Editing The Pen Addict 280/transcript (section)

== Field Diary ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Now in refill, um, this week you, you showed off your, uh, like a little field diary that you, you've been taking you and the kids had actually been doing during the trip, which was really fun.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I always wanted to do something like that. Like that's that idea that's always in my head, but never acted on. And I never really have the opportunity when I travel to pen shows because it's worked pretty much 24 seven from the time I land to the time I take off again. And there's not too much outside of the pen show stuff. So that works great for like the photo diary stuff. This time I had time with the family since the kids were out of school that week, you know, I took them to Chicago and we had a few days to see the site, see the city. So I wanted to capture that in a notebook. So I of course took a little field notes, drink local. It was the, uh, I think that one's called the pale lager.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't have it right in front of me, but I believe that was a popular one at the, uh, at the field note shop. So like we'd mentioned, we had like, um, there was a, like a meetup, uh, open house afterwards, but we're all kind of walking around looking at stuff. I didn't realize that like they, they sell some rare additions in the store. Like if they have some, they, they sell them and like, they had both the drink locals in there and there was a bunch of really interesting additions floating around. Nothing mega rare.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Like fire spotter, traveling salesman, drink local, those were the highlights.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I reckon that's maybe as far back as they go. I was very surprised to actually see that they had them in there. Um, but yeah, I actually, I actually asked Jim, like, how do you price these? Like, how do you work out the prices? And he was just like, you know, we see what they go for online and we try and give them a fair price. Like, yeah, we don't, we're not looking to make a ton of money, but we don't want to sell it for a price that somebody could then just go and flip it, which I thought was like a really good way of explaining how they do that. But yeah, they do have some rare ones there. But anyway, so you were using a drink local for your, for your diary.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. I thought that was a good, a good trip notebook. And I tried to document as much as I can of our trip. And then when I got done, I ended up, I scanned it all in and created one big PDF file of just my notes on the trip. You know, like I'd recap a day, you know, it wasn't all, a lot of it was captured a day, day after, because I don't always have time that day to write down the things I'm actually doing live at the time. And then I threw in a little sketches, threw in a few receipts or tickets from the places we went. So now I have this little book that's just going to sit there and it's just going to be like a memory book of Chicago. So if we ever like break out, you know, start looking at the pictures, we can go get this book and read these stories about these things we did. So I was really, that turned out as about as good as I could have expected. I think for me, at least the way I capture things, right? It's very straightforward. You know, there's not, it's kind of no frills, but that's how I do things. So it worked out well for me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So yeah, I would like to do more. I like to do more of that. It's just having that opportunity to like commit to doing it. That's always the challenge.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So what were you doing? Like sitting down in the evening in the hotel room and writing it down?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Like almost always, or the next morning, like while everyone's getting ready, getting up. And then a few times I was able to do it like after we did something, if we were waiting around for a ride or something like that. But most of the time I just tried to do it in our down times in the hotel room because I was too busy having fun when we were, you know, out and about eating or visiting or walking.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, so like doing it for a few days, could you not see something like this being like a regular practice? You know, this is what people do. It's just journaling, right? Like this is it.