miscellaneous iv

I've lost track of the days again. Can you believe it's nearly November?! The days are finally getting chilly here on the west coast, which is always an impressive feat worth celebrating for us in "we only have two seasons" land. I brought out the duvet this weekend, which is the *real* sign that it's finally fall.

Two new friends!

I broke my vow not to buy more inks, but I'm not too ashamed. It's October, which means the year is practically over! And there's so little to look forward to every day, other than my twice-weekly bubble tea adventures and the occasional friends hangout. I was always a homebody before the pandemic, so frankly the past two years have been smooth sailing for me. It would be nice to go to a hockey game again, but when your hometown team is currently (at the time of writing) 2-6, is it really that exciting to buy tickets, pay for parking, order arena food, etc.?... I could be watching the game from the comfort of my home. And drinking a bubble tea.

Where was I? Right—new inks. I split two bottles with my coworker: Sailor Manyo Haha and Yurameku Byakuya. She'd recently purchased a Blue Dew fountain pen with a flexible nib, and was keen to fill it with more dual shaders. When someone asks you if you want to split Sailor inks, you should really just do it. Manyo Haha is already a favorite (I'd previously purchased a sample), so I'm glad to have more to play with.

I'm looking forward to filling a pen with Yurameku Byakuya. At first swab, it seems almost unusable, but many dual-shaders seem to have this characteristic. It looks quite similar to Dominant Industry Early Spring, though that ink has the added benefit of a big dose of pink shimmer. Byakuya is a pink gray that dual-shades green, while Early Spring is a blue gray with a bit of blue dual shading, though the difference is minimal in my swabs. Dual-shading inks really are best enjoyed in person. They're quite light on the page in my swabs, but I'm sure both will look better in a pen. I have to get Byakuya into the rotation soon: I'm almost done with my old Tomoe River paper notebook (just 25 pages left!). My second Kanso Noto uses new Tomoe River paper, which is not nearly as good at showing off the intricacies of a dual-shading ink. I'll be back with my thoughts about it.

Boy is this ink pretty though.

Ink acquisition is a big issue here in the office. Bottles getting damaged during shipping is pretty normal, and since they can't be sold, we usually pass them on to employees. For those of us with the "I might as well take it, it's free!" mentality, this can be quite the problem. My very funny coworkers signed a pact to reduce their own ink collections, setting up a "one in, one out" policy. I'm not sure what the punishment is. A shame circle, probably. On the bright side, all this means that if you'd like to rebottle your inks (as I occasionally do), you have plenty of fresh containers to choose from. You do have to pick them wisely, though. The larger 80 ml Diamine bottles with gold caps seem nice, but they have a plastic inner cap that tends to trap ink. Said ink can still leach out and possibly contaminate anything new in the bottle, so it's a good idea to keep these bottles upright.

Sorry about the dust.

I've had the best experience with Kaweco bottles, which look like miniature jam jars. There isn't much threading on them, so I'm sure a great deal of jostling will likely cause some leaking, but I haven't had issues so far. I've transferred some of my inks that originally came in circular bottles, which makes them much easier to keep neat in my ink drawer.

Finally, I was in two videos that covered my office pen case and my fountain pen collection.. I had a ton of fun filming these, so I hope you enjoy watching them!