Monday Morning Surprise

Imagine my Monday morning joy when I visited The Missive Maven's blog and saw this:

It's the postcard I sent to her last April!!! (Click photo to enlarge.)

Yes, I sent The Missive Maven a postcard in late April after a blog hopping spree brought me to her site. Of course I didn't tell her I'll be sending her a postcard. *Grin.* To my suprise, the postcard arrived in Rhode Island the first week of May. Surprised because it got there a lot faster than the other postcards I've sent to US addresses in the past. The Missive Maven is a blog dedicated to snail-mail and letter-writing. The blog owner calls herself The Missive Maven, from New Port, Rhode Island. She posts photos of the letters she wrote and received, and urges everyone to GO WRITE A LETTER! And so I sent her a postcard.

Here's what she wrote about it:

"A blog reader sent me this postcard of a funky old church from the Philippines. Though I am not much on old churches (or any churches, for that matter), this is a really lovely building. The other side was the rockin' side, though."

The rockin' side she's pointing to is the other side of the postcard where I wrote my short note to her. (Click photo to enlarge.)


Here's what she said:

"I don't know how I hadn't managed to see Parker Quink Ruby fountain pen ink before, but I hadn't. Gorgeous stuff! Wow. I have a couple Parker Vectors -- could it look that fantastic in mine?"

Aw, what a complement. For The Missive Maven to say that about my lowly Parker Vector (but it's white!), I'm truly elated. Now for a bit of info, the ink I called Parker Quink Ruby is part of Parker's Penman ink series, and not Quink -- apologies for the mistake. I got several of these ink cartridges -- Ruby, Emerald, and Mocha -- all from different National Bookstore branches around Manila. The discontinued Penman series have five colors: Ebony, Emerald, Mocha, Ruby, and Sapphire. I'm lucky enough to get hold of three in cartridges only, though. Here in my part of the world, getting hold of non-black, non-blue, and non-blue/black ink is close to impossible so getting the cartridges is just as lucky.

The Penman ink cartridges I got: Mocha, Ruby, and Emerald. (Click photo to enlarge.)

It was only recently that I realized these are not Quink inks, but Penman inks. The Penman logo went by completely unnoticed by my detail-obssessed eyes. *Winks.* Ruby, which I first used on my white Parker Vector and later on my white Schneider Base, is very saturated and I was scared it might cause some serious clogging problems later on. Then again, with a strict rule of cleaning and flushing with every ink/cartridge change, the beauty of this ink, its unique and incomparable redness is just... priceless. As priceless as the review post by The Missive Maven. Thanks, Missive Maven!