PigPog

I got a new pencil today – a Lamy Scribble 0.7mm, with palladium trim.

I’ve liked the look of the Scribble for a while, and seeing them for real didn’t disappoint. I think the black ones look just as good as the palladium ones, but the palladium seemed to match my Lamy 2000 fountain pen a bit better.

I’ve not had it long yet, but I’m liking it so far – I’ve filled it with Pentel AIN 2B leads. It has a tiny tubular lead sleeve, that retracts all the way back inside to make it pocket-safe, and the clip can be removed for those who like to roll the pencil to keep the point a bit finer. I quite like to roll, but I need my pencil to clip to me, so the clip stays on.

• Dave’s Review
• Dave’s ‘Day in the Life’

If you don’t have one or more cats, this post is going to be of very little interest. Really.

We’ve tried many different types of cat litter, though. Very few are flushable, which makes disposing of them a problem. Many are clumping, but most of those don’t seem to work very well. One good wee, and most of the litter turns into a big clump, which you then have to dispose of. We’d pretty much settled on Catsan before this (Yes, they have a web site, but it’s so awful I won’t hurt your ears by linking to it). It did a good job generally, but wasn’t flushable, and after a while, the tray just starts to fill with wee, and has to be emptied completely.

OkoPlus Cat’s Best actually does seem to work. Yes, a wee still makes a big clump, but it doesn’t seem to use up much of the litter at all. It can be flushed, though it does sometimes take a little while for a big lump to break up enough to flush easily. Best of all, though, the stuff just lasts and lasts. The bag claims to last for ten weeks with a single cat, which seems pretty accurate. Because it clumps, there’s no need to regularly empty out all the litter and start again.

All that means less money spent on cat litter, and less trips to the pet shop – and less often having to carry a big heavy bag of cat litter up the stairs outside our top-floor flat.

Because it’s easier to keep clean and clear, we do a better job of looking after the trays, too, which Sweeney seems to like. Win-win.

(Oh, and if you don’t have a cat and you’re still reading – you must be very bored.)

Just a few bits that have amused me recently…

• Enter SandLOL – Metallica’s Enter Sandman in LOLCats.
• plz to insrt carrot – hungry, hungry bunny.
• Turn Head to Sneeze – a good reminder for us all.
• Engineer’s Guide to Cats – Very funny, especially cat yodelling.

The first fountain pen I bought that I really liked was a Lamy Safari, so I have a bit of a soft spot for them.  I have a couple of Safaris, a Vista, an AL-star, an Accent (well, that one’s Sam’s really), and a 2000 (Sam’s again).  They have their faults – they tend to skip with pressure – but for the most part, they’re nice smooth-writing pens.  A couple of links from Brassing Adds Character first:

• All about the Benjamins – Ryan’s top picks for pens around the $100 mark.  The Lamy 2000 is in there, though it costs a fair bit more than that over here in the UK.

• An extraordinarily rare Lamy 2000 – a little story of how Matt gets his Lamy 2000 reground at the DC pen show.

• Lamy at Cult Pens – yes, we finally have Lamy at Cult Pens. Only a limited range so far, but we’ll be expanding it soon.

I just upgraded our installation of WordPress here to the latest version, using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. All seemed to go pretty smoothly.

I wrote a while ago about trying out Photoshelter to sell my photography. I’d have to admit that the results haven’t been good. I’ve had a few views, but no actual sales. Unfortunately for them, it sounds like my experience isn’t so unusual – they’re closing down the Collection (their stock photography site). According to their post about it, the market is just too dominated by Getty, and sales were never high enough to make the idea work.

It’s a shame – it would be good to think someone could fill in the mid-ground between the really expensive stuff Getty do and the cheap low-end microstock, which pays photographers so little it barely seems to be worth it.

• Photoshelter’s Announcement

A couple of great sets of photos of London and Tokyo at night, taken from the air. All perfectly SFW, as you’d expect, but much of the rest of the site is quite NSFW.

• London
• Tokyo

It’s just an experiment at the moment, really, but we’ve created a new category here: Oinks.  The idea is to use Oinks for quick simple posts, like Twitter posts, or links.  If a post on Twitter is a tweet, we figured a similar short post on PigPog could be an oink.  Grunts and squealing available separately.

Oinks are formatted a little differently to ‘full’ blog posts, articles and photography – at the moment, they’re in grey text, and indented a little on both sides.  I’ll probably fiddle with that a bit more later.  At the moment, they stand out that way, but if the idea goes well, most of PigPog could end up made of oinks.

Since all decent work opportunities seem to be in the big city rather than the little old ‘burb we now call home, I decided that after a year and a bit of resistance, it was time to look for work in Exeter.

I’m no stranger to commuting. Back when we lived up country we had no choice but to commute – driving a good 20 mile round trip to get to our respective places of work. Michael now, fortunately, has the job of his dreams and it’s right on our doorstep. I’m more of an awkward bugger and have had several attempts of obtaining the same but with no luck. So, off to the big city I go. My temp agency told me of a chance of a long term job coming up at County Hall so today I took a trip over to Exeter to see how I would handle commuting.

Michael dropped me off at Tiverton Parkway station, and picked up a ticket. Just under a fiver seemed very reasonable – I think it’s cheaper than the local bus service. I got rather pathetically excited at the thought of travelling on a train. I do it so rarely that it’s quite a treat. Whether I feel like that in two or three weeks remains to be seen, but for now, it’s definitely a case of “TRAINS! OMG! They’re SO cool!”

On arrival at Exeter St David’s, I became overwhelmed by the BIG CITY. The station seemed huge in comparison to little Tivvy Parkway, and at the peak of rush hour, the place was packed with busy people doing busy things and more students than I’ve seen in a long while. I had no idea how to get out of the station, never mind into the city centre, so I bought a map and wandered around like a wide-eyed tourist.

I found a bus and asked the driver if he was going to County Hall. Instead of giving me any information, he decided to entertain me with his impression of Latka Gravas. There you go folks, an exclusive. Andy Kaufman is indeed alive and well, and he’s driving buses around Devon.

Clutching my map, I decided to pick a direction and just go for it. I found a pedestrian route to the City Centre and followed it, stopping at various bus stops to see if any timetables could give me a clue as to my whereabouts. I have never felt like such a dim-witted grass-chewing yokel. The much talked about “different pace of life” really hits home when you try to navigate a big city after nearly two years in a cosy little Devonshire town.

Relying on nothing but guesswork, I arrived in the City Centre. That’s when I caved in and rang my agency – and as it turned out, I was mere metres away from the right bus stop. My urban groove was coming back and my internal GPS was working as well as ever.

I arrived at County Hall, had a look around and left feeling good. Commuting to Exeter is doable. And it’s fun. Good thing, really. I start my new job there tomorrow.

• This is a photo-heavy post, so you may want to back off if you’re on a slow connection, or a mobile one charged by the data you transfer.  It’s a good chance to have a smug chuckle at us being idiots, though.

A couple of months ago, Sam and I decided to try to walk to Bickleigh.  It would be a longer walk than any we’d done yet, but there’d be a nice stop in the middle, and we could have lunch at Bickleigh Mill or the Fisherman’s Cot.  It wasn’t going to be paved much of the way, but it was listed in a nice little book of walks the council produced, so it should be reasonably easy.

That’s not quite how it turned out.  There’s a reason the title says Attempted.

Starting Out

We reached the bottom of Canal Hill (the road we live on) without incident.

Things were looking up when we passed two bees having sex – it’s always going to be a good day when you start it by seeing creatures having sex or defecating.

We spotted a distant bunny keeping an eye on us through the grass.

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