Calligraphy Pen

My affection for all things old-timey and magical is no secret. Beneath this female exterior beats the heart of an eighty year old British professor-adventurer who may or may not be a wizard. So imagine my pleasure upon finding at work, treasure of treasures, a calligraphy set. I have spent long moments in art stores, stationary shops, and curio holes looking at fancy sets, eyeing the price tags, wondering how I could justify the purchase, asking myself what I'd even do with something so frivolous. Lucky me. 

In looks, pens are modern, ugly, plastic things, nothing like I would imagine finding in a 16th century baron's study. But their tips, not angle-tipped felt markers, but glorious metal nibs. These are fountain pens, real liquid ink flowing out from cartridges, so that you have to keep the cap on, keep the pen upright lest you come back to desk and find it covered in black. 

Three different pens, three different widths, things written with them are somehow more magical than regular pens.

Excited with my find, I squirrelled it home, selected the fine tipped pen, and loaded it with the blackest ink in the set. In the box was a notepad of thick paper with which to practice. I put my new pen to the page, and here is what came out. 

Like I said, magical.

Hot Mess

Okay, this is the sort of dumb thing that nobody wants to read about, but I feel that it's necessary to share anyway.

Like most adults in western society, I wear antiperspirant on a daily basis. In fact, after having used the product day in, day out for the last 15 or so years, one might expect that I've become something of an expert in the application of it. Today proved me wrong.

I went to work out today, and halfway through my shower afterwards I realized I'd left a chair jammed in the door of the workout room in an attempt to not die from a combination of heat and shellac fumes from the pool reconstruction. Now, I live in the sort of building where some old biddy can be counted on to notice every wrong-doing within a 5km radius. I can only assume that one of them was watching me from her apartment window, watch in hand and frown on face as she waited for someone to return and take care of the wayward door.

In my hurry to get dressed so I could go and fix this grievous error, I managed to pit-stick myself to the utmost degree. This was not your typical "streak on the shirt hem" pit-sticking. No.

Imagine a 5 year old putting on makeup.

Now you have an idea of the sort of mess I made of my dress. Thank god for the old "cotton sock" trick, though even that required some vigorous scrubbing because apparently I ground it all in there pretty good.

I'm really not sure how I managed this, but I've taken a picture and included some handy commentary. Please ignore the mess in the background. Now, since I cleaned myself up already, I've done a very high-tech computer simulation of where the pit-stick ended up. 

I'm a failure of a human being.

Final Resting Place (The Dead Bee Chronicles, Part II)

I had to. Honestly, I did. 

After a rather awkward and undignified collection of the body, during which one, possibly more, of Dead Bee's legs fell off, I laid him to rest in my azalea plant.

You were an inspiration to us all, Dead Bee. You will be missed.

The Dead Bee Chronicles

There's a dead bee on the stairs leading up to my apartment. A proper, fuzzy bee, mind you. None of this wasp crap. He's a very darkly coloured bee, against a fairly dark and patterned carpet, so the first time I saw him, I thought he was a clump of dirt. I'm not sure when exactly I realized he wasn't, but I remember being a little surprised. I mean, how did he get there? It's not inconceivable that a bee would fly into my building and die somewhere, but the stairs seems a weird place to do it. Also, has anyone else noticed him? In the early days, I shrugged my shoulders and figured he'd be vacuumed up soon enough.

I've been walking past this bee every day for at least two weeks now, very possibly longer. I take that particular staircase on my way back from working out, and every day as I make the approach, I wonder to myself if the dead bee is still there. I walk up, I look into that little left-hand corner on the seventh or eighth step, and there he lies, a husk of bee-ness forever lost.

I think I'm starting to feel some sense of affection for this dead bee.

Today I caught myself wondering if I should do something about him. His little bee-corpse is just sitting there, waiting to be ground into the carpet by some careless shoe, and that thought makes me a little sad. I have considered moving him on more than one occasion, but then what should I do with him? I think I'd feel guilty if I just threw him in the garbage, but what else does one do with a dead bee? Should I give him a proper burial? That just seems ridiculous. First off, it would require a special trip to the stairs, with a baggie or a piece of paper towel or something because I am NOT picking up a dead bee with my bare hands, followed by a concerted effort to pick up the dead bee and take it somewhere (likely one of the plants on my balcony) where I would dig a tiny hole, deposit the dead bee, and then bury him.

THEN WHAT?

Honestly, what kind of adult person in their right mind considers going to fetch a dead bee so that she can bury it, because she feels bad for its dead little bee-body lying on the stairs?

The only conclusion I can come to is that in the course of my exposure to the body, I've somehow become possessed by the spirit of the dead bee. Perhaps he was murdered and I need to suss out the perpetrator, or he needs me to deliver a message to his queen or something. I have no idea and he doesn't seem to be offering up answers. All I know is that there's a dead bee on the stairs, and he doesn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

The Twitter Conundrum

I have a Twitter account. This, in itself, is nothing amazing. There are, what, like a majillion Twitter accounts out there? No big deal.

I have thus far tweeted a grand total of one time, nearly a full year ago. I made the account purely to write that tweet, as I recall. It was during or slightly after that ridiculous "name the new flavour" contest that Doritos held last summer.

Here, for your enjoyment, is that tweet:

"Sexual connotations aside, "Intense Pickle" is the most hilarious name for a chip flavour I've ever heard."

That's it. That is the magic of brilliant mind, but it still isn't the amazing part.

Now, you may at this point be asking yourself what the hell's so great about my dumb Twitter account, and here's what it is:

I have two followers.

I don't know these people, and they presumably don't know me, but somehow they saw that tweet and decided that what I had to say was important enough to keep paying attention. One of them decided to follow me shortly after that miracle sentence was released to the world, but the really funny thing is that my second follower found me LAST WEEK. Nearly a year after typing it, the power of my tweet reached across the internet to grab this pour soul's attention. One can only imagine how many followers I will have next year!

So obviously, the key to world domination is to keep saying dumb stuff about food. After much thought and careful consideration, I've decided to tweet the following:

"Canned potatoes are handy, but sometimes taste weird."

I'll let you know how it turns out.