Jennifer St. Clair's Blog

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Fountain Pen Revolution Darjeeling

To be honest, the biggest drawback of these pens is the smell. 
I’ve had these two pens since 2018 and they still hold faint odor. If you can get past the smell of the plastic, they’re actually quite nice pens, comfortable to hold and solid feeling. 
They can be converted to eyedroppers, which means they hold a lot of ink. 
The FPR nibs are decent, my green Darjeeling has a fine nib and my demonstrator has a semi-flex nib. I feel that the nibs are fairly wet, although I don’t get a lot of featherin...

Fountain Pens

I thought that maybe I’d start up my blog again, perhaps with fountain pen reviews since I use fountain pens every day to write my books. I’m a bit picky about fountain pens, and own quite a few, so I’d have plenty to review without buying any others right away. At least that would give me something to use this space for, so we’ll see if I can keep it up. 

Testing, testing

Testing, testing

Basix by Staub Enameled Cast Iron Cookware

Basix by Staub Enameled Cast Iron Cookware
A few years ago, I found a small enameled cast iron dutch oven on Ebay for a really nice price. It was only marked "Made in France", and I had no idea who had made it until I came across another one that had the paperwork still with it, identifying it as a Basix by Staub, a line of inexpensive dutch ovens brought out by QVC in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Staub, of course, is a well-known manufacturer of lovely and practically indestructible enameled cast...

Not that many years ago, I updated this blog almost every...

Not that many years ago, I updated this blog almost every day.

It's more that I felt I had to have a record that I was actually accomplishing something in my life, however small, and a a record of the weather, the garden, and my life in general. Not necessarily for an audience, but more for me to go back and read later.

Ah, I'd be able to say, I planted the black currant bush in 2007, and that was the year of the drought. I lost everything I planted except one black currant bush, which is still...

Radio Silence

It's June! Already. And I haven't updated here since March, wow. I keep meaning to update, and then something comes up, and I forget again. Repeat as necessary.

I've been busy outside, though; planting the garden and such; spring is my busiest time of year, after all. And although we've not yet planted Mom and Dad's garden, that's next on the list, along with picking currants and raspberries, since they are beginning to ripen.

So pretty much the rest of June will also be busy. And it will proba...

Spring has sprung, at least I hope it stays around. We're...

Spring has sprung, at least I hope it stays around. We're into Mud Season now, which means rain and well, mud. I did get to work outside a bit yesterday, building a new raised bed for the potatoes out back and cleaning up a bit--cutting down honeysuckle, for the most part. The bunny--Cinnamon--is outside now, and that makes me happy. :)

I've also been working on finishing the next book in the Beth Hill series. I've been writing it for what seems like aeons; on and off for the past four years,...

It occurs to me, perhaps not for the first time, that if ...

It occurs to me, perhaps not for the first time, that if you concentrate on 'living your dream' and 'not settling for less' and 'taking that chance' and not 'blooming where you're planted', you're actually losing out on the present by focusing so thoroughly on the future that you miss the entire process of becoming what you already know you are.

You don't need outside validation. You only need to believe in it yourself, whatever 'it' may be.
I have no patience for people who are so focused on t...