Bags of Love A5 Custom Notebook

One of my favorite emails to get is when a company approaches me out of the blue and offers me a product for review. Part of me worries for them a little bit, because I have high office supply standards, and I’ll feel bad if it turns out I hate whatever they so nicely offered me, or if it has some major terrible flaw (like a notebook with terrible paper (this has happened before, I contacted the company about it, that review remains in limbo)). LUCKILY FOR EVERYONE, THIS WAS NOT THE CASE HERE! So I can thank Bags of Love for providing this sample without any reservation.

Front, featuring a sunrise from my bedroom window. Back, featuring a sunset in Morocco. Both sides featuring reflection self-portrait shadows!

The way this company works is they take photos you upload to the site and make personalized gifts—in this case, a notebook. This only narrowly avoided being a notebook of my cat; the pictures I had taken with my real camera of a sunrise out my bedroom window and a sunset in Morocco were better quality than a thousand iPhone cat pictures.

The notebook is a glossy soft cover. It looks beautiful and you can touch it all you want. The photographs I used turned out wonderfully, with solid blacks and rich colors, just as they looked on my computer screen, and the design/upload interface on the website was easy to use.

The downside to it being a soft cover though is I just know these corners are going to get dinged up, and the spine will end up creased and lined like any paperback.

Crease damage to top of spine. Typical for paperback books.

Now for the good news. No, the fantastic news. THIS PAPER IS WONDERFUL. I had no idea. I didn’t have the slightest clue going in. I looked at the cream-colored, unlined paper and braced myself for enough feathering to cover an outdated dinosaur model and enough bleedthrough to designate the notebook a crime scene…and got none of it! Not the slightest fuzz!

EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL

Even my broad nibbed Pilot Vanishing Point, which throws down ink like it’s going out of style, it was able to handle with ease. You can somewhat see the shadow of the previous page’s writing, but nothing so bad that it would stop me from using both sides of the page.

Lines crisp and both sides of the page usable

I got the A5 size (8×6″), but they also offer A6 (6×4.5″) notebooks. Says it’s got 150 sides of paper…I don’t feel like counting. I can tell you it is a decent but manageable amount of paper. I don’t like a notebook with too much paper, because then it’s too heavy to carry around in a casual bag. And being unlined, I can use this notebook for writing OR drawing.

A bit thicker than a standard writing utensil

Price-wise, this is definitely a case of getting what you pay for. This is a high-quality custom-cover notebook. Something from, say, CafePress would be cheaper, but have you ever actually ordered things from CafePress? I have. I got a custom shirt so poorly made that the shirt pieces weren’t properly aligned when it was sewn and there was a hole in the side of the shirt. I have a friend who ordered a custom SIGG water bottle and received a cheap knockoff. Maybe those kind of shenanigans fly when you’re trying to make custom things for yourself, but you want a gift for someone? Bags of Love is going to give you a quality product that you won’t have to be embarrassed about when you give it. And they are capable of some CRAZY fast shipping if you need it. I don’t know how much it costs, but this thing was in my hands all the way from across the Atlantic Ocean within 24 hours of my being notified it had shipped.

Freshly wrapped! Even on an unattractive plastic table it looks lovely!

Good paper is worth its weight in gold to me. This notebook is full of good paper. My only complaints are those which plague the very nature of all paperback notebooks. This is a solid product, and I would gladly spend my own money with Bags of Love. Thanks again to them for providing this sample!

Custom Pocket Notebook at Bags of Love

Daycraft 2013 Animaland Diary – Baboon – Overview and GIVEAWAY!

Reminds me a bit of the Regular Show

It’s 2013, and MAYBE YOU DON’T HAVE A PLANNER? Or maybe, in the stupor of a New Year’s hangover, you stumbled into some cut-rate box giant and picked out some unspeakably atrocious calendar to drag through the next year. Or maybe you have an incurable addiction to calendars and day planners. Whatever your deal, perhaps I have a giveaway for you.

Unless you hate pink. In which case, WOW, you are looking at the wrong giveaway.

You remember Daycraft? And their super cool planners? Well, some time last year they sent me a box of 3 spankin’ new 2013 selections. Even I cannot use that many calendar-planners, so I figured I’d share some of the love.

I’m even going to let you have the stickers

A quick run-down on the specs of this diary/planner/notebook/bound configuration of paper:

• Pink / Baboon
• Laminated pearl paper cover
• width 106mm x height 150mm
• 216 pages of 60 gsm paper
• Week-to-view
• International holidays
• Nutrition labeling information
• Gift ideas
• Year planner
• 71-week planner (WHOOPS I did not pay attention to the fact that this planner started in August 2012…I’m a little late on this giveaway, sorry. The thing was just so thin I figured there couldn’t be that many extra weeks in it. Goes to January 5th of 2014)

The paper is the same thin sort as I reviewed in my 2012 Signature Diary, so I imagine it’ll take various inks as well as that did.

I hope you like cute illustrations

Each month in 2013 starts with a little illustration and a month overview with room for notes.

No page without cuteness; see the little sheep at the bottom?

And here’s the layout for each week. There’s also a set of 4 perforated sheets in the back, each sheet divided into 3 sections, so if you need to tear off a piece of paper to give to someone, it will be an adorable piece of paper.

Now, if you’re interested in this little planner to make your year better, read on.

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THE GIVEAWAY RULES!

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1. To enter, just leave one comment on this post any time between now and Sunday, January 20th 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. Since I’m feeling crazy and like I don’t give enough of my money to the postal service, let’s have this contest open WORLD WIDE. The only people who can’t enter are people on space stations, the moon, and those otherwise residing extraterrestrially.
2. One winner will be picked at random from the comments section of this post. Make any kind of comment—but only one comment! Comments in excess of one shall be deleted. The comments will be numbered in the order they are received, i.e. the first comment is #1, the second #2, and so on. Because my blog doesn’t seem to number the comments on its own yet, and I STILL don’t will probably never have time/the willpower to fix it, I will again hand-number all the entries in Photoshop like I did here. The Random Integer Generator at random.org will be used to pick the number of the winner.
3. I’ll post the contest winner on Monday, January 21st. Winner will have one week to email me. There’s a link to my email at the top of the right sidebar.

And if you can’t wait to see if you won, here’s the link to the diary—just remember that price is in Hong Kong dollars. Good luck, and thanks to Daycraft for providing this sample!

DIY Phone+book Case

This is a project that anyone with a complete disregard for the mind-numbing tedium involved can complete.

Making this project will turn you into a hipster lunatic, as pictured here

You’ll need a sharp knife, some kind of proper glue (for unfathomable reasons I chose a glue stick—Pioneer extra strong permanent bonding), a pencil, and a phone thin enough to fit in a notebook. Or a notebook thick enough to conceal your lumbering phone.

Not pictured: the requisite phone for the case

Unless you really hate your writing, you’ll want to get an unused notebook, preferably one with useless paper. No sense wasting good paper.

Got this on sale when Borders went under. Cool cover, but blank/plain Moleskine paper is pretty much the worst. Finally found a use for it!

The easy part: hold the phone next to the paper of the notebook, so you can see how far down in the depth of the paper will be sufficient to fully conceal the phone. Open up the notebook where, if the phone were in the notebook, the page would be flush with the screen.

This is the worst tutorial explanation.

Put your phone where you want it to nest on the page and carefully trace around it. Scream like a pterodactyl when you still manage to get graphite on your precious technological baby. Once you have your outline, start cutting. A metal ruler helps on the straight edges. Check your work periodically–get all the paper dust out of the hole and see how your phone fits. Keep cutting until the phone in the hole is flush with the top cut page. Once that’s done, start gluing. This part will be tedious. Say goodbye to huge swaths of time. Question your decision to undertake this project. Once you’ve glued all the cut pages together AND THE GLUE IS DRY, check your work again. You’ll probably have to do some touch-up trimming for the phone to fit properly again.

Almost like you can’t even tell. I swear it looks a little better in person. With the band on. With the phone actually inside instead of taking the picture.

When it’s done, the glue and your inability to line up the pages properly will give the notebook a slightly used look while concealing what’s inside. The downside: no access to ports, buttons, or the main camera. The upside: UNPARALLELED STEALTH.

And unparalleled nostalgia.

And I’ve left access to the back pocket, as well as some pages in front and back in case I absolutely need to write something on paper. It’s surprisingly secure (I cut carefully to make sure it would fit just so, though it will undoubtedly get looser over time) yet easy to get out by pushing on the back of the pages and flexing the block of glued pages a bit.
Or if you’ve got money to drop, you might do better to either get something like theGOODbook case, or pay someone to go insane making one for you.

DIY Pocket Notebook GIVEAWAY

You remember that post I did about making your own cahier-style notebooks? Well I’ve been making scads of them, and I’ve made one to give away to all of you! Literally, all of you, as this contest will be open to everyone!

Lazy iPhone photos ahoy!

It has 26 pages of white Rhodia dot grid paper, size equal to 1/2 of a sheet of Rhodia Bloc No. 16.

Please forgive this experiment in laziness, but pulling out the big camera takes more effort. More effort means longer to get the giveaway to you.

The cover is red posterboard, and the notebook features a back pocket:

Grocery list not included

And baby blue hand stitching:

This phone takes good pictures, but perhaps not when I can’t hold my hands still at 4 in the morning and I only upload the medium image size. TOO LATE NOW. THE GIVEAWAY MUST GO ON!

That’s about all there is to the notebook, just a simple, lovingly hand-made imperfect little notebook up for grabs.

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THE GIVEAWAY RULES!

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1. To enter, just leave one comment on this post any time between now and Tuesday, December 18th 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. This contest will be open to everyone, everywhere! But since I’m footing the bill, if you live far away you’re not getting any frilly big-money rush delivery.
2. One winner will be picked at random from the comments section of this post. Make any kind of comment—but only one comment! Comments in excess of one shall be deleted. The comments will be numbered in the order they are received, i.e. the first comment is #1, the second #2, and so on. Because my blog doesn’t seem to number the comments on its own yet, and I STILL don’t have time/the willpower to fix it, I will again hand-number all the entries in Photoshop like I did here because I am a masochist and numbering is just ever so fun. The Random Integer Generator at random.org will be used to pick the number of the winner.
3. I’ll post the contest winner on Tuesday, December 18th. Winner will have one week to email me. There’s a link to my email at the top of the right sidebar.

Good luck everyone!

Daycraft Cookie Bookie

This is the most unreasonably adorable notebook I have ever seen, and that includes all manner of miniature assortments of bound paper. I couldn’t even mentally process how precious it was when I first received this sample from Daycraft. How can words ever hope to convey this:

Midnight snack edition

I’m afraid I can’t attest to how sturdy it may or may not be, because whenever I see my Cookie Bookie I just want to wrap it up in a paper-lace napkin and cradle it and remind myself that it’s not for eating.

I swear I’m not going to eat it! I just wanted some tea! Who would even use chopsticks to eat a gigantic cheese cracker, don’t be ridiculous.

The cover is that same irresistibly, touchably soft Italian polyurethane used in the Daycraft Signature Diary, with the added bonus that the Cookie Bookie cover is ever-so-slightly-squishy. Beautifully made, down to the little thread cheese dots in the cracker.

Lance wishes their crackers looked this pretty

Even the spine keeps up the appearance, properly recessed and cheesy-looking. I’ll have to get back to you on how well this holds up, but top marks for style.

Dishware not included

No elastic band or any other type of closure mechanism (that would ruin the illusion), but the book easily stays closed on its own (and strongly takes into consideration your request for it to remain open).

Love the slightly darker cheese border around each page

The paper did well with most pens I tested, including many fountain pen inks (particularly the quicker-drying inks like Lamy and Sheaffer). Thicker, wetter, slower-to-dry inks and the Sharpie Marker had a bit of shadowing on the other side of the page, and a couple dots of bleedthrough on the heavy inks.

The beginnings of bleedthrough with Noodler’s La Reine Mauve in a Caran d’Ache broad nib

The effect was very minimal, not something that would get in the way of my using both sides of the paper.

Is there any color I can’t use on this paper? …maybe highlighter orange?

I think I’ve found my new perfect paper for writing with the Uni Signo Broad white gel ink pen. Look at that ink pop!

NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS!

First of all, at the Daycraft website you can now order their products online with free worldwide shipping. Just PAY ATTENTION, all the listed prices are in Hong Kong dollars. So when you see HK$129, take a deep breath and pull up a currency converter, because at time of writing that’s just $16.63 in the US. Hopefully in the future the website will integrate a currency converter in the website, at least perhaps a drop down menu you can pick from if not automatically detecting the country you’re in, but one step at a time. The biggest thing is I can now review these notebooks and you can all actually buy them!

Good news #2: To celebrate Father’s day, Daycraft is offering shoppers who buy The Moneywrap online before June 18th a Father’s Day bonus – 20% off their next Daycraft purchase of other products. That’s $56.46 [at time of writing] for a sweet leather wallet. Feel free to buy me one, even though I’m not anyone’s father.

Thanks again to Daycraft for providing this sample for review!

The Cookie Bookie in Cream Cookie, Cheese Cracker, and Lemon Waffle at Daycraft

Ink Drop Soup: The Moleskine Tradition of Quality

Pretty sure "le vrai moleskine" still "n'est plus." Or maybe the legend has just always included centuries of shoddy construction and I just don't know any better.

In a world where “quality” is synonymous with “being mauled by a small bear.”

Not the first time I've had a random hole in the page in the cahier notebooks

I imagine the quality control process consists of one person carrying a box of notebooks over to the QC inspector, and then the QC inspector laughs brutally in that person’s face until they carry the box away to the shipping trucks.

I don't appreciate buying jeans pre-ripped, and I REALLY don't appreciate buying shrink-wrapped notebooks pre-ripped. Didn't care enough to stop me from drawing on them anyway.

If I hadn’t figured out how to make these notebooks for less than a dollar a notebook, I’d probably be peeved enough to write a sharply worded letter, or demand some kind of retribution. As is, I’m just shaking my head, wondering why I’m not the one making beaucoup bucks scamming consumers into paying top dollar for tripe like this.

Mini Review: DIY Notebook—Moleskine Cahier Style

WEEP, MOLESKINE! YOUR REIGN OF TYRANNY IS AT AN END! ... oh who am I kidding, millions of people will still buy Cahiers anyway.

I love the Moleskine Cahier, but for all the wrong reasons. Let me explain. The Moleskine Cahier plain notebook contains what is by and far literally THE WORST PAPER I have ever encountered in my life. The only thing worse would be newsprint, or napkins. Used receipts would be a step up. And that terrible paper is why I love it. I use these notebooks for pencil sketches, and since the paper is so shoddy I’m not inhibited by the art-blocking psychological worry of wasting good paper. I end up drawing more, being more loose and creative, and I make better drawings as a result. I also like that the notebook is thin, so it has a low profile when I carry it in my already notebook-laden bag (what’s the point of leaving the house, really, if you don’t have at least ten notebooks with you?). Now, I like this notebook, but I’m not insane. I’m not going to pay top dollar for a product that I value CHIEFLY BECAUSE IT IS SO HORRIBLY CONSTRUCTED. I might as well staple five dollar bills together, draw on them, and throw them out the window. But, my friends, these are simple notebooks. After a bit of Googling I settled on this tutorial, and got to work on making a proof-of-concept prototype.

Bound left-handed-ways. Also, if you don't know Blenheim's Ginger Ale, it is the best ginger ale in the world. Period. Exclamation point. Semicolon; no exceptions.

Since I was using thin weeny repair-kit thread, I doubled it up. The tutorial said not to, but I like living dangerously

Then I made another prototype when I was bored at work (there’s often a lot of downtime) and realized I still had my needles and thread with me. I had just finished a delightful box of Triscuits, and it served me well in my boredom-fueled-craftmaking.

Delicious notebook

Cut the corners off Battlestar Galactica style, cause I'm cool like that. Also because I didn't have a corner rounder at the time.

Concept proven. Buying actual supplies was now justified. My local pen store had a 100-page pack of typewriter paper for $1.00 that was almost an exact replica of the thin, cheap Cahier paper. An additional 99 cents (plus tax) at the A.C. Moore scored me a 22in. x 28in. piece of black posterboard, and for 39 cents each I picked up five different colors of thread. Additional expenses include: $1.69 for another needle (pack of needles) (the ones I had were either too small or too big), $3.59 for a corner rounder (thank you 40%-off coupon), and $2.39 for super glue (couldn’t find any around the house). I already had a large needle that I used in place of an awl, and an X-acto knife for cutting the board and trimming the paper edges. Time took maybe a couple of hours? I’m not sure; I love doing stuff like this so I didn’t time it. End result:

It looks just like a real notebook!

Gotta be reppin' some turquoise

WITH POCKET, BOOYAH. Also note that this notebook is left-handed bound.

Materials expense per notebook: 20 pages ($0.20), maybe three feet of thread (comes to about $0.05 worth of thread), 8.5in x 15.25in of posterboard (about $0.21 worth of posterboard), and a wee bit of super glue (we’ll be generous and say that it was maybe $0.20 worth of glue) = $0.66 per notebook
Plus tools investment: Needles, corner rounder, superglue: $7.67
Total cost for making a set of 3 notebooks, including tools: $9.65

And now I’ll never have to buy another Moleskine Cahier again. :D

Daycraft 2012 Signature Diary

Say hello to my newest indispensable companion

Usually my spam folder is filled with oddly-capitalized tales of murder and intrigue, including sums of at least (US$7.5M) Seven Point Five Million U.S Dollars that need a Trust Worthy foreign individual such as myself to help escort out of any number of African countries for a percentage of said sum. But one rare day I spotted an email from Mr. Foreal Lee in reference to Daycraft Notebooks & Diaries. I carefully scooped this rare opportunity out of the spam folder, and am now three sample notebooks richer for having done so. The first notebook I want to review is the one I’ve put to the most use so far: the Daycraft 2012 Signature Diary.

It's true, they really do make your day

The cover is made of fine Italian polyurethane, which is an abbreviated way of saying “fantastically soft who-knows-what that I want to rub my face on even though people are giving me weird looks.” According to the papers I have here, this exact model seems to be the D631K 2012 A6 size Diary (Black Color) with 408 pages, 60gsm cream paper, 108mm x 149mm page-a-day model.

This is either a soft-cover notebook, or I possess superhuman strength. You decide.

Typically I am wary of soft cover notebooks, as I am dead certain that I will ruin them at the bottom of some bag, the covers will be all squished, and tragedy will ensue. But it has held up so far. We’ll see how it does over time as the year goes on.

There is a ribbon marker—not too short, not too long—but no elastic band and no back pocket typical of so many notebooks. Given how many empty pockets I have at the back of so many notebooks, I don’t much care about the pocket, but I do tend to like an elastic band. The notebooks I have without plastic bands have a tendency to sit around with one cover flopped up.

Like it's about to give a speech, or tell a joke or something

Content-wise, it’s jam packed. Well, not necessarily packed with jam, per se, more packed with information. I enjoy having daily planners with unobtrusive tomes of random knowledge, so this is perfect. My notebook has a list of international holidays for 2012, international guides for 28 different countries—tourist information, outgoing international code, what number to dial for emergency services, what type of currency is used & the denominations, what the value added tax is, what side of the road they drive on—etc., IDD codes, world time, size conversions, conversion tables, even nutrition and health:

Look at that. That is a little man climbing a food pyramid. And there's a list of the pros and cons of various nutrients. And the next page (not pictured) is a little lesson on how to understand food labels.

There’s also a table of food calories for common foods, how to calculate the calories you need, how to calculate BMI, gift ideas (traditional gifts for anniversaries, birthstones and flowers for each month, and the symbols and dates of each sign of the zodiac), special dates, year planner, and then, of course, the actual pages for each day.

Each month has a quote and an overview of the month before the daily pages start

I’ve used the month page to list out overall goals for each month, and highlight the days I’m scheduled to work.

Spoiler alert: one of the three days pictured here is my birthday

And then each day gets its own page, except for the weekend, which gets one page for both days. I’ve been using this diary especially for keeping up with my extensive list of goals and resolutions, so it’s nice to be able to plan out some goals for the next day on each page.

See those colors on the page? Each month has a different color. Don’t believe me?

That feeling you're feeling right now is the feeling of believing me

Now, very importantly, how does this paper hold up when it comes to the pen test? The thickness of each page is only slightly more than what’s typically reserved for facial tissues or voluminous holy books.

Maybe one day I'll order my writing tests according to color, so it looks more aesthetically pleasing and less like rainbow vomit

I was VERY surprised how well it handled a large number of pens, especially the broad nibbed fountain pens—there’s little to no fuzzing or feathering. Now, there’s bleedthrough like nobody’s business:

And yet now I'm making it everybody's business

But there are so many things I love about this notebook that I don’t mind sticking to gel pens and ballpoints. I’m currently way into using various Pilot FriXion models to plan things out, so I can erase if I need to without having to use a pencil. A notebook this colorful deserves exciting pens.

According to the Daycraft website, I can find no U.S. distributor for the Daycraft brand—but some of you international types may be in luck (here’s their list of distributors)—and there’s whole lists of shops for those fortunate enough to live in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Macau, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand or Turkey. But I see from both Pens Paper Inks…Whatever! and Notebook Loves Pen that Daycraft products may perhaps be obtained through a U.S. distributor by the name of Mr. Andrew Oentojo at Star Imports: starimport[dot]andrew[at]gmail[dot]com …so I’d say give him a try! Mr. Foreal Lee says we’re back to not having a U.S. distributor! :( My fellow Americans, guess it’s back to holding our horses and bribing friends overseas to get notebooks for us.

But honestly, this seems like the kind of AMAZING PRODUCT the equally amazing JetPens should already be carrying. (hint hint please?)

At any rate, I hope that the convenience of obtaining such diaries and notebooks increases exponentially in the near future, and that you are able to get one for yourself. Thanks again to Mr. Foreal Lee for this sample!

Ok let's just watch this one more time. This is the first animated .gif I've made and it makes me happy

 

Moleskine Extra-Small Plain Notebook GIVEAWAY

Featuring photos not by me! You can tell because they are on a normal, white background instead of something like my shoe, or the trunk of my car

I am still recovering from the  unspeakably delicious Thanksgiving turkey my dad made last Thursday, so instead of a review, lazybones here is instead going to do…ANOTHER GIVEAWAY! You can thank the good people at Jenni Bick Bookbinding for this one. They specialize in handmade books and customized Moleskines, and I suggested we give away some of the latter. In spite of my violently scathing vitriol well-intentioned criticisms of said notebook brand, I not only own, but use and continue to purchase its products in various sizes, formats, designed for various purposes….what can I say; they’ve got the market utterly cornered when it comes to variety. I am currently very fond of the extra-small hardcover notebook; I have one that I carry every day as a general all-purpose pocket notebook. That position was previously held by the soft-cover Moleskine Volant extra small notebook, but those tend to bend quite atrociously after a few days being tucked into a back pocket. Another advantage over the Volant: this one has a pocket! And a bookmark! And an elastic strap! And they’re cute and wee!

wheeeeee

The notebook specs:

• Measures 2.5″ x 4″
• 160 plain pages
• Fun new colorful Moleskine hardcover with rounded corners Comes in colors typically only seen in clucking, egg-laying rabbits
• Elastic closure
• Thread bound for durability
• Acid-free paper
• Bound-in bookmark
• Expandable Inner Pocket
• Can be personalized with embossing

Let me emphasize that last point: Can be personalized with embossing.

Raise your hands---who else feels like eating some pastel M&M candies after staring at these notebooks too long?

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THE GIVEAWAY RULES!

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1. There will be four lucky winners, one for each of these plain-page notebooks that Jenni Bick Bookbinding will customize for said winners—to enter, just leave one comment on this post any time between now and Thursday, December 8th 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. Sadly, this contest is only open to U.S. residents.
2. One winner will be picked at random from the comments section of this post. Make any kind of comment—but only one comment! Comments in excess of one shall be deleted. The comments will be numbered in the order they are received, i.e. the first comment is #1, the second #2, and so on. Because my blog doesn’t seem to number the comments on its own yet, and I don’t have time/the willpower to fix it, I will hand-number all the entries in Photoshop like I did here because this is the kind of solution that sane people come up with. The Random Integer Generator at random.org will be used to pick the number of the winner.
3. I’ll post the contest winner on Friday, December 9th. Winners will have one week to email me. There’s a link to my email at the top of the right sidebar.

As a consolation prize for everyone, Jenni Bick Bookbinding is offering a special coupon code for us—15% off valid at both MoleskineAndMore.com and JenniBick.com; the code is: 15NOPEN and it’s only good ’til December 31st. Oh man, that discount would go great with these notebook covers and having someone else buy one for me!

Good luck!

Ink Drop Soup – Boombox Arsenal

Dinner is served

Feeling restricted by Twitter, I wanted to roll out a little segment, a header under which I might categorize all my random pen/ink/paper/etc. musings, to post my write-ups that are not reviews, and can’t be expressed in 140 characters. Such meanderings shall henceforth be declared Ink Drop Soup, so if you don’t care for such ramblings, you can easily avoid them.

It's a set of keys! it's a boombox! It's a wooden bench!

One of the few good things to come out of the closing of Borders Bookstores was that, in the final going-out-of-business sales, I was at long last able to afford overpriced junk like this thing and Moleskines. I probably paid somewhere between five to nine bucks for this thing. Ah, what is this thing? It’s a boombox. No really.

This thing is the epitome of what seems like useless hipster garbage. Only it's actually useful.

First, I attached my keys to it, because I keep losing my keys. Then, I started to keep stuff in it. I’m surprised how much it holds.

Amount held: one scientific unit of a heckuvabunch, or, 1.2 kilahekabunches

The essentials: one mp3 playing unit, to plug into the boombox; one matchbook of Writersblok perforated sticky notes; one Zebra mini-pen; 8GB of memory (one of the two flash drives I use to hold all my pictures for this blog). Optional, not pictured: coins, small sewing implements, band-aid(s), stick of gum, what have you. It’s my favorite mini-arsenal that I’ve assembled so far, and is always handy wherever my keys may go.