Little Things, Little Things...

Let's hope the money I've saved by eating stale crackers for lunch will pay for my latest little splurge: some nice pens. I've spent about $20 in the past month on 4 new pens, all after stumbling on a blog called The Pen Addict. If you have the least inclination to care about what kind of pen you use, DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK! You will be sucked in. You will want to buy new pens.

I generally feel like pens are a thing that should not be bought. Lots of free ones are given away, and if you work in an office, so much of your use of pens is probably for work purposes anyway that you'll just use the ones you get there for free. But I hate crappy pens. When my office stopped stocking the kind I like best, I hoarded the ones I had, and at one point I even ordered a way overpriced box of them online because I was afraid they weren't being made any more. I still have a few of those left and continue to use them happily.

But in the meantime, I've been trying to organize my life better by keeping lots of notes and to-do lists in one of my beloved Moleskine notebooks. In the past, I've kept lots of lists in my PDA, and there are advantages to the electronic method, but I also really like the immediacy of writing things in a notebook. I've posted about my notebook obsession before, and since increasing my usage of notebooks lately, I've been searching for cheaper ways to buy them. There are plenty of blogs that discuss Moleskines, and one of the frequent themes is how different pens work on Moleskine paper. My usual pens work okay in Moleskines, but not perfectly. Or at least they seemed much less perfect after reading other people's opinions about what pens are closer to perfect via sites like Pen Addict!

Also, I wanted to try using multiple colors in my notebook to try to differentiate different projects. I thought it would be handy to have one of those multiple 4-in-1 pens like Bic makes, but I only use rollerball pens, not regular ballpoints, and a rollerball multi-pen seemed impossible to find... until I visited JetPens.com, where I bought a nifty rollerball featuring black ink, red ink, and a mechanical pencil all in one. It was $6, which seems like a lot for a fairly basic plastic pen. (Fortunately, though I've used fountain pens in the past, they hold no attraction for me now, as you could easily spend a lot more than $6 on one of those!) The trouble with buying pens online is that you can't be sure they'll feel the way you want them to, and that you're tacking on shipping charges that can seem quite high relative to the price of the item itself. But I was so happy with the pens I ordered that I'll probably end up ordering some more... which may mean I'll have to start eating stale crackers for dinner too!

This Week's Crazy Spending

I mentioned that I'd been doing some sketching and painting over the holiday weekend-- the good news is that I'm having one of my creative spurts, where I can sit for hours doodling and drawing up a storm. (Actually, I'm not sure I can draw a storm, but I'll have to try that.)
This has been partly inspired by the purchase of a new sketchbook: $9. The sketchbook made me dig out some unused pens that I've had for a while, brush-tipped markers which turned out to be quite fun to use. I filled so much of the sketchbook that I decided I needed a few more-- this was the one where I'd already decided to buy another one because I could hardly bear to put a mark on its pristine pages. So I went and bought 4 more sketchbooks, and while I was carrying them towards a register, someone working in the store came over and offered me a shopping basket.

Let me pause for a moment to say how much I appreciate savvy retailers. It drives me crazy when stores don't maximize their opportunity to make money by doing stupid things like not having enough shopping carts, or the staff totally ignoring people. The littlest thing like offering a basket to someone whose hands are full is not just a polite gesture, it is a way to clear any obstacle the customer might have towards spending more money. No one likes hard sell techniques where people try to force you to spend money, but most customers appreciate not having to work too hard if they're already inclined to drop some cash!

So anyway, once I had my basket I continued to browse around the art supplies, and happened across some lovely sets of the same brush-tipped markers I'd been using, but in wonderful color palettes. I bought four sets: a basic color set, a landscape palette, an earth tone palette, and a palette of 6 shades of grey. I can't wait to play with these! I love working with color, but paints get really messy and they aren't that portable. The exception is small boxes of watercolors, but I find watercolors really hard to control, even if I occasionally end up with good accidents.
The bad news is that the total damage at the art supply store came to $90. While on the one hand, I feel like I shouldn't casually be spending $90 on anything right now, on the other hand I always feel happy when I have my little artistic moments, and I could certainly spend $90 on stupider things.

My only regret is that I didn't shop online first: of course I googled the brand of pens and found a website selling them for quite a bit less. The shipping costs make up some of the difference, and at this point I am not going to bother to return the ones I just bought, but next time I'll know!

Cost Comparison: A Meal vs. a Sailboat

I took sailing lessons a couple of years ago, and ever since, it's been something I dream of doing more often. I occasionally read a blog called Sail Brooklyn, and I love it whenever he posts things about the costs of sailing. Here's a post which compares the cost of a meal at Per Se to buying a Sunfish!
At the risk of spoiling a surprise, I'll tell you that you can get the boat for less!

Sailing vs. a Summer House Rental: A Cost Analysis

Check out this post at Sail Brooklyn, which analyzes the cost of owning a sailboat in Brooklyn vs. renting a house in the Hamptons. Sailing has a reputation for being an extremely expensive pursuit, but the good news is that it might be more affordable than you realize.
I've only done a little sailing myself, but I'd love to be able to do it more. I had never really looked into the cost of boats at all, just assuming it would be way out of my reach. But the prices he quotes for sailboats are lower than I had expected: $3,500 for a used 28-foot sloop. And given that I only know how to sail things that are about half that size, I guess I could pay quite a bit less! When you factor in the storage and maintenance, it's still a bit beyond my price range, not to mention that it would be totally impractical to own a boat at this point in my life, but it's nice to know that it is something I could probably do in the future. In the meantime, I'd better take some more sailing lessons so I wouldn't sink the thing!

Collecting

Do you collect anything? How much money do you spend on it?

I've always collected books-- but that somehow doesn't seem like collecting, it just seems like having books to read and use for reference, even though within my library there are several series and authors that keep lists of and always look for in used bookstores. Same with music-- books and music are just things you might have lots of, but not necessarily a collection. A collection is more about STUFF.

My grandmother and her sister were the people I saw as collectors growing up. My grandmother collected bells, tea cups, a certain type of plate, small glass objects, and a lot of other knick-knacky things. My great-aunt had a lot of clocks, and her dining room was full of a collection of teapots which had belonged to my great-grandmother. (It turned out that my great-grandmother never intended to collect teapots, but once she had a few, people started giving her more and she could never get them to stop.)

But I have never had any particular desire to collect anything in particular. I have lots of weird little things that I've picked up here and there, but I never felt like there was much of a theme to my knickknacks-- until recently. I realized that what I always seem to be drawn to in junk shops is old product packaging-- cracker tins, spice tins, medicine jars, and old cigar and cigarette boxes. One of my aunts realized that I liked this stuff, and when she was in charge of clearing out my grandmother's house after she died, she saved a few things with me in mind. One of them was a neat little tobacco tin with a bunch of rusty screws in it, a relic from my grandfather's workbench. I put the tobacco tin on my mantel next to a glass tube of pills, a small brass pig and a doll's head, and didn't think much more about it.

But the other day, I got a package in the mail from a friend of mine, containing a card and a gift: another tobacco tin in the exact same shape but for a different brand. It's a great looking tin, and it had never occurred to me that that rectangular, rounded-corner shape was a standard package for tobacco. Suddenly, I found myself thinking it would look really neat to have a whole wall of these tins, and I was dying to get more. My friend had found the tin for $1 in a junk shop in Arizona, and had bought herself a similar one. Out of curiosity, she looked for similar tins online and found that they can be valued at $15-25 and up. "Take a look on eBay," she said.

To make a long story short, I immediately flagged about 10 tobacco tins on ebay, and I won a nice Prince Albert one for only a few dollars. Now if anyone asks me if I have Prince Albert in a can, I can say "Why, yes! And I'm not going to let him out, either!"
I didn't bid on a few tins that had gotten too expensive, and missed the end of the auctions on the rest, which is a shame as a few nice ones went for only $2 or $3 each. But given how many I found on that first try, I'm sure I'll have many more opportunities. I also just like the way they look-- I don't care how old or rare they are, so I'm happy to find ones that serious collectors wouldn't want.

I don't want to collect these so badly that I'll pay more than a couple dollars each. That is part of the fun of collecting something-- the challenge of the search, or the pleasant surprise of a random discovery, leading to the satisfaction of getting what you want cheaply, rather than paying through the nose to complete your collection quickly. At least that is how I feel about it, though some people would differ!