Nice paper going to waste? Make your own notebook!

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The world of notebooks is fraught with peril. It seems like most of the notebooks I find with great paper come in a format that I’ll never use. Then there are the notebooks that I pick up for a specific purpose, fill up half or 3/4 of the way, and then I’m simply done — there’s nothing left to add to them. I’m sure there are plenty of other scenarios that all result in the same thing: a bunch of perfectly good paper going to waste because I don’t want to use the notebook that it’s bound in.

So, what’s a writer to do? Cut the excess pages out and make another notebook out of them, of course.

It occurred to me, while scouring the internet trying to find the perfect Traveler’s Notebook insert, that anyone can make one of those things. It’s literally just a bunch of pages folded in half and sewn together. All you need is some filler paper (see above), some kind of hardier cardstock-type paper for a cover, a cutting tool of some sort, a needle, a thread, and elementary-school level sewing skills. The hardest part is finding the right paper, but if you’re in the same boat I am, that’s already taken care of. The rest of it is easy peasy lemon squeezy. I’ll show you how.

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Eraser Review: Staedtler Mars Plastic

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Here it is, mid-July, and apparently it’s already Back to School season. As anxiety-provoking is that is for me — back to school means back to winter, back to carting everyone around to hockey practice, back to hassling the kids to do their homework — one nice thing is that it’s a good time to pick up office supplies. As part of their efforts to capture some of the rush to stock up, stores are discounting — and sometimes even augmenting! — their inventory with the type of gear that students might need.

One product that went on deep discount at my favorite office supply super store is the Staedtler Mars plastic eraser. I feel like Staedtler makes some pretty solid products, and I’ve just been waiting for an opportune time to try out their eraser. A four pack hit the sale shelves for something like $2, and it’s been a minute since I’ve performed and written up an eraser review. So, earlier this week I picked up a pack and thought I’d see how good they are at getting rid of my mistakes!

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Analogue Grocery Shopping

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Shopping at the food co-op might be hip, but you’re not really “analogue” unless you stick a net directly into an Alaskan river and pull fresh sockeye salmon out of the water to fill your freezer with.

Most of my crew went dipnetting (the partner and I, plus four of the five kiddos) on the Kasilof river this weekend and hauled some “reds” out to sustain us through the winter. Dipnetting involves standing waist-deep in the mouth of the river, sticking out a ten-foot pole with a five-foot hoop net on the end of it, and waiting for a fish to swim in. At that point, you trap the fish into the net and try to get back to the shore with it before it escapes.

The teenager posing with her dipnetting haul

Dipnetting is not sport or commercial fishing — it’s for subsistence, which means you eat what you catch. For indigenous people of Alaska, salmon isn’t a gourmet luxury, it’s a staple. Although my family isn’t Native, we are trying to stock the freezer with enough fish to last us until next year — every fish we catch is one less meal we have to buy from the supermarket. For our family of seven, this means a lot of fish! We “only” got 8 this weekend, but our family limit is 85 so we’ve got a way to go, and we’ll be back at it next weekend.

The silver lining is that I only had 8 fish to process — which I’m terrible at. I was up until 1 a.m. last night bagging up fish meat in the back yard. I can’t imagine how it would be if we had actually caught 85! I’m getting pretty good at gutting and cleaning the fish but, honestly, my fillet skills are seriously lacking. I’m pretty sure my toddlers could do a better job with a pair of preschool scissors.

Hopefully we’ll have a better haul this weekend and I’ll get more practice in.

Pencil Review: Marco Grip-Rite (2B w/ Bonus Sharpener)

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I’m going to come right out and say it: I’m a little burnt out on reading about a certain pencil from a certain company that sells its products for two bucks a pop and periodically releases special editions that send the pencil nerdosphere into a Beanie Baby level craze. So for this week’s review, I’m going to go in a completely different direction. Something cheap. Something Made in China. Something nobody is buzzing about. And yet, something reminiscent (in some ways) of the aforementioned, unnamed company’s flagship offering. I’m talking about the Marco Grip-Rite 2B (model 9002).

A product of Axus Stationery in Shanghai, the Marco brand is most well known in the west due to a strong following for their affordable colored pencils. Their Raffine and Renoir colored sets have a positive reputation among artists. However, Marco is no slouch when it comes to the graphite game. They produce several lines of graphite writing pencils, and today we’re going to zero in on one that looked particularly enticing when I recently dug through my to-review drawer: the Grip-Rite 9002 in a 2B core.

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What do you do with a stubby pencil*?

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* Sung to the melody of “Drunken Sailor”

I recently professed my love/obsession/fixation with stubby pencils and my goal to collect an entire jug full (read all about that here). However, since posting that I’ve reflected on the topic some more and come to a conclusion: stubbin’ ain’t easy.

What’s a pencil-lover to do as a pencil approaches the end of its life? It enters the “awkward phase”, similar to a person trying to grow their hair out. You know, when it’s not long enough to be long hair, but it’s so long that it looks like they really need to get a haircut. It’s kind of the inverse with pencils: it’s too long to throw away, but short enough to feel a little cramped and weird. So I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about any particularly useful jobs for a pencil that is reaching the age of semi-retirement.

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Pencil Review: Musgrave Ceres 909 (#2)

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In ancient Roman mythology, Ceres was the goddess who made civilization possible. Before her intervention, humanity lived a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Then, one day, Ceres bestowed upon us the knowledge of ploughing, sowing, harvesting, animal husbandry, and all of the skills we would need to practice agriculture, settle down and become modern folk.

If a person were to look at a satellite image of the countryside surrounding Shelbyville, Tennessee and the wider area southeast of Nashville, they wouldn’t be surprised at all to find that Musgrave Pencil Co. — one of America’s last remaining domestic pencil manufacturers — pays tribute to Ceres with it’s mainline yellow #2, model number 909. Perhaps the folks at Musgrave had the agricultural outskirts of the “Pencil City” on their mind when they named this mule of a pencil. So, is the Ceres pencil a worthy namesake for a Roman goddess? Let’s pull out a sharpener and see.

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Queerly Not Your Normal Pencil

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Hope your Pride Month was empowering and awesome. I went to the parade and festival with the fam last weekend, and found some really gay pencils:

These pencils actually aren’t bad for unmarked freebies. The cores are all centered, they write smooth and a little dark…even the eraser is pretty decent. I’ll have to grab extras next year!

Pencil Review: Ticonderoga Renew

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The Dixon Ticonderoga pencil has been around for ages, and seen numerous iterations — especially in the past decade or two, as production shifted from the U.S. to Mexico and China, production lines were changed and materials were tinkered with. The recent Chinese iteration of the well-known and often-used pencil was the subject of my first-ever review on this blog, and since then I haven’t felt particularly compelled to go back and revisit them, at least not to any extent worth writing about.

That is, until now. At this point in time I’ve got umpteen different pencil makes and models available to me, clogging up multiple desk drawers, but (in the States at least) the Dixon Ticonderoga has a funny way of hanging around and finding a way into your hand. In this case, the Ticonderoga pencil that events conspired to lead me to was one marked for its environmentally-friendly qualities and natural aesthetic: The Ticonderoga Renew.

This review was inspired in part by a post exploring the rise, fall, and perhaps second rise of the Ticonderoga by our Glorious Comrade Johnny, who stands at the vanguard of the invincible world Pencil Revolution. I’ve had this post cooking on the back burner for a while, actually; and given the aforementioned Ticonderoga buzz and the fact that my review of another pencil that shall remain nameless is taking a while, I figured it was high time to have a look at the Ticonderoga Renew.

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A (Mus)grave Situation

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Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been trying to review some pretty hard pencils, which means I can’t grind through them as quickly. Really, though, the big problem — er, “problem” — is that it’s been nothing but sunshine and 70+ degrees Fahrenheit lately (it’s supposed to top 80F by the end of this week, which is kind of a big deal in Anchorage) and I’ve had some extra time with all of my joint-custody kiddos. So I’ve been spending a substantial amount of time off the computer, and out in the sunshine playing or doing projects!

But the I didn’t choose the pencil life, the pencil life chose me. On that note, I got a little delivery yesterday, all the way from Tennessee! I placed an order with the Musgrave Pencil Company and was pleased to receive a dozen each of the Ceres and News pencils (plus a little sampler pack they threw in). Check it out:

I haven’t sharpened any up for a review yet, so I know nothing about the innards of their products, but I have to say that the service from Musgrave is impressive. If I may, please allow me to rant about that for a moment…

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Notebook Review: Apica CG-54 Grid

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Good, affordable notebooks are hard to find. As much as I value notebooks — and believe me, I’d be lost without them — there is something that puts me off about paying $15 or $20 for a carry-around, soft-cover notebook just because it’s a certain brand or style that’s hip right now (you know the ones I’m talking about). So whenever I spot a notebook that looks solid, affordable, and cool, I grab it and give it a whirl. This notebook from Apica is a perfect example.

I picked up the Apica CG-54 notebook during my recent trip to Seattle. At the time, I really knew nothing about Apica notebooks, even though in hindsight I’ve found that the CD line has a reputation among fountain pen users. I just grabbed it because it was affordable, looked nice, and wasn’t something I’d found in shops in Anchorage. Even after searching back through Google for some background info on the Apica CG, I can’t find much — the interwebs are awash in information about the CD line, but not so much the CG. So, I reckon this is a prime subject for a review!

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