Drawing The Line - 5

It is clear that the Pilot Easy Touch ball point pen I have been using for my Line Around The World Project is going to fail me. It only has a few hundred feet worth of ink left in it. This means that it will soon be time to write this Project off as another of my brilliant ideas that failed for some reason beyond my control.

As an aside, here is an idea I came up with today while I was in the shower. Imagine a company that will store online all of the memories that a person would like to have in a future life. Say that you put a 1000 bucks in a bank account before dying. Instead of your heirs receiving and living it up with the windfall, you keep it secret and store all of the information you will need to collect it if you are reincarnated. The company, for a fee collected in advance, will keep the information safe and available to the new you. If it takes a century or two to find it, all the better, for the interest will swell the account to a huge sum. Of course there are some technical difficulties to work out, but there the idea is for anyone that wants to run with it.

Back to my Line, just when it seemed doomed, a new product arrived on the market in time to save the Project. Noodler's has produced a roller ball piston filled pen called the Nib Creeper. Here is a picture of one I ordered:

This pen will allow me to carry on with the Line Around The World Project using a small number of pens. Instead of using 50,000 or more regular ball point pens, I can use this refillable one and a few hundred bottles of fountain pen ink. I have already done some scientific testing with this pen and discovered that one load of ink will draw a line 3,266 feet long, or 0.62 of a mile. That is as far as the Pilot ball point. According to the folks at Noodler's it has been specially designed to be low maintenance. It is possible to purchase replacement nibs for it at a cost of 2 per dollar.

I have purchased two of these pens. One as the main line pen, and the other as an emergency backup pen. Thinking ahead I also purchased two different inks from Noodler's Polar inks series. These inks are mostly water proof and will supposedly not freeze up in winter conditions. Hopefully these will work in Arctic conditions. That will be the true test. The colors I'm testing now are Polar Black and Polar Blue.

Armed with this new writing instrument and ink I am well prepared to face the rigors of the project and will carry on.

Tomorrow is a day off, but the next page of my maze will be posted on Monday.

Jonathan