2018: Day 105 the one where my Parker pen leaked

Dear Reader,

It was bound to happen. Given enough flights and travel around. One of my pens was bound to lead all over the place in my bag. My primary writing instruments during my travels include two Parker IM rollerball pens. The one in question was my first real pen. It was and I guess still is a Parker IM Gun Metal Rollerball pen sporting a parker branded ink medium insert. Along the way up or down from the friendly skies the pen ink insert lost containment and ink gushed everywhere in the pen cap and the pen body. It took me about 5 minutes with some Clorox branded wipes to clean up the pen and get it ready to return to service. You might be wondering if I just cleaned up the pen inserted a new medium blue ink refill and put it right back in my bad… that answer to that one is of course that is what happened.

My traveling writing instruments are rollerball pens. I have two Parker branded IM rollerball pens that travel with me everywhere. My collection of fountain pens does not really travel with me. That seems like a dangerous way to go about things. I’m a huge fan of using fountain pens and I have really enjoyed the ones that I have, but traveling with them just does not seem like a good idea. I know that people blog about and talk about traveling with fountain pens. I know it happens. People do it all the time. It works out for them. I tried it one time about a year ago and it worked out well enough, but it was not something that I kept doing after that one trip to Texas. Part of the fun of learning to use and operate fountain pen is the connection to the past the the performance of the whole thing. Writing with a fountain pen just feels different.

Usually the folks over at WordPress have built out a new theme for the year by now. I’m looking all over for the 2018 theme and I do not see it loaded or anywhere for download. Maybe they are gearing up for the new world blogging order that is Guttenberg editor for WordPress. I gave it a shot and messed with it for a couple of hours. The best part of writing with a fountain pen is really just the reality that the pen works the same today as it has for almost 200 years. It does not need a theme the words are the words and as long as you can read them they have value and meaning. Well some of them have more value or meaning than other sets of words. Some of scribblings are just that and have no real value other than amusing me on a personal level. Some of them just help me remember things. I’m going back to the whole idea notebook or at least a new form of that in the idea storage application that is Google Keep.

One of the things I want to start doing on a more regular basis is trying to capture my best ideas and keep a good running list. At the moment these blog posts are mostly just a stream of conscious based on whatever happens when I sit down and elect to hammer at the keyboard. You pretty much get the content in real time as it happens and is built out. That is not without merit, but things would probably benefit from a little bit more planning and organization. Counting on the spark of inspiration to be an eternal flame may not be the best strategy for an entire year of writing. It has worked out well enough for the last 105 days, but it may not work for the next 260 days.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs