daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
I bought a couple of new inks from JetPens recently. I’d been having issues with my old Iroshizuku Chiku-rin ink being too wet and bleeding through the Tomoe River paper in my Hobonichi. A little research pointed me toward Diamine Meadow (green) and Asa Blue, which run drier and suit Tomoe River paper much better. I tried them out using my Pilot Metropolitans (F and M nibs), and they perform wonderfully with no bleed-through at all. So glad I made the switch! 🖋️✨
Despite loving stationery and pens, it’s pretty rare for me to actually use up a full pen cartridge! Today my Zento Signature finally ran out of ink. It makes sense, though – it’s my daily go-to pen for writing a page of Morning Pages, and the 0.7 mm cartridge I use lays down plenty of ink. I swapped in a fresh cartridge, so I’m officially back in business! 🖊️📖
Today started off with a bit of rain, but the cloudy skies eventually left and a bright sun appeared. I was happy to be able to use three of my stamps in the Hobonichi today! ☀️📖
I didn’t bring my Canon Selphy photo printer to Japan with me, so now I’ve got over 30 photos to print, cut, and glue into my Hobonichi. Once I catch up, I can finally close the book on my A6 Hobonichi (pun intended) since I switched to my A5 Avec Cousin for the rest of 2026. Next time I take a long trip to Japan, I think I’ll just bring the printer along. It’s not too big, and it weighs almost nothing, so it should be an easy addition to the bag. 🧳
I’ve been using the Hobonichi Cousin Avec for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really enjoying the bigger size. My little A6 techo is compact and cute, but the A5 is just a better writing experience overall. The pages lie flatter, so I can use my Clampy, and I get to write at my normal size instead of concentrating on keeping my letters tiny. There are still spots where small writing is a must, like the daily timeline in the photo, but even there I’ve got twice the space to work with. And on the free-writing pages, I can just write without worrying about size at all. As a bonus, I’ve got more room to print bigger photos too. Overall, I’m happy with the mid-year switch to the Avec ✏️
Three months into my Hobonichi Techo A6 and still really enjoying it. 📓
Writing small has been a challenge, but I’ve slowed down and started paying more attention to how I form my letters. It’s a different kind of writing than my morning pages, which stay big and loose since that’s all about getting thoughts down fast.
The slow, deliberate approach has been a nice surprise. Turns out I like it a lot.
I finally settled into a journaling layout that feels right. 📓 The left side tracks the day’s timeline, the right side gets a few short notes. Top left is for the day’s high and low temps, and top right has a checklist for tracking my language learning.
I keep tweaking things here and there, adding icons with a stencil or pasting in little bits of ephemera. I’m having a lot of fun with it!
