Enough Already

We had two events this year to make it the worst weather damage year we've ever had. We've been dealing with replacing and fixing things ever since a hail storm in April and a lightning hit in July. I had these telephones and electronic gear ready to throw out but wanted to sketch them first. They are now in the garbage can. The TV was fixable, which required replacing 2/3 of the electronic boards. Unfortunately the damage from the lightning wasn't enough to exceed our deductible so repair and replace was on our dime.

As for the vehicles, we had to junk two of them and we bought one back from insurance. We fixed the Suburban. Local body shops were inundated with jobs and will take a year to get back to normal.

Just had our roof replaced. The local contractors have enough repair work from that one 10 minutes storm to work through next Spring. We were in the house when the hail hit, and we could tell from the low rumble sound that we were in trouble. Some more car damage needs to be fixed, but we're basically through it all. Dealing with insurance for hail damage was a protracted effort but I can't complain. They paid out as they said they would in our policies.

As for the sketching, this is the first time for using Noodler's Lexington Gray in my flexible fine nib fountain pen. For journaling I have always used my Pitt Artist marker pens but this time I used my Namiki pen and used varying pressure to get the variety of widths I needed. I think it worked well. The Lexington Gray didn't bleed like the Noodler's Black does. The pen gets carried to work, too, for day-to-day writing. If I need a quick pick-me-up I'll secretly do some warm-up calligraphy exercises with it just to watch the flexible nib do it's thing.