Most of the plants are doing well, one's even got a pepper growing already. 3 of them are full of aphids though, to the point they started crowding and deforming new leaves. I had to set them outside, away from the others. Hopefully they can still be saved. I've tried washing them away every morning but doesn't seem to be doing much so far.
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ISSUE 016Remind me, what month is it again?
 
~~ Ink well ~~ Latest purchases are: a Mabie Todd Swan and a Conway Steward with a medium nib.
Do I have all the pens that I need to write and draw whatever I want? Yes. Do I need anymore pens? That is a matter of opinion. Meanwhile I have 3 pens set aside for sale (I might add some to it). I just need to make the effort of finishing writing the actually eBay listings. Originally I was waiting for some normalcy but the postal service (apart from some delays) seems to function okay and we're not going back to normal any time soon anyway. I am a bit afraid for things getting lot in the post because of the chaos though. I've already had 1 package get lost by the British Post. 
~~ Listening ~~RollinsI've been binge-listening to Henry Rollins' radio show on KCRW. Didn't even know he was part of regular programming on the radio until a friend sent me a link to a special quarantine episode.It's simply him putting on his record collection and telling you about the recent cool tunes he's found or been sent. I especially love that he uses this to promote small band or independent labels, or just puts on weirdness like the sounds of the Western Chorus Frog. KlaraA show on Flemish radio about soundtracks that another friend shared (dag Brecht!). They basically take a topic and us it to fill an episode full of movie soundtracks around it. It features some really good ones like the time they went over the best scored movies from Bill Murray's career. It's unfortunate that the presenters are a bit haughty. It's a program about 'popular' music on a (mostly) classical music station, so they maybe they're just trying to meet expectation.
~~ Writing ~~
~~ Seen ~~ I saw the movie 'Skeletons' recently, after it being mentioned on Wyrd Britain. You can find Skeletons in its entirity (and for free) on Youtube. I'm going to steal the description from there:
Davis and Bennett (played by Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley) two fabulously disheveled functionaries for an enigmatic agency run by The Colonel (Jason Isaacs) that travel the countryside on assignments to psychically extract the metaphorical skeletons quite literally from people's closets. Their newest assignment finds them at a remote cottage helping a woman (Paprika Steen) and her children (Tuppence Middleton & Josef Whitfield) find out what's happened to her husband. I agree with Ian that it gives a very interesting take on the idea of 'being haunted'. The movie is nothing like I expected and I highly recommend it. On a side note, Wyrd Britain is a treasure trove of British cultural gems. In another article, I was reminded of 'kinescope' (or 'telerecording' in Britain). Before videotaping (which started in the second half of the 50's), broadcasts were preserved by recording the projection of broadcasts onto the screen of a video monitor. As you can imagine, this kind of recording has a great loss of quality. This gives us the shitty, grainy, black and white footage that is often associated with old TV show first episodes. Original recordings on film were of much better quality (of course still depending on storage and equipment). But since the original rolls of film were often tossed because of storage issues (or were prone to accidental loss & destruction), we're lucky that recordings before video have even made it into the 21st century at all. And audio is literally an entirely separate issue, since the audio would have to have been recorded separate from the visual.  I had a week off work at the same time the museums were reopened, here in Belgium. So Booo and I made a reservation to go to the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts. Spread out through the building, were works by artist Patrick Van Caeckenbergh. They were basically various cabinets of rarities, strange inventories and imaginative views on how the cosmos functions. The kind of stuff I would love to build and stuff my house with if I had a mansion and infinite time.
The rest of the time, we counted the dogs in all the paintings in the museum. We found 88.
~~ Final notes ~~A relatively short mail newsletter today. The weather is nice and the past week has been… challenging.
Ah, almost forgot, I finally got a chance to finish the last watch I was going to modify (swapping out some parts in my bronze watch). So I've officially completed all I planned to purchase and change about the current watch collection. Does this mean no more new watches? Well, as long as I'm playing with fountain pens, the 'Watch tower' section of the news letter gets a bit of rest, yes. Got to budget these things out, you know? But there's still many nice (and not too expensive) watches out there to admire and tinker with, so I imagine getting back to it in some way in the future. I especially like the bronze copies Heimdallr has been making of classic (and no longer produced) Seiko watchers. So we'll see. That's it from me. I'm gonna go into the garden with the dog and stare at some plants or pens for a while. Have a good week!
~~ Links ~~
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