This morning as I got up and tried to shake off the morning grogginess, my eyes fell on a calendar we have hanging on the wall and I noticed it is the 2nd. The second....the second... wait a minute, that means I missed Hive Power Up Day! Wow... That's the first time I've missed it in well over a year. Of course it is still the 1st in some parts of the world, but HPUD follows the UTC time zone, and that one is into the 2nd along with me, meaning I missed HPUD!
Oh well. I have been powering down, so I technically don't qualify even if I am powering up. I have been just re-powering up what I power down, mind you, so I'm still gaining. I will do the full stats tomorrow for my Hive Goals post, but looks like I am up around 900 HP for the month of January. Much less than the last few months of last year, but nothing to be unhappy about. Only 900 out of the 20k I need to hit my 60k HP goal... so I'm not doing much to meet that goal yet, but I'll try to do better in February.
I was cleaning out some of my fountain pens last week and today I just refilled two of them with new ink. I think these two seem appropriate.
The blue one is called Anti-Fascist Blue and the red one, Anti-Feather Red. I assume you all know the guy on the blue bottle. On the red is Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper in the Red Army during WWII. She is credited with killing 309 enemy combatants, a number that both would place her within the top snipers of all time, but a number which is thought to have been seriously under-reported. She was a remarkable woman. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her once.
The guy who created these two inks is something of a hermit who lives in Maine and runs this fountain pen ink company pretty much entirely by himself, making all the inks by hand himself. A libertarian, he has some strong political thoughts and isn't shy of sharing them, hence the bottle labels. Though he leans Right, as libertarians find a lot of common ground with traditional conservatives, he hates Neocons and especially hates Trump, making him not a friend of either side as the currently are, really, in that dreaded middle ground where you get the ire of both sides.
Interesting guy. Though I usually don't agree with his politics, I can't help but enjoy his passion and the history he puts into his ink labels.
The blue ink is, by the way, very much true to the name anti-feather. You can slop down as much as you want even on very cheap paper and it won't feather at all. One of my favorite inks. A nice dark blue. The red, however, does not follow the name, and it feathers on even great quality paper. Oh well. But I have a very fine nib (around .38) that I use with it, so it isn't too bad.
Both are permanent archival quality inks, which isn't common for colored fountain pen ink.
It's raining and is eerily warm today. As always, unusually warm days feel amazing during winter, but they are also slightly disturbing and always bring to mind the the thought "If it's this warm at the beginning of February, what will it be like in August?"
This comic from Sarah Anderson has long been one of my favorites and captures the conflicted feelings well:
Well anyway, my kids are a bit antsy so I'm going to figure out something to do with them and go enjoy the day. Have a good one y'all!
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. |
