What's on Adam's Desk? (February 2021)

I’m back for an update about what’s on my desk, the new stationery items I’ve been using, what I’ve been reading and listening to, and what I’ve borrowed from my wife.

I continue to write in the Field Notes Snowy Evening edition. I’ve started my third book. I’m also back to unloading my thoughts into my third XOXO COVID notebook. I rarely use my Field Notes for work notes, so the Baron Fig 2021 planner has become essential in the last few weeks for capturing work notes in the moment. These are items that may not belong in my Google sheet of long-term tasks. It took a a few weeks into the year for this to turn into a natural process. The key is not being precious about the high-quality planner.

I have mostly been writing with a Rowney 820 in my notebook. This pencil was a gift from Dave Tubman, who really dives into the history of vintage pencils on his blog Pencil Fodder. The Rowneyis almost 100 years old and I’ve taken to sharpening it with an Opinel No. 7 knife in order to avoid being a guy who turns an antique into a relic. I hope to write more about the pencil soon.

I’ve also been using and enjoying this mustard Pentel P209, recommended by Ted on our most recent episode. I like the .9mm lead. Even as a kid, I was too much of an old soul for the .5mm lead. I leaned towards the dark gray .7mm Bic mechanical pencils at the time. That fragile lead is a young person’s game. I may be raving about one of these 5.6 mm lead holders soon.

Ted also recently recommended the slightly heavier TWSBI compared to the Lamy Safari, which lead me to immediately “borrow” my wife’s TWSBI ECO. Ted was right! It’s great and it’s underused by my wife. Wish it was mine.

I’ve recently read and recommend  John le Carré’s memoir The Pigeon Tunnel and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, both autobiographical essay collections of sorts. The le Carré is organized a bit more like a memoir but many of the chapters originally appeared elsewhere as stand alone pieces. I suppose World of Wonders is an adult book but it struck me as a volume young adults would cherish forever. In each short essay Nezhukumatathil draws a line from an animal or plant to an event in her life.

This month I’ve been listening to a lot of New Orleans music to celebrate Mardi Gras. I borrowed the Crescent City Soul boxed set from my dad years ago and I was happy to discover it reassembled as a Spotify playlist. At other times I just wanted nothing but Fess. “Big Chief” by Professor Longhair is on a short list of songs that astonishes me every time. Those songs actually go into a list I’m compiling very slowly in a Field Notes End Papers. 

Check out what was on my desk last month.

Let me know what you’ve been writing with in the comments below.