General

Pen nostalgia

Back in my public school days, I wrote and doodled using a variety of ballpoint pens. I also really loved using fountain pens, and enjoyed the ritual of going to the local stationery store in Duncan, The Letterbox, and buying new ink cartridges for it. The idea of having and keeping a pen instead of just throwing it away when the ink ran out seemed a good one back in the ecologically-aware 1970s.

Alas, fountain pens and left-handed writing do not go great together, so some of my output would get a bit smeary. I adapted and bought faster-drying inks, while also learning to slow my writing, to further let the ink dry before my left hand would smoosh all across everything I’d just written.

Most of my writing with fountain pens was cursive, as the flow of ink from the nib just seemed to lend itself to that. But around grade six or so, I gave up on cursive (mine was fine) and went to printing everything. It was slower, but I enjoyed it more, and modesty aside, I had really nice printing. I even started doing fancy a’s.

Occasionally, I wanted to use different colours of ink to better emphasize certain words or phrases, and this is when I discovered the Bic four-colour pen, which offered:

  • Black
  • Blue
  • Green
  • Red

All in the same pen!

It was great. I loved it and kept buying them for years, until I finally just started typing out everything on computers instead.

But a few weeks ago I saw one in the stationery aisle of a drugstore and I had to buy it. And I did!

Yes, made in France. This delights me more than it should.

I still don’t have much need to write things by hand, but I do keep a notepad by my keyboard, and this pen sits next to it, ready to jot down things in four different colours. Sometimes I just click through the colours, like it’s secretly a fidget toy. Maybe it is a fidget toy.

I’m just glad to have one again. I am easily pleased, sometimes.

A night of weird dreams, featuring

My REM sleep was rated Good by my Garmin Forerunner last night, and I think it may have accurately captured things, because I had dreams a-plenty. Here is what I remember of them, using four keywords when I woke up during the night to help:

  • gay
  • Musk
  • Mom
  • Tim

Gay: This seemed to be a dream about olden times, like in the 1800s, and was focused on a man who wondered if he really was a man (i.e. straight), musing aloud about the alternative possibility: “It could not be so”. I think he was sighing heavily on a couch or something. The best I can figure is this keyed off images I’ve seen on a social media account called Old Book Illustrations.

Musk: I was with a group of people outside. There was a hill and a lake or some sort of body of water and it had this weird undulating effect that didn’t seem physically possible. Even in the dream it seemed weird. This part is directly related to seeing a gull bobbing on waves on the Fraser River yesterday afternoon, which undulated in the same way.

And yes, Elon Musk was there. At one point, a bunch of helicopters (?) flew in, dropping off a bunch of random vehicles. They were all the vehicles he had owned, which was supposed to be interesting, somehow. Musk babbled on about all of this and someone by he commented on what a showman he was. I replied that he was a con man and a huckster. Even dream me ain’t impressed. This dream had a strange and somewhat poignant turn at the end, as my mom showed up and upon seeing me, she immediately turned her head in a way to get a welcoming kiss, which signalled to me that she clearly recognized me (she did not quite recognize me in April 2023 when we met in person for the last time). But then I asked her, “How are you?” and she couldn’t answer, like the question had no meaning to her. It was odd and a little sad.

Tim: But just in time to save me from the melancholy, I found myself at my old place on East 19th Avenue, where I last lived in 2011. I was apparently on top of a broken staircase outside and trying to figure out how to get down. The son of Tim, my friend and landlord, appeared at the base of the stairs and I noted how much bigger he was from the last time I’d seen him, apparently going from a toddler to maybe 8 years old? Also, the kid looked nothing like Tim’s actual son, but more like one of my brother’s kids, who is obviously now a full-grown adult. The kid seemed to acknowledge my predicament. Then Tim and Sue arrived and I feel others were with them, but I can’t recall who. Tim was completely naked, but it was OK, because they had been attending some event/ritual where being naked was part of the hippie fun. In the dream I could remember what the event was, but not now, alas. No one seemed fussed about Tim’s nakedness. I managed to climb down the back side of the stairs to get back safely to the ground.

There may have been more, but that’s what I remember. My brain is weird.

Echo Beach

Martha and the Muffins is a great bad name, and also a pretty good band based out of Toronto. I remember them mainly for the above-titled song, “Echo Beach”, which was a radio hit in Canada back in 1980. It’s a great little pop song and captures a sense of longing that hits me right now. Plus sax!

There’s a decent write-up on the song on Wikipedia, where I learned that Echo Beach is a real beach, and it’s in Saskatchewan, and that the B-side to the single was a song called “Teddy the Dink.”

Enjoy! (They’re a good live band, too)

Bonus:

Echo Beach as seen on the Map application included in Windows 11:

November rain

It’s a run day, but it is also a rain day on this, the first day of November. According to the Windows weather app, it’s rained 19 out of 30 times the past 30 years on this day. That seems about right.

I’ not actually complaining (mostly). Sometimes it’s fun to even go out in stormy weather, as I did a few weeks ago. But it is not fun to run in the rain. It’s low-key horrible, as the kids say. This IS me complaining.

With the rain expected to go all day, I look at my treadmill and ponder. I may have to take advantage of it later.

And think about going out to buy discount Halloween candy. Kidding! I am totally being good for November! Really! Haha.

No, really.

For sure.

You’ll see.

I am not going to spam 14 posts tonight

14 posts is how many I’d need to post in the next four hours in order to get my desired monthly average of 2 posts per day.

I mean, I could cheat and do it pretty easily:

  • 14 one-line posts
  • 14 posts of cat pictures (so tempting)
  • 14 posts highlighting a “best of” post from this blog, based on my own arbitrary criteria
  • 14 letters from the alphabet
  • Breaking up “The 12 Days of Christmas” and adding two brand-new things, like cows a-mooing or crows a-cawing or whatever.
  • And so on.

But I am doing none of that.

Probably.

Happy HallowChristmas!

With today being October 31, which is to say Halloween, we witness the unique retail ritual of store managers deciding when, precisely, to start shifting over the Halloween candy to make room for the Christmas candy.

To be clear, the Christmas candy showed up weeks ago, but now that we are at HallowChristmas, there is a new tension in the store air, as managers ponder exactly when the bat-festooned Snickers must make way for the mistletoe-festooned Snickers.

Speaking of, here is a Halloween cartoon for you. It doesn’t even have a cat!

Atmospheric river + actual river = River++

This past weekend, October 19 and 20th, an atmospheric river passed through the area, bringing a whole lotta rain and the attendant issues that accompany a whole lotta rain, like flooding and such.

Over both days I went through Lower Hume Park and the Central Valley Greenway that follows the trail next to the Brunette River, getting shots of local flooding and water, water everywhere.

I’ve collected the most interesting shots below.

For the record, I prefer my rain light.

There’s something in the air

Specifically, an atmospheric river. It seems like just a few short years ago I’d never heard the term, now it pops up every fall. I live in a region known as temperate rainforest. Rain is right in the description, so rain is not unexpected.

But rivers of rain? In the sky? That come down to be with the land I walk upon?

I do not like this.

But until U.S. Democrats can perfect their weather machines (topical joke), there’s not much I can do but put on my big boy booties, jacket and suck it up. Well, not literally suck it up. That would be a lot of water. And it would probably taste funny, too.

Here are cats in the rain: