I love mechanical pencils.  At any given time you can usually find a half dozen of them strewn across  my desk.    I also have a love-hate relationship with them because I usually buy the inexpensive half-dozen to a bag variety and I end up regretting it because the lead breaks easily under pressure or I can’t advance it. Now my regrets have come to an end because I’ve recently found the most wonderful pens and mechanical pencils at the Tokyo Pen Shop. 

You probably think that Tokyo Pen Shop is located in Japan, right? Well, they are located right here on the west coast in the San Francisco bay area.  Their pens and pencils are high quality from Japan including some hard to find pens like the Hi-Tec C.   Anyway, I just got my order today and I’m ecstatic.  I got the super duper “2020 Super Grip Shaker Pencils”  in pink and blue.  I love them.  They have a nice grip and write smoothly, almost like a gel pen.  The lead doesn’t break either because of a metal sheath that protects it, and the lead advances with some kind of sophisticated shaker mechanism.  While I was ordering I grabbed some of those hard to find Hi-Tec C gel writing pens that have fine writing points and also grabbed some gel-tip Uni-ball Signo RTs for heavier writing.   I showed my pens and pencils to my husband and I now have three less than I started with but if I ever need to order more I now know where to order them from.

As a web designer I’m always looking for the right color scheme combinations to incorporate into site design. I’ve seen some beautiful color palettes that look great at first glance but when applied into a site can have a completely adverse effect. Having an “on the fly” visualization of what those colors would look like on a sample test page would be handy and save a lot of time. I happened to be reading through Mashable and while sifting through their ‘Web Design Toolbox” I came across a vast array of web design tools for graphics and color management. One particular link caught my eye and it took me to an online color creator tool called Color Scheme Designer. After playing around with it I found it relatively easy to use. Just plug in a hex code and it displays some wonderful color combinations in mono, triad, complement, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic variations. But what I was looking for, they delivered, by incorporating “on the fly” tabbed previews of what the colors would look like on a sample site in either a light or dark variation including text.

My perseverance with diet and exercise over the last 6 months is paying off and since my last post of Nov. 20 I’ve now lost a total of  18 lbs.   My goal is to lose about 10 more lbs. then  maintain it.   Since  starting this regimen I can really feel the difference in how great I feel from working out.

I haven’t found the blog style I like yet so if you find the site changing looks often it’s because I’m trying to settle on one that works for me, or one that works.

I’ve often wondered what the farthest man-made object was from earth.  It’s amazing that this spacecraft is still plugging away after more than 30 years.

Voyager 1 is now the farthest man-made object from earth. It was launched in 1977 and it amazingly still receives power from its electrical generators that allow it to keep communicating with earth until at least 2025.  From wikipedia:  “The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram (1,592 lb) robotic space probe of the outer Solar System and beyond, launched September 5, 1977. It still receives commands from, and transmits information to Earth, currently pursuing its extended mission to locate and study the boundaries of the Solar System, including the Kuiper belt and beyond. Its original mission was to visit Jupiter and Saturn; and it was the first probe to provide detailed images of the moons of these planets.”

We recently returned from a wonderful trip to Puerto Vallarta. It’s been about 20 years since either one of us last visited Mexico and we hope to not take so long to re-visit. Alaska Airlines has a direct flight from Seattle to PV. We did survive the airport taxi and timeshare sharks in the airport by pretty much walking quickly through and looking straight ahead and saying “No!” The hotel that we stayed in was called Velas Vallarta and we had a room on the 6th floor that looked down on lush gardens and pools. Great service, good food, nice rooms, beautiful swimming pools with great poolside service, and our hotel was within walking distance of the Marina for some great dining. We took two excursions during our stay – one on land, and one by sea. The land excursion was to Los Veranos Canopy Tour to enjoy 4 miles of ziplines (14 ziplines in total) through the forest canopy. The other excursion was taking a sailing trip to Las Marietas Islands National Park for birdwatching and snorkeling. We boarded the 54′ Cutter boat “Tinuviel” that took 14 passengers out to the islands. We had dolphins following our boat and when we arrived at the islands we even spotted a few rare Blue-footed Booby Birds. I can’t speak highly enough of the great service, the friendly captain and deckhands as well as the food and drinks that were included. We booked through Vallarta Discovery excursions and highly recommend them.

Sailing to Las Marietas Islands to snorkel and bird watch

View from our balcony at Velas Vallarta

The Malecon boardwalk in downtown Puerta Vallarta

Man balancing rocks on the beach at the Malecon

View of one of the three pools at our resort

Some of the guides resting after our zipline canopy tour.

Sand carvings along the beach at the Malecon

Bizarre sculptures along the Malecon boardwalk

Flea market in downtown Puerto Vallarta

Just a few of us posing

Waiting for breakfast at a cafe at the Marina

I need to write here more often but life has it’s way of diverting my energies elsewhere. I’ll post some images of our zip line adventure in a forest canopy soon.

Project Gutenberg – A library of 17000 free downloadable ebooks whose copyright has expired in the USA Book listings.

Okay, I own a lot plethora of computer games that I’ve enjoyed over the years. I’ve also been getting a lot of mileage out of my favorite game of all time “Thief”. It’s going on 10 years now since I started playing this game and the Thief community over at TTLG.com has a captive audience and churns out fan missions like crazy, and the best part of all – they are all free! In the meantime, I really miss playing my favorite genre which is RPG’s so I recently bought myself a new one called “The Witcher” that is really good so far. If you don’t mind adult content, you can sink quite a bit of time into this game with it’s innovative content, unique GUI interface, and non-linear gameplay.

My parents have a Springer Spaniel named Maggie who lives up to her breed and springs like a deer.  One of these days I’ll photograph her mid-spring and post it here.  In the meantime, here she is bouncing around our yard.