leads for a "vintage" pencil
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
Today Mari and I went for a walk to do some errands. We needed light jackets but my suede coat was a touch heavy for the sunny warm weather. We went to the hardware store, the library, and the post office, and also paid our gas bill at the 7-11. While they (finally) have Internet banking and automated payments here stuff automated payments don't seem to have fully gelled and we haven't been able to get our gas or rent payments done. So we'd paid our rent first thing by hand (at least by online banking) as well. You'll get there, Japan!
(Also, I'll note that Canada's not always a lot better. I've had my entire online account deleted by the jokers at Toronto Hydro, and I once had one of their clowns ask me, "Is your name this, your birthday that, and your mother's maiden name this?" I told her not to do that sort of thing, because she'd just identified me to an unverified caller. On that day I stopped using my mother's maiden name right on the spot, combing through every counter-party I could think of and changing it.)
Where was I.
I was delighted to find some 2mm "HB" pencil leads at the hardware store. I have a mechanical pencil that takes 2mm leads that I picked up for drafting class in Grade 10 - likely in the autumn of 1985. Until today I was still using the original 2H lead, because it was a drafting pencil.
I found this by Googling "vintage mechanical pencil"
2H lead is great for drafting, borderline useless for writing or even sketching. But recently I've been doing a fair bit of work in Japanese, writing on paper. Normal wooden pencils and my grandfather's 0.046" pencils are tough to keep sharp enough, and 0.5mm pencils - such as my middle-school "click pencil" are too thin and the stroking style of writing kanji breaks the tips. Writing with a pen would be ideal but I constantly make mistakes.
So I'm quite pleased. Here's what my kanji homework looks like:
