Smoked!

I guess I needed to start the new year with a piece of equipment failing. At least I get sketching time out of the expense. This time it's our blender. We're not sure how old it is, but it's a nice one. WAS a nice one. I was making a batch of hummus when it spewed some electrical burn/melt smells and slowed down until it stopped. Puff of smoke and all! Luckily no fire.

New appliances don't tend to impress me. Too many stories of people buying kitchen appliances and never using them. Out cupboards were full so we weren't going to get a food processor until the blender died. We had to wait a couple decades, but now is our chance. In a few days we had our food processor.

As soon as we got home I had to make something. We viewed the DVD and the breads looked good. They always look good to me. So I chose one that looked like cinnamon rolls (labelled Breakfast Bread?) and went to town. The mixing goes SO fast in these things. Results came out great. This thing is going to work fine.

As for this sketch, it's using my Noodler's Ahab flex nib pen again, with Lexington Gray ink. I still like it but I'm learning some things. This ink takes much longer to dry than my art marker pens. That would go for any fountain pen that lays down as much ink as this does on wide lines. I need to keep my fingers away or ink smudges everywhere! Also, once in a while a mysterious ink drop comes from nowhere. It just shows up. I can't tell if its from the nib or the feeder under it or from the pen body. Time will tell. I still love the ink feed rate and the ease of changing pen width. It's still a keeper.

Manhattan Meeting

Had a meeting in Manhattan last night. That's Kansas, the "Little Apple". Our State 4-H Venture crew is planning our summer backpack trip with the teens. I've been a volunteer for a few years. This time we met at a coffee house in the little business/beer district near campus we call Aggieville. I decided to get there a little earlier so I could sketch the storefront. It was getting dark but with street lights it would still be sketchable.

I set up my little three-legged stool in a nook along the sidewalk across the street and was sketching away, in my own world, when I heard "Hello, John!" in an unfamiliar voice. Nobody knows me here and I'm invisible! I kept sketching but the voice got closer. It was a cousin of my brother-in-law that we camp with a couple times a year. He hails from the Topeka area like me, 60 miles to the east. K-State basketball is playing tonight so he must be here for the game. We exchange pleasantries and he leaves with a couple others I didn't know. Then I had a vision of a future conversation. He'll go back home and strike a conversation with my brother-in-law - "Say, I saw John huddled in a dark corner in Aggieville secretly doing something by himself, oblivious to the world. Is he OK?"

New Pen

This journal entry is just one more combination of pen, ink, journal and coffee house. I'm at Juli's Coffehouse, taking a couple lunch breaks to test a new PEN! Gee, I love to do this. I thought I was happy with my current art supplies. But no, a friend (that's you, Cheryl) mentioned the Noodler's Flex Nib pen (at only $20, gouletpens.com). She knew I use a Namiki (msrp $180). Now I'm not proud of what I paid for the Namiki. I'm not a fountain pen snob. I'm a pen and ink addict with no 10-step program to save me. Anyway, Cheryl wanted to know how these two pens would compare and if I would conclude that the Namiki is worth the money.

Short answer - the Namiki is worth the money from the standpoint of quality material and construction and it's visual presentation. This thing's a piece of art and joy to use. And it PERFORMS. I'll pay for performance. That's probably why I'll never have a $350 fountain pen (which I lust for), because they may be build better yet, but won't perform better.

Back to the Noodler's. I'd like to meet the company CEO. He wanted a fountain pen for the common person, at a reasonable price so that the fountain pen could take its rightful place as a price-viable mode of written communication, and he did it! The features that mean the most to me - nice fit in hand (I like the fuller barrel of the Ahab), impressive ink flow rate (maybe too fast for some when you spring the tip for a wide mark), variable width (easy to shift from fine to broad), massive ink capacity, and colorful bodies.

Now, to get to a $20 product you need to shave some corners. They do that through cheaper parts and design. I don't know about fountain pen design (what you don't see in the pen) but from a performance standpoint the Namiki is not 9 times better. I'd be happy with the Noodler's alone. I love them both. I think I saw on the Goulet website they refer to the Noodler's pen as a "novelty" pen. Not sure what that means. It's a full function pen that does everything I want. I'm hooked. I'll be using both fountain pens.

Spend what you're comfortable spending on a pen. It's how you use it that counts. Both pens will get me to the paradise of pen and ink sketching.

Wilma's Obsession

Ahh! The smell of a busy oven in the holidays. Food is such a part of it all. Watching Wilma cook up a series of confections gives me the idea for a sketch, so I get my gear out and sketch to the smells that only fresh baking can produce.

As the journal says, she has a love/hate relationship with the baking tradition. It's stressful and rewarding. She has trimmed down the quantity from a few years ago. Back then she did candies, too, like chocolate covered cherries. Very talented. Very addicted to creating confections. The whole extended family knows it, too, and has come to expect tasty treats when Christmas rolls around. They even put in a word for their favorites in the hopes she'll keep making them. We'll end up freezing some, too, so we can extend the good times.

A Late Present

I wanted to get a camping stove for my daughter and her husband. They're just starting out and don't have much in the way of camping gear. Unfortunately my normal retailers were all out of them. So, I decided to sketch it and give them an IOU. I don't think my daughter ever gets out to my blog so I'm safe in posting it before Christmas.

As for the stove, it's a model I've had for many many years. It's still produced, and still gets great reviews and hasn't been replaced by anything that impresses me. I'm prejudiced.

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.

A Cold House

Just one more thing that needed to be fixed, which gave me something to sketch. Our furnace stopped working this morning. It's not freezing out yet, so it's not dire straits, but it's a very cool rainy dreary day. The bones get cold faster that way. I call a service guy. While we wait, I decide to bring in some wood from our wood pile so we can fire up our small wood-burning stove. But wait, it's been raining all night and is raining now, so the wood is soggy. With a rain jacket on I dig for drier wood and build a pile in the cold and wet weather. Seems like I wait for the worst weather to stock the wood pile. Doesn't take long for the repairman to arrive. He diagnoses the problem and changes out the ignitor and we're all fixed. I start up a fire anyway and brew up some coffee so I'm quite cozy as I sketch. Not a bad day after all.