Christoph 31 (M-SIG) — 1/5. Muddy Sand shades nicely in such a broad M italic nib. Strong performance. Writes well without hard starts. Keeps up well with medium-paced writing tasks. Dries out a bit on longer writing sessions. Journaling, meeting notes, reading notes (accent).

• Sailor Pro Gear (Z Architect) — 3/4. Excellent shading combo. Great on the architect side of the grind, uncomfortably dry on the EF side. Too wide for normal writing. Headings and journaling only.

• Kaweco Sport (F) — 4/5. Mid-week addition. The stingy Kaweco feed helped Warped Passages behave on absorbent pocket notebook paper. Good pairing for scratch notes. Round F nib wrote with a lot of tooth. Pocket carry. Scratch notes. (Yep, just pocket notes so far.)

• Mythic Aeschylus (EF) — 4/5. Smooth EF nib. Seeing nib creep and quite a lot of ink inside the cap. Taken to wiping the section down before writing. Perfect pairing otherwise. Excellent shading. I dig a large pen with an EF nib. Reading notes (accent), meeting notes (accent), journaling.

• Visconti Homo Sapiens (F) — ??. Only reached for this combo twice. Once as part of Monday night’s journaling. Again for revising a lesson plan on Tuesday. Sole downside of an opaque pen body: the mystery ink level. Journaling, lesson plan.

Notebooks. Work bujo. Hobonichi A5 Plain Notebook. Six new pages bring me to page 96. Two pages are the typical weekly spread. This spread homes each day’s tasks and has a master teaching schedule along the top.

Box-a-palooza

Another two pages are meeting notes. One page of scratch notes from planning — and then running — student elections. Another single page of roundtable discussion notes from students’ discussions of Murasaki Shikibu’s diary.

Lastly, I leaned heavily on lesson plans drawn out last week for classes this week. As a result, I only needed to create one new lesson plan this week. Most of my work writing took place on lesson plan pages that were created last week.

Journal. Unbranded A5 Cosmo Air Light. Nine new pages across three entries. Three entries a week is my most common amount of journaling in 2021.

Every single currently inked pen touched CAL paper this week. That stands outside of the norm. Journaling with so many pens was fun. Fun is part of the point of journaling.

I sat down Monday evening with an article from FiveThirtyEight on my mind. I journaled my way through the Perry Bacon, Jr.’s thoughts on the role of the media in modern politics. Each of Bacon’s five dilemmas got its own pen and ink combo. Variety is the spice of stationery.

Mmm, spicy

Written dry. All seven currently inked pens survived the week. I spread my writing out across all seven pens well.

Two pens are down to their feeds: the Pelikan (my daily driver) and the Monteverde. The Pelikan will be emptied and cleaned before the week starts. No decision yet about what pen and ink will replace the Pelikan.

Newly inked. I inked the Kaweco Frosted Sport on Tuesday. Colorverse’s Warped Passages is an easily read, well-behaved pairing. The Sport became a dedicated pocket carry through the rest of this week.

Out on the “toon”

The collection

Incoming / new orders. No new purchases this week — despite Endless Pens’ best efforts.

As I shared above, Monteverde mailed me two new bottles of ink this week. One bottle of Caribbean Blue and another of Gemstone Sapphire. The one bottle emptied, one new bottle rule for 2021 remains intact.

Outgoing / trades or sales. My bottle of Diamine Sargasso Sea arrived in its new home Friday. Another ink crossed off the list.

The recipient is also a teacher, and a good friend of mine. He uses Sargasso Sea as his primary non-black writing color. The color wasn’t for me. I’m grateful the bottle is with someone who will make happy use of it.

Currently reading and listening

Fiction. No movement on fiction reading this week. Both Rhythm of War and The Wise Man’s Fear sat unopened.

Nonfiction. Two chapters remains in my first read-through of Cervini’s The Deviant’s War. There’s a third of a Blackwing Natural in the margins already.

For the cause

I bought the book hoping it would work well for an LGBTQ Studies course I’m teaching next year. Students benefit from a history focused on one person. Deviant’s War revolves around Frank Kameny.

But Cervini simply isn’t a good fit as an introductory text for my intended curriculum. The narrative jumps around too much to use at the secondary level. I’m considering choosing a chapter as an optional reading instead.

Music. GoGo Penguin. This trio has been quietly playing in the background most of the week, even while teaching. They have energy. They are instrumental, so vocals don’t interrupt the flow of my thinking. This playlist makes a wonderful writing and reading soundtrack.