random outbursts from my inner five-year-old about craftsmanship, books, family, bikes, wilderness, cookies, bees, building furniture, my dogs, travel, adventure, life, & all the rest…
Abu Dhabi ( أبو ظبي ), literally Father of gazelle, is the capital and the second largest city in the United Arab Emirates. My J-O-B is sending me there to look at some fiber optic issues on a commercial passenger jet. I will be armed with a digital microscope, a satchel full of wire drawings, and bright shinny new passport as my old one was both full to the brim with stamps, visas, work permits and set to expire in less than 6 months. I will have some time to kill waiting for access to the aircraft and for my flight out, so I am going shopping for nick-nacks to outfit our Moroccan-themed living room. Maybe a small metal lantern or three and some brass. Abu Dhabi is a shopping mecca, not the dusty souk kind, more like the 19 shopping malls in a five block radius kind of shopping… But there are a couple of blocks where one can paruse store shelves filled with dusty stuff and not have to carry a sack of cash.
I cannot say that I am the happiest of campers to be traveling tho the Middle East while there are revolutions and air strikes afoot though…
A local fellow blogger just published a post about fountain pens that I wish I would have beat her to! Now I have to stand in her shadow and try to come up with a witty observation or two . Damn…
I started using or trying to use a fountain pen back in college after hearing the writer and historian Shelby Foote discuss writing all his manuscripts out longhand with a dip pen. As a history major, that sounded like something amazing to do and I took a cligraphy class and wrote letters at the dawn of the e-mail age with a leaky black bakelite stylo. Though, like many things started in college, it fell to the way side as the rest of life swirled around me – picking up my lone surviving calligraphy pen every now and then to address Christmas cards or to add flair to a note or sign. I didn’t become a complete fountain pen convert until we lived in Germany for a couple of years: ALL the “smart” engineers had a nice pen to initial drawings and sign docs with (being engineers, there was the ubiquitous mechanical pencil as well). I wanted to be Euro/Old-World cool!!
I jumped right in and bought a couple of cheap cartridge pens and worked out which nib size and ink color was best for me. I now have a quiver of Lamy Safari pens with different nibs (from EB to EF) and a weighty stainless Lamy that my bride gave me for Valentine’s day one year. I use it for signing legal docs and for writing her love notes.
After trying Montblanc and Parker inks, my pens are now loaded with Noodler’s Ottoman Azure, Bulletproof Black, and #41 Brown. I have some blue Lamy refills – just in case, but the only time I have used them has been on travel when I ran out of the good stuff. Note: I find that Montblancs seem to find their way into the hands of the pretentious…
I have converted my wife as well. Any ‘Thank You’ cards or notes she sends out are written with either her glass pen or a compact Scheaffer. Though far from a luddite, I hope that more and more people switch back to fountain pens as the amount of auctual writing we do every has dwindled, I feel it is important to add weight to the words we choose to scribble instead of type.
