I am saddened. I have only one black ink cartridge refill left, so after the one that is currently in my fountain pen runs out, I’ll have only the one to replace it. It’s so sad. I bought three fountain pens while I was in France: a sky and cadet blue one with a green band on the cap (whose clip I’ve already long since broken), and a pair of black pens with blue and red trim to tell them apart. The cadet blue one has almost always had black ink in it (and is my favorite), the blue-trimmed one with blue cartridges, and the red-trimmed one with red. When working on the novels, I tend to prefer to use the fountain pens to ball-points or Pilots or felt or anything else. There’s just something about the scritch-scratching of the nib on paper that pleases me (and is why I bought calligraphy materials too). After all these years, I’ve held onto these three pens dearly, and before leaving France, I had bought a lot of replacement cartridges so I wouldn’t run out any time soon. I still have a lot of blue, a few red left, but now I’m down to my last of the black, the color I’ve been using exclusively for the second novel as I write. I’ve found similar cartridges to the ones I bought in France here in the States, but they’re not the same and don’t seem to fit just right (I end up with ink on my fingers every time I change the cartridge, and it sometimes seems to leak a little in the cap). Plus, they’re damned hard to find, and when I do find them, they’re expensive as hell. I found some that might fit the pen, but for an 8-pack, it was nearly $8. That’s a dollar a cartridge, and I go through these quickly when I’m writing! *Sigh* I’ll probably just switch to the blue pen after this one runs out, and the next time I’m in a large city like the Haute or Bloomington, I’ll have to hit a papeterie or office store or bookstore to look for more.

The problem is that fountain pens just aren’t as popular here in the States. Disposable is fine for the whole pen itself around here because most people can’t bother with carrying around refills. The company that makes the fountain pens I bought does not even exist State-side except via parent companies that don’t carry that particular line of products on this side of the ocean. Digging around on the web, I can readily find French sites that sell my particular type of cartouche, but American sites are woefully lacking. Ah, my Reynolds pens, why do you have to be so difficult? I suppose I’ll just have to move back to France where I’ll never have to worry about running out of ink ever again. 😉 Actually, there is a particular type of notebook carried over there as well that I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on again. It’s kind of strange, knowing that before living over there, I lived just fine without these things, but now that I’ve had a taste, the desire to have more is so strong. My mind’s a silly place. Oh well, I’m rambling. I’m rambling about fountain pens. I’m rambling about fountain pens to a bunch of people who probably don’t even like fountain pens, let alone use them, hehe. Ah, well, c’est la vie. A jeter l’encre, à saigner l’encre: c’est ma vie. Time to write. Later.