who only by moving can balance

I was linked, some time ago, to the Galen Leather writing box, a portable briefcase-slash-desk Thing made out of wood.

I have also been idly contemplating (i) the fact that I have been keeping hand-written notebooks of one kind or another pretty much continuously (albeit with variations in intensity of use) for... over half my life; (ii) while A continues to work from home, I am mostly working from the sofa, with the result that a good half of our very large sofa is covered with highlighters and seeds and printouts of papers and my notebooks various, and I have to go fishing for my pens and pencils down the back of the sofa cushions several times a day; (iii) my absolutely pointless and deeply impractical (at least in the current house) craving for a bureau (in the writing-desk sense); and (iv) my nebulous desire to get... Something... that is solid and tangible and useful and an indulgence as a reward for Finishing The Thesis.

So this afternoon I went hunting and found the term "writing slope" and disappeared in a pile of Etsy tabs and, you know, I'm still not convinced this is actually a thing I want to do but it was very pleasant to spend an afternoon staring at rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.


Not unrelatedly, I also abruptly decided that the Himmelsscheibe von Nebra [wikipedia (en) | Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte] would be amazing as a notebook cover, and in particular could slot almost seamlessly into the Archer&Olive line (I am thinking, particularly, of the bee)...

... which tangented merrily off into:

(1) German copyright law (see the wikipedia page section Legal Issues for copyright and trademark litigation over an artefact that is three to four thousand years old), the upshot of which is "probably I'm not getting it on a fancy notebook until at least 2027", and

(2) when Archer&Olive say "We’re Female Owned, 100% Vegan, and all of our products come with environmentally responsible packing", they mean "A portion of sales from [the Pride collection] will be donated to the Black Trans Travel Fund"! So that's lovely.