Inktober Day One: And so it begins…

Inktober Prompt: Ring
Goldspot Prompt: Mystery

Inktober Day One

Dear Bridget,

Autumn is good and finally here. For weeks, the flowers & trees have seemed still & quiet  — waiting. But now they begin to ring out with glory and colour. It started with the drifting, spinning leaves of the locust, floating down like slow-motion largesse, looking like the tinkling of a wind-chime in a lazy breeze.

But now the reds & oranges ring out on the trees and bell out that ‘Fall has come!’ in deeper tones than even the aspen can manage. There is a mystery to the liminal seasons, a mystery of which I never tire.

You are laughing, I’m sure, at my florid prose, but I am even more sure you will forgive and indulge

Your tedious friend,

Hannah

#30Inks30Days

It’s been a month of inks and pens. For those of us who love fountain pens, #30inks30days, the brain-child of Tom Oddo, gives us an excuse to play around with some of the amazing inks that are available these days. While fountain pens have never completely gone out of style, the allure of deeply saturated inks, of inks that shade, shine, sheen, and shimmer, of inks that are “bulletproof” and more enduring than biro inks, of inks that highlight texts and glow in the dark, has certainly contributed to the resurgence of interest in fountain pens.

The idea behind #30inks30days is that one will use a different ink every day of the month, then clean one’s pen and move on to a different ink on the following day. Ink samples and sharing make it more affordable to come up with thirty different tones and tints.

Then one posts whatever one has written with the ink. Some people just write out the name and brand of their ink of the day; other folks draw detailed illustrations or calligraph beloved quotations. It’s my favourite kind of game — one in which all the players win.

I’ve been posting my meagre thoughts and sketches on my Tumblr, but here are my contributions all together. As you can see, I am looking to place some of my creations in the Museum of Modern Mediocre Efforts. But I am trying to be a little more daring, a little braver, so I’ll post them here too. And off we go:

 

 

   

 

 

    

 

   

   

 

 

  

 

Thirty days of pen cleaning

 

Just Burning a Hole in My Pocket…

 

       A few days ago, Lydia Schoch put up a post on her blog, “What I Would Do with a Million Dollars.” Her plans are eminently sensible and I applaud her foresight. After all, one never knows: someone might just hand her a fortune someday, so it is important to plan ahead.

https://makeagif.com/gif/fiddler-on-the-roof-if-i-were-a-rich-man-with-subtitles-kt1U9n

But lately, I’ve found myself wondering what I would do if I happened to have 5.7 billion dollars to spend. I’m pretty sure some of it would end up at our local bookstore. I’d probably buy that cool fountain pen I’ve been eyeing. In a moment of unbridled reasonableness, I might even set up retirement funds for myself and my family.

But what to do with the other 5.6 billion? Would I build a border wall that could be easily breached, one that would have an enormous, deleterious effect on the environment, that would divide towns, deprive people of their homes, augment the crisis at the border, and be an eye-sore to boot?

No, I don’t think I would. 

I think I’d be inclined to spend it on children, on the generations coming after me.* Maybe I’d give kids books and fountain pens. Or better schools with reasonable class sizes and teachers who are paid so well that our best and brightest would vie to spend their days with boisterous kindergartners and surly, adolescent, high-school students. 

Maybe I’d find a way to help social services around the country staff their offices with social workers who would have only a few cases apiece so that children in desperate situations wouldn’t get lost in and abused by the system. And maybe, like teachers, I could pay these workers well enough that bright and caring people would be eager to be hired for these positions, especially if there were money left over to provide them with the training and support they would need to deal with heart-breaking family situations.

I might spend the money on research to reverse global warming so that our children will have a planet on which they can live or donate the funds to NASA in hopes that they’ll find new worlds for new generations — and ways for them to live on these planets without destroying them. (See WALL-E.)

Truly, I can think of so very many ways to spend 5.6 (or even 5.7) billion dollars, and none of them include a border wall. Anybody have some other suggestions? What would you do if you had 5.7 billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket?

As for me: bring on the next windmill…

 

*Possibly in both senses of the phrase.