On Pens and Writing

It’s never been a secret that I am a stationery geek. I love pens and blank notebooks of all kinds.

Recently, my love of fountain pens has been rekindled. My four fountain pens have been in their glass cup on my desk for a few years, ever since I ran out of ink cartridges for them. I own a Sheaffer Javelin with a F nib (which is my favourite), a Parker Vector with a F nib, and a Waterman Kultur with a M nib, as well as a standard Sheaffer calligraphy pen that came with three italic nibs of different widths. I use the smallest italic nib for regular writing. Nothing high end, mostly student-level models that I like. (I mourn my lost Pelikan fountain pen, which had a perfect nib for my handwriting style; not too wet, not too scratchy. I also have a collection of dips pens that is stored in a writing box.) I do so much work on the computer that buying new cartridges seemed wasteful. Besides, the only cartridges I could find for them were filled with black or blue ink, neither of which are colours I enjoy working with very much. I love brown ink the best, and while I used to be able to buy brown cartridges at local office supply stores and even pharmacies, those days are gone.

But a couple of spinners I follow online mentioned they got orders from Goulet Pens, and one day I clicked through to the website and fell into a deep rabbit hole. There is a very healthy market for fountain pens of all price points, and better still, there are inks. Oh, the inks! All sorts of colours and effects! But they’re mostly sold in ink bottles, and my fountain pens take cartridges.

A bit of sleuthing turned up a couple of options. I could wash my empty cartridges and refill them with syringes (this is perfectly acceptable and operable, but apparently the cartridges can begin to leak over time), or I could buy converters for my pens. Converters are essentially refillable ink reservoirs.

And rather than dropping thirteen to thirty dollars on a bottle of ink, I could order 2-ml samples to experiment with and help pinpoint the right colours I wanted to invest in to use! An average pen cartridge takes 0.5 to 1.5 ml of ink at a time, so it’s a decent amount for a trial. Shipping from the US and our feeble Canadian dollar led me to find Wonder Pens in Toronto as a Canadian alternative to Goulet Pens, and I used the last of a prepaid Visa card to order some samples of brown ink and a couple of syringes. I’ll save up for converters. (Of course all my pens are from different companies, so I need different converters. Figures. I suspect I may not get a converter for my Waterman Kultur; I tend to prefer using finer nibs.)

Tied to this is my investigation of pencil grips. When I handwrite for a long period of time, my hand cramps up. I looked into this and discovered that there’s a whole subset of pediatric occupational therapy devoted to pencil grips, examining efficiency and physical issues arising from the odd grips children develop to offset various obstacles. I use what I have discovered is called a thumb (over) wrap grip, where the web space in my grip is closed and my thumb wraps over the pencil and my index finger. This leads me to use my whole hand as a writing unit, making larger movements from the wrist instead of just moving my fingers. In addition to this, I grip my pencils tightly, which leads to fatigue and stress in the hand and forearm. My handwriting is neat (although less so when I write quickly) but I have to rest my hand frequently.

With the desire to begin using fountain pens again, I’ve started thinking about how I hold them and how I can make handwriting a less tense experience. Since most of my work is done on the computer and I only take brief notes with pen and paper as I work, it isn’t generally an issue, but I’ve begun working on a new story and it wants to be handwritten, so I’m running into these issues again after a long time. It’s interesting to look at this from an adult perspective, as opposed to a child learning cursive. I’m aware of the smaller elements, requirements, and stresses in a very different way. Having new inks to play with will encourage me to practice a new adapted grip, too.

Catching Up

December was, predictably, somewhat frenzied.

Work:

I edited a math book (or rather, a parent guide to math from pre-K through grade 5), and found a case of plagiarism in the second chapter, plagiarism so glaring that the author had even copied the mistakes and misspellings from the website. This is not the way to my heart. I documented it thoroughly, finished copyediting it, and sent it along to the editor, whose problem it is. It took me a while to calm down, though.

When I handed that in, I got another project immediately, which I edited over Christmas. It wasn’t as intense a schedule as last Christmas when I worked on a manuscript three times as long (with issues, oh, there were issues with that one), but it was enough to keep me busy. (And stressed out during yesterday’s ice storm that had our power flickering as I raced my deadline. Fun times.)

Just before Christmas, I also got a very interesting query from a major game studio concerning my availability at certain points in 2015 and wondering if I’d be interested in talking about handling some copyediting work for them. Of course I was. Am. Whatever. Let’s see what happens. Today I had my small panicky meltdown when I was asked what my rates were, and now I’m fine. It just needs to go through the contracts people in HR or whoever it is, now.

Music:

My teacher’s studio recital was a couple of weeks later than usual this year, taking place on December 21 instead of the first weekend of the month.

I am very happy with how my piece went. HRH filmed it with his iPhone for me, and I finally watched it a couple of days ago. While it sounded like the intonation was a bit odd overall, I suspect that is more due to the church and the poor wee iPhone striving mightily to record me seventy-five feet away, because it sounded fine under my fingers. Did I mention how happy I was with how it went? As in, no qualms or destructive self-criticism whatsoever? I don’t think that’s ever happened. I think doing this Wagner piece was very good for me. I’m sure my teacher will have comments when we view her (much better) video of it this weekend at my first lesson of the year, of course, but I am sure she will also be very excited about how well it went.

Christmas break:

We hosted Christmas at our house this year again, and both sets of grandparents joined us. Dinner was lovely, and we even managed to get the good china out this year. (We didn’t go so far as to dig out the good cutlery. Let’s focus on the small victories, though.)

I think the gift we were the most excited about receiving (apart from watching our kids be thrilled about everything they unwrapped) was our set of Paderno pots and pans. We gleefully stripped all the mismatched and bent stuff off the pot rack and hung all the new shiny ones. Cooking with them is a dream: they’re heavy but well-balanced, they sit level on the elements, and they clean up in a breeze. We adore them. The other big thing was that HRH designed and built Owlet a dollhouse for Christmas:

More details about that will come in her 41-months/January post, whenever that happens, since the 40-month/December post isn’t even up yet. Maybe I should declare amnesty on that one and just jump to the January post.

HRH and I took Sparky out to see Big Hero 6 after Christmas, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. Two days later, HRH’s parents came to spend the afternoon with Sparky and Owlet while we went out for lunch and to see the last Hobbit film. It was so unusual for the two of us to be out together, let alone without kids, and the experience was very enjoyable. Sparky told us how lucky we were to see two films in one week, and I had to point out that since HRH and I only see two or three films in a theatre each year, it was more like we were just fitting them in before the calendar restarted.

Sparky:

Sparky completed his first session of art classes in mid-December. Before it ended I asked if he’d be interested in registering for the next session, and he said ehn, not really. I gently pointed out that we’d have to figure out another extracurricular activity, then, and he buried himself in a book and ignored the situation. But when he brought all his art home the following week and we went through it, we saw some really good stuff, and told him so. We hung the canvas he’d painted, and framed a beautiful multi-media piece he called “Birch Trees in Winter” that he’d done at school, and suddenly he was very excited about going back to art. He got a pile of art supplies for Christmas from us, too (thank you, Michaels, for your crazy sales and decent-quality student stuff) and was thrilled. This year he also told us (repeatedly, in whispered asides) that he knew we were Santa. We’ve never really perpetuated the Santa thing; we’ve always told the kids that Santa is an idea, a representation of love and generosity and sharing, one of the spirits of Christmas. So this wasn’t a disappointment or a betrayal; it was more like he was confirming that he knew he was part of it, consciously helping to spread the joy and love associated with the season. He’s growing up.

Solstice also celebrated his one-year anniversary with us. We call it his birthday to keep it simple, even though we know he’s actually eight weeks older. Happy birthday, fuzzybunny Solstice!

Owlet: 41 Months Old!

Yes, two! Two Owlet monthly posts in close publishing proximity! This will be backdated soon to 4 January.

Christmas happened this past month!

The dollhouse. Oh, the dollhouse. HRH designed and built this for her. Every day he’d post pictures from the workshop of how it was progressing, and it just got better and better. Shingles! Siding! The round windows in the attic! The facade with the trompe-l’oeil portico!



Nana was in on the plan and bought a family of dolls, pets (a dog, a cat, a rabbit, and they all have food bowls — too cute) and some furniture as Christmas presents. Her friend Ada’s nanny also gave her a related gift, a little Calico Critters set of twin bunnies in a pram and their female adult companion. (Mother? Grandmother? Nanny?) (Oh, the Internet tells me they are Connor and Kerri Snow-Warren and their mother, Shannon. Thank you, Internet. And thank you, Carmel!) She plays with it all the time, usually pulling Sparky into her games. He brings along various toys to include, most notably the Transformers Beast Wars Transmetal 2 Megatron dragon Ann gave him, and Qui-Gon Jin in a police car. (It makes sense if you’re nine.) She is very inventive about sleeping arrangements, stuffing the rabbit into the desk, the cat into the oven or a cupboard or drawer, the dog anywhere except his doghouse, and the baby bunnies in the fireplaces. She also uses it as a stalling tactic if you’ve asked her to switch activities in preparation for going somewhere. “I just have to put everyone in their beds,” she says. And then it takes half an hour, because apparently all the dolls are just as bad at going to bed when they’re told as she is.

Her other exciting gift was her Meowsic keyboard. This is awesome because The Doubleclicks use one in some of their songs, and they’re her favourite band. The best setting is the one where it meows the notes when you play. (Wait, did I ever tell you that Sparky, Gryffindor, and I participated in crowdsourcing one of their videos this past fall? Cats at Parties! Okay, tangent over.)

Dancing has become a big thing. She loves to dance to music, dancing fast or slow to reflect what the music is saying to her. I’d love to put her into ballet, but the local schools are very expensive. That’s our stumbling block right now; it’s way out of our budget. The arts centre that Sparky does his art classes with offers affordable ballet, but only starting at five years old. (Which, now that I think about it, is only, like, a year and a half away. WHAT. You may proceed to panic, dear readers.)

She especially loves snow dancing. If there is a new blanket of snow on the driveway, she will dance in it (the more area covered the better) then stop and look at the design her footprints have made. “Look at my dances!” she says. One of her favourite pretends these days is being a snow fairy, a combination of the ‘snow bugs’ she saw in an episode of Aria the Animation (Season 1 episode 10, if anyone’s interested) and the snow fairies from Tinker Bell: The Secret of the Wings.

In the category of Weird Things Three-Year-Olds Do, one day I put her down for her nap on her day off from daycare. We’d been having trouble with her not horsing around after we close the door, so I stayed nearby listening in order to nip any unallowed behaviour in the bud. She was pretty quiet, but then I heard an odd creak, so I went in. She’d crawled into her pillowcase, pillow still inside, and was lying with her feet at the head of the bed. She turned her head to look at me and froze. We stayed like that, looking at each other for a moment, and then I cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually I got it together enough to pick her up and reverse her so that her head was at the right end of the bed, so I could pull the covers over her. I had to go in one more time to pull the pillow out so she could be less crowded, but I let her fall asleep in the pillowcase. She hasn’t tried it since.

She can arrange the first six letters of the alphabet in order. After that, it gets… creative.

Owlet has been doing a lot of “reading” to herself, going page by page through a book and telling herself a combination of memorized phrases and description of what’s going on in the pictures. Sometimes she doesn’t tell the story that she knows the book tells, but a different one inspired by the pictures. I find that really interesting, because it means she isn’t locked into the story she knows is on the pages. And she doesn’t limit herself to what’s in the pictures, either; sometimes she’ll pull in characters from other books to join the story.

Lots of her spontaneous narratives involve purple horses or unicorns. “I’m the baby kitten, you’re the mummy kitten” is another popular pretend.

We are working on interpreting emotions. If I am cross with her (for whichever of the zillion reasons three-year-olds push us over the edge), she will often shake her finger in my face and say, “I am very cross with you!”, turning it around. (This does not usually fly so well.) If she does what she has been told to do, she will say “Are you happy?” hopefully. And while I want to be honest and say that yes, I am happy when she does what she’s been told because she’s been asked to do it for a specific reason, I also don’t want to set a precedent that she has to be compliant in order to make other people happy. That’s a bad path to start her down. I still struggle with my sense of self-worth being tied to keeping other people happy with me or my work, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

If she knows I am upset or sad, though, she will often come over to me and say, “I will make you feeling better.” She’ll stroke my back or pat my arm, and ask, “I am feeling you better?” It is an amusing syntax error.

To her great delight, I knitted her socks from the DK-weight yarn I spun from the second fibre she chose at Espace Interstitiel, the Louet Corriedale in ‘Grape Jelly.’ She was very excited until she put them on. Then, two minutes later, she said they were making her feet cold and wanted them off. No, I have no idea. She’s three.

Santa 2014!

When we got to the mall on Sunday morning, it was later than we’d planned, and the lineup for Santa was already really long (and he hadn’t even arrived to start his shift yet!). I was very proud of how both kids behaved while waiting, and I promised them a trip to DavidsTea afterward as an incentive to keep positive. “I don’t want to see Santa,” said Owlet; “I just want to have tea.” Oops? (Anyone else remember that last year, when asked what she was going to tell Santa she wanted for Christmas, she said tea? I’m so proud.)

It only took about an hour in the end, and we got a very nice photo.

The little DavidsTea semi-shop was jam-packed with people, though, so all we did was taste the teas of the day at the entrance. (They’re opening a full-sized store in that mall very soon, thank goodness. Next year, the bribe will be a bit easier!)

For the purposes of comparison and exclaiming at how the children have grown:

– The 2013 Santa photo
– The 2012 Santa photo
– The 2011 Santa photo

Owlet: 40 Months Old!

We have pictures, so let’s do the 40 month post anyway, yes? This will be backdated to 4 December 2014 in a few days.

There was an overnight language upgrade again. There’s subtlety, updated syntax, that sort of thing. And pronunciation has become even clearer, not that we’ve had trouble understanding her for a while now. She can count to twenty without hesitation (fifteen is sneaky and sometimes get dropped; Sparky had a similar issue with fourteen and sixteen, which is interesting).

Her expression in art has leveled up, too. Her paintings are often still chaotic, but she painted a picture of flowers that were very recognisable this month. Her use of colour has really exploded, too. Rather than just making one or two marks on a page and calling it done, now she’s filling the entire paper with rich colour and lots of motion. Painting is her number one activity; if she can’t paint, she’ll colour or do something with stickers. I bought some poster paint, cleaned out the unit that housed the ColorWonder gel paints that all dried out, and mixed the poster paint to go in each little pot. She likes it much more than watercolors, which can be slow to get started, and it’s much easier to pull out her little art desk, pop open the paint jars, and let her go.

She loves just about any craft activity, though; if there are stickers and glue, she’s excited.

When she needs a pencil sharpened she says, “Can you scrape this please?” And her pencil grip has miraculously improved. I saw her approximating a correct pencil grip the other day for the first time. Apparently she’d seen her godsister coloring at my last concert, stared at her hand for a bit, then shifted her fingers around her own marker so it was like hers. It was encouraging.


(THose were taken on different days; she just really loves that shirt.)

We gave her a couple of quarters to put in her bank one day when we gave Sparky his allowance, and suddenly she was very interested in it. “Can I have a money?” she says. “My owl is hungry.” So we dig a nickel or a dime out of our change pockets, and off she goes to ‘feed’ her owl bank.

She has decided that when she is big and has her ears pierced, she would like feather earrings. Also ladybug ones, and rainbows. She must have heard about pierced ears at school for some reason; I rarely change my earrings from my small, plain hoops, and I don’t talk about them.

At the end of November they started working on a winter unit at school, and she brought home this little diorama:

There’s a bonus view of her wonky jack o’lantern jar next to it. It had an LED tea light in it that burned out pretty quickly because she insisted on having it on all night, every night.

She’s fun. They’ve started with the Christmas songs at school, so now there’s a lot of Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells happening in the car. She still gets stuck in those funny little-kid loops when singing, where they slip into a line from an earlier verse and then sing the chorus and end up slipping on the same line again. We grin and bear it, myself with more patience than Sparky. He refuses to hear that he did it, too, because he could never be so uncool.

~ Sparky’s forty-months post, for comparison

How Is It December?

This year has flashed by. I’m not panicking about it, just feeling slightly sad. Owlet’s post for last month is still in draft form, and her next one is due tomorrow (ah ha ha, that’s not going to happen). For all the time I’m spending at the computer, not much of it has been writing in any form.

I’ve been tangled in horrible paycheque luck these past three months. The most recent snafu is that accounting has recently discovered that no, Canadians can not in fact be paid via direct deposit, which is a complete contradiction to what they said when I checked with them in early October. The direct deposit option was being promoted as a quicker way to be paid, and after the really, really, really late payment earlier this fall, it had sounded like a good idea. Everyone is horrified and apologetic, and I’m waiting to be paid. The accounting department is swamped because two of their full-time employees retired this summer, and the new employees are making mistakes and working more slowly. There’s not much I can do except wait. Which is stressful on its own, of course, because not only can I no longer schedule an expected payment date into my agenda and work out a household budget with any confidence as I used to (it used to be four and a half weeks from the Friday of the week my invoice was sent through, like clockwork), but I can’t even expect the payment process to be flawless (other than slow). I’m sure it will get better… eventually.

I’ve been prebooked to copyedit another book on math, which is great; not only do I already have a stylesheet for the other book in the series, but my December work schedule is taken care of. I’m also slowly working through a private editing project of picture books, which is fun but challenging on how to schedule it into my other work, as well as how to think about it/approach it and put my thoughts down on paper for the author.

I recently applied for a copyediting position with a quarterly magazine incredibly relevant to my interests. The editing sample they asked for consisted of working over a five-page article, which took me a day and a half because it needed a lot more work than the example they’d provided as a guideline, and I was constantly referring to the house stylesheet and making decisions in a bit of a murky situation. However, a zillion other people also applied (many non-professionals as well as professionals). Yesterday they announced the position had been filled (by a professional), and that they’d been spoiled for choice with a lot of perfect people, but they could only choose one. I am moving forward, disappointed but not devastated, assuming I am one of the perfect people who didn’t get hired. It would have been more lucrative than my ongoing freelance job with the publisher, and the work would have come at four predictable, reliable times per year, so I could have organized my schedule around them. But it wasn’t to be.

Our fall concert went well last Saturday. We brought Owlet, and it was her first non-Canada Day concert. As always, I wish I’d done better, and hoped the people sitting closest to me weren’t hearing the sludgy mess I made of quick finger-twisting bits. Our next concert is in March and we’ll be doing Beethoven’s seventh, which is very exciting for the celli and bass. Up next for me is our Christmas studio recital, which is a bit later than usual this year, on December 21. I’m working on a transcription of Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star” from Tannhäuser which is asking a lot of me in the letting-go department.

The furnace went on the fritz a couple of weeks ago, necessitating repair. We had the money, but it meant that the optometrist appointment and new glasses I was planning on didn’t happen, and isn’t going to for a while. (See above re. unreliable payment schedule.)

I think that’s about it. Knitting is at a standstill, because the shawl I’m working on is now at the 400+ stitches per row point, and there is always something else that has to be done instead of knitting a row. I’ve spun a couple of yarns, but I’ll save those for another post.

Fall Concert Announcement!

It’s that time of year! Fight the November dreariness with some sparkling music at our fall concert, presented this Saturday evening by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra!

The concert takes place at 7:30 PM on Saturday 29 of November 2014, at our home base of Valois United Church (70 Belmont Ave. Pointe-Claire, between King and Queen). The theme of this concert is Great Britain Revisited, music written in and about the British Isles. Here’s the programme:

Handel: Concerto Grosso Op. 6 no. 5
Mendelssohn: The Hebrides Overture
Vaughn Williams: The Wasps Overture
Haydn: Symphony, no. 104, the “London”

Admission is $10, free for children 18 and under. The concerts usually last just about two hours, including the refreshment break. The address and map are on the church website. Children of all ages are very welcome.

I hope we’ll see you there!