Pens...

Yesterday, LawDog put up a post about fountain pens, praising them highly.

I've never used a fountain pen in my life. The Farm Family always seems to have a few old ones floating around, but well, they're old, and dry. And ink for fountain pens is thin on the ground, locally. It's easy to find super non-fade ultimate indelible ink for marking cattle ear tags, but fountain pen ink? Not so much.

I do, however, seem to have a bit of a thing for pens. I like different pens, ultra fine point, fine, medium, colors and weird barrels and different inks... I've got nine different kinds of pens in the cup on my desk right now, and seventeen individual pens. I buy packs of pens whenever possible, because, well, I lose them. Or the gremlins take them, that seems to happen, too.

That's another reason that I don't own a fountain pen. I don't want to lose the danged expensive thing.

I've got Bic ultra fine point pens, because I needed the red one for revisions. I'm not normally a fan of ultra fine points because many of them have ink flow problems, but the packaging touted the smooth ink flow of these, and well, I needed something that I could use to make small notations in between double spaced type. My medium point pen was just too chunky, I was writing all the way across the page to fit it all in.

I've got Papermate medium point pens, because when I'm taking notes in class, I want that bold writing, it's easy to read at a glance.

I've got a funky pen that's covered in a squishy outside, that, now that I look at it, is another Papermate. I bought six of those one time when they were on clearance for some ridiculously low price, in varying off-beat colors, and I'm down to one, the pink one.

I've got el-cheapo Papermate plain old twenty-to-a-pack pens. You know, the plain plastic barrel, at least three in the pack won't write at all right off the bat, but you buy them anyway because they're cheap kind.

I've got gimme pens from a couple of different places. Gimme pens tend to break before they run out of ink, but they're free, and some of them write really well.

I've got Uniball Signo pens, which I bought yesterday to restock the backpack pen supply, because they were on sale. I've written with them a little, and they seem to be really nice.

Really, I've got a... thing.... for pens, I guess. I want to try them all, and the ones that I really like are usually the ones that I wind up losing because I cart them everywhere with me, tucked into the spiral rings of various small notebooks, clutched in my sweaty paws, tucked into the console in my car (which eats everything that's in there at least once a week, it seems like,) hung on the collar of my shirt or tucked behind my ear. I've even been known to shove a pen through the hair behind my pony-tail holder, so that I know where it is.

Whenever I'm at a store, and I've forgotten something on the list of things that I need to get (except for grocery runs,) I usually think to myself "well, it was probably pens."

So I buy a couple of pens, and I bring them home, and I take them out of the package, and I stuff them into the over-filled pen-cup.

And now that I know about the low-cost disposable fountain pens, I'm probably going to come up with a couple of them, too.

.....................

I wonder if they have Penaholics Anonymous meetings?