Every once in a while — maybe once in eigh­teen months — I will find some­thing so won­der­ful that it lit­er­ally makes me squee with delight.

I like pens. Specif­i­cally foun­tain pens. I love how easy they are to write with. I hate ball­points so much that I absolutely refuse to use them. For “cheap” writ­ing needs, I use roller­balls. It just takes too much effort to drag that gummy, nasty, ball­point paste across the paper. And they stink, and they don’t write evenly.

So I bought myself a very nice foun­tain pen. I have sev­eral cheap­ies that work well, but I found a really nice, mid-​​priced pen that I decided that I deserved and I bought it as a present to myself. It’s very pretty. Here it is.

I love it and it writes wonderfully.

So here’s the squee part. It came with a cat­a­log from the seller. I open the cat­a­log, and am imme­di­ately struck by a pen that I absolutely must, but prob­a­bly never will, own.

You have to click it to see the whole thing, com­plete with descrip­tion and, most depress­ingly, price.

There is really only one thing I can say about it: “Squee!”

Update:

It turns out that the Caran d’Ache “1010” is mis­named. It’s off by over 46 sec­onds. The maths indi­cate that the hour and minute hands are both devi­ated from 12 by the same degree (hour hand coun­ter­clock­wise, minute hand clock­wise) at 10:09:13.85, not at 10:10:00. Because, you see, the hour hand moves half a degree per minute. So by the time the minute hand gets around to the “2”, the hour hand has moved past the “10” by 5 degrees. The exact time at which the angles are equal is ten and 2/​13 hours after twelve.