sweasel.com

As a left-handed Office Hack for many years, my go-to pen was always a Cross Classic Century with a black-ink fine-point refill. I always kind of viewed it like a mechanic buying Snap-On tools.

Despite a consciously-developed habit of always making sure my pen was returned to me, I would lose about one a year or so…. thus I’ve probably owned at least 30 of them over the years.

I have always had a bit of a pen-fetish but being left-handed means that fountain-pens are denied to me. Still…

Are you looking for the normal oil-based ballpoint ink, or will a gel ink be suitable, Sra. Comadrejita? Pentel makes some very fine-point gel pens, down to 0.3mm. Here is one on Amazon, $2.50 a pop here in the U.S.

I do like your Minimo—it would fit into my zippered wallet. I have this thing about always having a pen in my purse. Monday I dumped out my small tote and had nine pens in there. Two notebooks. One Kindle, one Samsung tablet, and a cell phone.

Filling out those teeny-tiny boxes in the genealogy forms left me searching for the ultimate extra-extra-fine point—which I never found. But I did finally settle on a rolling ball from Pilot: The Precise V5 Extra Fine, which has a .5mm ball. Not to be confused with the Pilot V Razor Point Extra-Fine, which is a marker point.

Oh—I have to have that Pentel .03mm. Ordering that after this 🙂

The older I get, the more I appreciate a “full thickness” writing instrument. That said, in this digital age, I rarely find the need for a fine writing instrument. I recently bought a house in FL. I digitally signed everything…all several effing hundred pages of documentation with a digital key.

One other thing…

It’s just…a little hard to get a grip on.

Duct tape is your friend. (-;

Yeah, I’ve considered duct taping this baby up. The point is .5, which is pretty good for ballpoint.

I love a gel pen for writing. I didn’t realize Pentel made an 0.3, though. As always, slightly more expensive here.

For artwork, though, the oil based kind is better. The ink is more permanent, apparently, and you can get neat effects like this.

Not that I approve of photorealistic drawing, however. I don’t. I think it’s an obscene amount of human effort to recreate something that was already made by mechanical means.

Or a rubber band wrapped around the grip area. I received a beautiful Parker Jotter—smooth machined stainless steel and impossible to grip. I wrapped a rubber band around it, which detracts considerably from the beauty of the pen, but I think the designers failed on this one.

Hey, did you see the Frenchman fly over?

Re the Frenchman:

– he should have had a speaker system that blasted out “The Infernal Galop” as he flew across the channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Diu2N8TGKA

Does the UK no longer have any coastal artillery to ward off those dastardly Frogs???

I like my Pilot .38mm pens. Very nice for filling in boxes on forms at work.