And no, I’ve not just been watching Castle, although that has occupied a fair bit of time.
I have actually either been at work, at work on nights, or working on my dissertation. I have, however, come off nights today, which means I’m allowed a whole day of sloth. Or ‘other activities’. Which include:
– Breakfast at the very lovely Workhouse Cafe, who remember me, even via twitter :)
– Fresh coffee brought home from Two Day Coffee, home of the best coffee in all of Bristol.
– Working on Kathryn’s present.
And… fixing a fountain pen. See, work don’t give us pens anymore, well, I don’t think they do. I have not been privy to the location of a pen-store, and am thus reliant on either then pens I buy, or the pens I find lying around when my pen runs out at some difficult moment.
And so, I decided that my new plan would be to have a nice fountain pen and a crappy biro. Nice pen…’til it runs out of ink, then crappy biro to tide me over. Except that I don’t have a nice pen, not since the ‘nice’ pen I got from WHSmith had the paint turn to crap. I’m assuming a mixture of hospital soap and alco-gel wasn’t very good for it. It may not be very good for this pen, but we shall see how we get on.
Anyhow, I laid out an entire 1.50, I think, plus postage, for this pen…
As you can see, when it arrived the nib was munged and the ink sac was, well, sad.
Well, the ink sac’s still sad, but I stripped it down:
Spent some time cleaning it all out, straightened out the nib (which now feels like it should write okay), and reassembled it. I need a new ink sac, which is on order, along with the shellac to stick it together. I also need some ink. Which is odd, because I’m fairly certain there’s a bottle of black Parker Quink kicking around (which I’ve had since at least university the first time, and I think actually from school).
Having failed to find it (or have even a faint clue where it is) I’ve ordered some black ink.
I am quite looking forward to it…
