Bob Wertz

Many years ago, I was having coffee with a successful designer. We were discussing career challenges and he just offhandedly commented “I just don’t love design any more. In fact, I’m thinking about winding down my business.” I was still a pretty young and ambitious designer and left the meeting stunned. How could a successful designer get to this point?

Fast forward to about six months ago. My oldest is in college and took a digital art class… basically the first design class. She did really well and thought about changing her major to graphic design, but she didn’t. “I don’t want to do what you do.” In fact, all of my kids are incredibly artistic, and none of them want to be designers. I shared this observation to my wife, who matter of factly commented “You don’t love design. You haven’t for a long time. They’ve watched you. Why would...

Posts in the “Then” category were originally shared on my “Now” page.

This week provided confirmation of how bad Hurricane Helene devastated the people and places that we love in Asheville. We’ve heard from all of our friends and they are fine, but the destruction is almost incomprehensible. Asheville is a 2 hour drive from our house, and we make day trips up there all the time. Many of the stores, restaurants and spots we visit are quite simply gone. Lutheridge — a camp very special to my family — is okay, but with a lot of damage. The pen store in Biltmore Village is destroyed. So is the little bakery next door with the amazing Ginger cookies and the restaurant across the street with the pea salad that my wife loves. It’s hard to process all the loss.

Feels

• Off balance. Last week was a dance of improvisation. School...
  Continue Reading →

Just found out that my favorite pen store in Asheville, Origami Ink, was completely destroyed in the flood. I assumed that was the case because they were located in Biltmore Village, but the owners posted an update today confirming the sad news. Such nice people. I’m devastated for them.

It’s funny to see how a post shows up when crossposting. In Micro.Blog, it’s a link with some tiny thumbnails. In Bluesky, a link with all four images. In Threads, a link with a preview, but the featured image is my Micro.Blog fish avatar.

My dad texted me one afternoon that he’d found some fountain pens at a local auction and asked if I wanted to bid on them. He’s shared links in the past and I’ve never seen anything that looked interesting. From the look of the pictures, most of the listings looked well worn. But one of the pens was actually in the original packaging — a Parker 25B. It was impossible to tell what condition the pen was in, but I decided to take a shot on it. Dad placed a $7 bid. And won.¹

When I got the pen, it was in great shape. The package contained two dried up ink cartridges and a squeeze converter.² The pen had been used — there was dried up black ink in the feed — but I was able to clean it up fairly easily. I...

In general, I avoid Twitter and Facebook. But Twitter is still useful for live sports. And Facebook is useful for checking on people after natural disasters.

Really enjoyed The Armageddon Protocol by Dan Moren. 📚

Posts in the “Then” category were originally shared on my “Now” page.

Hurricane Helene hit us in Columbia, South Carolina this week. Early Friday morning, we lost power with 60+ mph wind gusts. Trees down everywhere. In Columbia, we weren’t prepared for a storm of this magnitude. We got power back 12 hours later, but many people in the area are still without power.

As bad as it was here, it was much, much worse two hours north in Asheville. Western North Carolina is devastated. Asheville is in many ways a second home and it’s heartbreaking to see the devastation and flooding.

Feels

• Grateful that our family is fine, our house is undamaged, and we have power.
• Heartbroken for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.
• Thankful for the linemen who are working to restore power. (There were five trucks in the front of our neighborhood earlier.)

Health

• I wasn’t particularly rigid with my diet while...
  Continue Reading →

Expected Helene to be bad, but we don’t normally get hit this hard in Columbia. Lots of trees down and power outages across South Carolina.

For several reasons, I decided to work from home today. I know that many (most?) people love it, but I really, really don’t enjoy working from home.