Steve Gunnell

Over at The Well-Appointed Desk a list of 21 pen related questions were posted back in May. They have just popped on Mastodon so I will have a stab at answering them.

1: What is the pen they’ll have to pry out of your cold dead hands?
Ooh, hard to say. Am I that attached to any of my pens? Possibly my workhorse TWSBI Vac700R?
2: What’s your guilty pleasure pen?
My pair of Waterman Carene pens.
3: What’s the pen you wish existed?
Ah ... an affordable Visconti Homo Sapiens?
4: What pen would you give to a new enthusiast?
A Pilot Kakuno. Nice, reliable, robust but not too heavy. Can be modded with the Con-70 converter.
5: What pen do you want to get along with but it just never clicked?
I have several ... the Sailor 1911 Large, the Parker 51, the Lamy Studio, and the Kaweco Sport.
6: What pen do you only keep only because its pretty?
I have some "modern Maki-E" pens from Platinum and one from Wancher. Pretty but I am afraid of getting them scuffed.
7: What pen (or stationery product) did you buy because everyone else did?
A Traveler's Company Notebook. I sort of use it ... but?
8: What pen (or stationery product) is over your head or just baffles you?
Bullet Journals. I can theoretically see their use but I can't grok them.
9: What pen (or stationery product) surprised you?
My first Sailor pen, a Procolor 500. My previous experience was old Parkers and Sheaffer pens and the Sailor was just so different. It was my first modern Japanese FP.
10: What pen doesn’t really work for you but you keep it because it’s a collectible?
I'm not sure I really have anything collectable ... but maybe my early Danitrio FP ... nice to look at.
11: What is your favorite sparkly pen (or ink)?
I don't really do sparkly so I guess that puts my Sailor Shikiori Yodakai just ahead of my other Shikiori Yonaga.
12: Which nib do you love – but hate the pen?
Never really been a nib aficionado in that way.
13: What pen (or stationery product) gives you the willies?
The whole Montblanc thing. People who write posts about how great it is to own a Montblanc pen.
14: What’s your favorite pen for long form writing?
TWSBI Vac700R closely followed by my Pilot Custom 823. Vac fillers for the win!
15: What pen (or stationery product) do you love in theory but not in practice?
My Ranga ebonite fountain pens ... the threads where the nib and feed cartridge secrews into the body have failed on several. :(
16: What pen (or stationery product) would you never let someone else use?
Probably my Sailor 1911L ... so expensive for no real improvement in experience over the standard 1911 and if that nib gets damaged it is all over.
17: What pen (or stationery product) would you never use for yourself?
An ostentations "prestige" pen.
18: What pen (or stationery product) could you NOT bring yourself to buy?
An Urushi pen. They look great but the price and the fact my wife is allergic to lacquer.
19: What’s your favorite vintage pen?
I don't have many so my choice is limited but my "sterling silver" (I'm not sure it is more than plated) Sheaffer Targa would probably fit there.
20: What is your favorite EDC/pocket pen?
TWSBI Vac700R Iris.
21: What’s the pen (or stationery product) that got away?
Just after I retired during the pandemic lockdowns one of the Japanese pen companies was selling off pre-production samples of decorated Urushi pens. But Japan Post was not shipping to Australia and could I use it when it got here ... IDK. Anyway the opportunity passed.

No photo's today. There was a loud storm over Ceduna in the early hours of Friday. I got back to sleep and left around 08:00.
Stopped at Wundina but nothing was open and the nearest public toilets were at Kyancutta 8Km down the track. Drove on through light showers to Kimba and had a pastie and coffee for breakfast.
Fuel Stop at Port Augusta (630Km since last fill) 189.9 CPL 37.5 litres.
Stopped at Port Germain but missed the nice cafe by 5 minutes. Got another pastie (from lack of choice this time).
At Lochiel I started following the directions of Mz Google to bypass Adelaide rush hour. Nasty twisty and full of locals who consider the speed limits to only be a guideline.
Missed a couple of possibly good motels and ended up at the Coonalpyn pub for the night.
The pub is not too flash but acceptable and the Mushroom Bruschetta was really nice.
938Km for the day.

Saturday morning I had a couple of slices of toast for breakfast and was on the road at 07:00.
It was a nasty miserable day with incessant rain and poor visibility.
I had a couple of brief breaks and got fuel at NHill (655Km since last fill) 185.9 CPL 31.8litres.
Got off the freeway at Bacchus Marsh and found there was some kind of street fair going on. Got some truly excellent steamed dim sims (more like shao mai really) and some ladies' fingers from a Lebanese pastry stand.
Turned Mz Google back on and headed off to my hotel in Melbourne. Forgot to check the odometer so 530 plus mumble kilometers for today.

I had a whole lot of celery leaves from Sunday's vegetable shopping to which I added a small chopped onion and a mixture of rosemary, mint, and parsley from the garden. All minced together and mixed with 1/4 of their weight in salt. The result will go into a clean peanut butter jar and into the bottom of the fridge for use in soups and stews. Keeps for at least a couple of years.

I knew about the problems with bright green 19^th Century wall papers but I had no idea it extended to book covers. Conservation specialist Melissa Tedone checked the pigment that was flaking off of the book she was conserving and found it was high in Arsenic which prompted a review of several collections where they found a variety of chemical traps including "Nearly 50% of the 19th-century, cloth-case bindings analyzed for this project to date contain lead in the bookcloth".

IIC Poison Book Project
Winterthur Poison Book Project
Winterthur Chrome Yellow Bookcloth

So I was down at the markets this morning and I saw a lady about our age wearing a t-shirt with the image of a dalek on it and the text "OMG it's R2-D2. I loved him in Star Trek".

We were up at the Kalamunda Artisan Market to stock up on Solafruit products (they missed the Royal Show where we normally stock up at this time of year). While we were there they told us about a new cheese shop in Kalamunda. We wandered over to have a look but didn't buy anything this time because we are currently well stocked up but we will be back!

Ok, I'm a tomato sauce snob of sorts (that's tomato ketchup to benighted Americans not passata or sugo). When I grew up either you either ate Rosella or Heinz tomato sauce and whichever you were used to the other tasted weird and unpleasant. Later there were other brands like Masters or Fountain which are acceptable to varying degrees. Recently I picked up a bottle of Maggie Beer's Tomato Sauce which I had high hopes for seeing as how Maggie is a well known Australian foodie icon, but it was terrible. Thin and acidic with almost no spiciness (spicy is not the same as chilli infested).
I'm fully in the camp that tomato sauce belongs in the pantry in the way the God and the CWA intended. If your bottle of tomato sauce reads "refrigerate after opening" then it is an inferior product and should be binned immediately. Likewise if it makes spurious claims about tomato ketchup being thicker than tomato sauce then it is full of gelling agents and not worth the space on your shelves.
Basic tomato sauce is Tomato, apple, onion, vinegar, sugar, salt and spices. Over the years I've made sauce using fresh and canned tomatoes as well as with passata. All work well as long as the base fruit was good to begin with. Onion is there to bolster the umami flavour of the tomatoes and provide extra structure to the sauce. Most recipes include some garlic as well. Some recipes call for the apples to be peeled and cored but that is missing the point. The apple is not there to provide sweetness (lost in the sugar) or to provide apple flavour (totally lost) but to provide pectin to make your sauce thicker. I suppose you could add a small amount of pectin containing sugar but watch the quantity otherwise your sauce might set. The vinegar should be a good quality pickling grade vinegar. Pick a good one because it will come through in the taste of the finished sauce. I like a little mode depth of flavour than white sugar provides so I use raw sugar but you could also use brown sugar or honey. Salt needs to be not too much and the spice mix is to taste.
The batch I made yesterday used 1 litre of home made passata from March. 2 onions and 2 apples (about 400g of each ) chopped roughly. A half cup of raw sugar and the same of cider vinegar and 2 teaspoons of salt. Spices were about an inch of ginger chopped, a blade of mace and a teaspoon each of black pepper, cloves and mustard seed. Pressure cooked for 20 minutes and then blitzed with a hand blender and pushed through a mesh strainer with a spoon into a saucepan. At this point check the seasoning and adjust the balance to your taste. The puree was then simmered until it was thick enough, and then bottled and hot water processed to give a nice vacuum seal.

Judith passed away around 4:30 this morning London time. She didn't even make it home. :(
We took Judith across to Esperance in late 2015 and we stayed a few days on Woody Island. This is Judith taking a photo of one of the bays in that area.