About 3 months ago I filled in a website usability test at my local energy company’s website. I never win anything so I had forgotten all about it until when in early June I got an e-mail that I had won their main prize: a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner!

I’ve now been the proud owner of a Roomba for almost 2 months and it’s such a life saver 😀 I’ve always loathed vacuuming, and never did it weekly like you’re supposed to at least. But especially since I got sick and became a spoonie with daily exhaustion and pain, vacuuming became a really hard task for me because it takes so much of my energy, and makes my chronic migraine worse (there’s something about the arm motions and the back/head posture of vacuuming that aggravates my chronic head pain) and so it went down to bottom of things I need to do when I realized I can’t do everything as often as I used to do them I was healthy. But now with the Roomba I can get my floors vacuumed every week, or even more often if needed I’d always been doubtful about Roombas but after just a few weeks I can’t imagine my life without one now 😀 The Roomba is maybe the best gift I’ve ever gotten, it’s that good!

Now I can’t say I never win anything either 😉 

Also in other happy news – looks like the heatwave is really over! It’s been two weeks now of 18-24 degrees (Celcius) and lately it’s rained quite a bit, and it promises more of the same for the next 10 days at least. I’m happy   Weird how 24 degrees has felt relatively cool now, it used to be way too hot for me. I guess this summer calibrated my hot-o-meter somewhat.

Finally was able to buy the TWSBI Eco Smoke Rose Gold. I’ve been salivating after it since it was released earlier this year. It was really difficult to decide what nib to get. I like M(edium) nibs the best so far, but I also got one Eco in B(road) and I’ve been liking that more and more this year. So I decided to go with a B nib for the Smoke Rose Gold. Can’t wait to get it! Also bought some inks at the same time, mostly notably to me the Sailor Shikiori Yamadori. I got a sample of it, and fell in love with it immediately. It flows and writes perfectly, and I love the teal & burgundy sheen combo   Teal is one of my favorite colors. Also got some J. Herbin cartridges in that order to use in my two Jinhao x750 pens.

Also got a blue Kaigelu 316A fountain pen on the way from esybuy on Etsy, heard a lot of good things about it and it looks so pretty in pictures. It’s shipped from China and the estimated delivery is in September-November. It’s already shipped so we’ll see how long it’ll take! The two PenBBS orders I done during COVID-19 took 4 weeks both, but TheWashiTapeShop.com order took only 2 weeks and all those shipped from China too. I’ve bought from esybuy once before but I can’t remember how long it took to get it – propably around 4 weeks because that’s what my orders usually take from China or USA to get to Finland, and I don’t remember there being anything unusual about that time.

One pen I’ll get at some point is the new TWSBI Swipe because sometimes I need a cartridge pen for ease of use when out and about and I love how TWSBIs write the most. I’m just not sure about the two colors available at the moment – the Smoke looks so much like Go and I don’t like the looks of the Gos, and the Prussian Blue isn’t among my favorite colors. I hope TWSBI will come out with other colors for Swipe, preferably soon!

The first fountain pen I ever bought was the EU version of Pilot Metropolitan (it and TWSBI Ecos are recced for beginners usually,) with an F(ine) nib, but turned out I hate the feel of that pen in my hand and that I like a wider nib. It wrote really well but I just didn’t like to use it. Luckily it didn’t go to waste though – I gave it to my Mom who’s now been using for about six months! I also gave her one of the little Tomoe River paper notebooks I made along with some blotting paper. She’s still on her first cartridge (Diamine Syrah) though because she mostly uses it to list the books she’s read this year. She says she used a similar pen but a dip one when she was a kid in school in the 1950s but never one with cartridges/converters. I’m trying to get her to use it for other things as well such as shopping lists etc. where it doesn’t matter if the paper isn’t that great.