If I had one wish, I'd wish for two

I'll kick off this blog entry with a brief, paraphrased recap of a conversation with a friend the other day:

Friend: "I've been thinking about trying my hand at drawing. I'll have to buy a sketch pad or something."

Me: "Really, you don't need much more than some plain white paper and a plain old #2 pencil.

Friend: "Well, the paper's not an issue. I could just take some from the printer. I don't have any pencils, though."

Me: "..."

Friend: "What?"

Me: "How can you NOT HAVE A PENCIL?!"

Friend: "Well, how many do you have just laying around?"

Me: (Insert crazed laughter here.)

A photo-tour of Lori's pencil cups:


Starts out innocently enough. Everyone has writing utensils in their coffee cup. Right?


Hey, I do serious business out by the kitchen phone. Like, scheduling and phone calls and, you know. Stuff.


Our stash of mechanical pencils and assorted erasers, resting quietly over the summer. Please note that they are cheap, disposable mechanical pencils. Because the only thing the Michael-Monster is harder on than #2 pencils with leads that shatter inside the pencil and thereafter refuse to sharpen correctly after being dropped on the floor a zillion times an hour is a regular mechanical pencil with pieces that jam when dropped on the floor a zillion times an hour. Looks like they'll need a restock when the school year starts. I wonder what other cool colors they might come in...


The kids' stash of other assorted pencils, highlighters, markers that ran away from their sets, and a couple hundred colored pencils that their mother fooled herself into thinking they might need so that she could scribble with them sometimes, too. And a pack of crayons that middle schoolers are highly unlikely to need, but that their mother cannot part with. I MIGHT USE THEM SOMEDAY. And I did give up the bucket o' broken crayon bits to the school when we cleaned out this spring. IT WAS HARD.


My stash of grown-up colored pencils, drawing pencils, and OMGprettycolorsmustbuy markers that usually lives in the dining room closet to the left of my desk. It was too dark to photograph them in there, so I hauled them out to my desk. (As a side note, the dining room closet has cedar shelves. Mmm. I could crawl in there and take a nap, some days. You know, if I could fit into a dining room closet.)

The above tour does not include the set of chunky Prismacolor markers stashed uh... somewhere in the basement because their fumes give me a headache. Or the two containers full of Crayola chunky markers that I just now remembered and am too lazy to go to the effort of photographing and uploading. Or the 24-count box of unsharpened pencils in the kitchen cupboard above my pencil cups there. (Joe-Bear uses those ones. He has fewer dropping issues than his little brother.) It also includes only pencils, pens, and markers. If you added in other assorted media... Well, there might be a few more photos.

As I told the aforementioned friend, office supply aisles and God-help-me art supply stores are dangerous, dangerous places for me.