The Purple Check Writing Pen

I'm not crazy about purple as a color, and by that I mean I think purple is a lovely color, but it's not my number one color.  I like purple clothes on my daughter and purple candy looks delicious to me, and I like grape juice and many other things purple, but it's not "my color."

My color is orange, but how that came about and how long I spent loathing the color orange and then deciding that I loved it unconditionally when I was older is the topic of another blog post.  This post is about an unlikely little purple pen and how it's been with me for probably twenty years now, maybe more.

Do you remember the gel pen craze that happened way back?  Someone figured out you could suspend colored ink in something not unlike Dippity Do Hair Gel and it would flow out both beautifully and effortlessly from a ball point pen.  This little invention started an ink pen revolution.  First, the constant fights with your pen to start writing again by running it in a circle and adding pressure was rarely seen any more unless the pen was just out of ink.  And second, there were colors!  Something in this new process enabled a much wider variety of colors, much to the delight of children all over the world.

I think it was about that time that I got a purple gel pen.  It wrote very nicely so I attached it to my current check book that sat in my top desk drawer.  There was a very short period of time in my life that I a) carried a purse and b) needed a check book with me.  I grew up just as credit and debit cards were becoming more mainstream, so for most of my life, my checkbook has sat at home, waiting to be used.

And that waiting has become longer and longer between periods of use as time goes on.  What with online ordering, bill pay, auto-draft and point of sale credit card terminals, my checkbook gets more neglected with each passing year.

But this is about that purple pen.  I can see through its clear chamber and I know how much ink is left.  Surprisingly, there's about a third of the pen's ink remaining so ready and willing to write checks for a long time to come.  At the rate I write checks these days, how much longer will this little purple pen and I be together in the future?

The Big Boy Update:  "Daddy's toe is out of gas."  It is?  Maybe you should fill it up.  Where is the tank?  "The tank is in Daddy's foot."  Oh, okay. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She must have a need to read.  That, or she just wasn't tired the other night.  When we go up to bed and enter her room she says, "books...books" so we read some books.  Not uncommonly, she will get up in the middle of a book to go crawl into bed.  This is a sign,—so mommy divines—that she is ready for bed at which point I turn out the light and give her a pacifier and leave. Two nights ago I came back upstairs to find her sitting in the big chair, in the twilight, "reading" a book she had to climb up onto the dresser to get.  I know she climbed up via the chair arm, but I don't know how she got down without falling and landing badly but somehow she managed it.

Someone Once Said:  Better to be tempted and resist, than disappointed.