Argh, food poisoning sucks

 Not quite sure how it happened, but I got food poisoning after getting out of the hospital on Tuesday. I suspect it's on Friday, when I was out walking about and picked up some snacks and dimsum, probably the snack, a mix of peanuts, edamame, and dried bait fish. My stomach started spasming couple hours later, threw up 2-3 times, ended up with NO food for 24 hours. Basically subsisted on candy and chocolate. What's worse somehow EVERY ache on my body came back, and since I can't keep any food down, no medicine would go down either. Tried taking Acetaminophen, came right back out an hour later. So it's double or triple the suffering. I count it as lesser blessing I didn't shat in my bed, but it was close. 

On the other hand, the edema (fluid retention) in my calf is mostly gone. There's still some around my feet and ankles, but those would go down with time, I suspect. 

It's now Sunday morning, and the symptoms from the food poisoning have mostly subsided. Got some oatmeal flavored with a bit of maple syrup. I think I'll do with half a cup for now. 

Now some fountain pen talk. 

One of the major criticisms for Chinese fountain pens is that they are very often... "homages" of western pens, or they are of very low quality with horrible tips. Part of it is they are often cheap as dirt compared to Western pens. You can often find full metal Chinese fountain pens for less than $5 on Chinese sites on Aliexpress, Temu, and so on. The cheapest fountain pens outside of China you'll find are disposable fountain pens like Pilot Varsity. Next step up you're looking at Platinum Preppy, at about $6-7, which is, of course, plastic. Basically, you're not going to find anything more "high-class" with metal body until you hit the $20-25 range, such as the Pilot Metropolitan, or Lamy AL-Star (which is very lightweight aluminum and costs $40-60 unless you shop around, and looks exactly like its cheaper cousin, the resin-based Lamy Safari, which is 30-40)

As I said, you can get a very nice full metal WEIGHTY Chinese fountain pen, directly from China, for a pittance. I bought the Hero A11 for under $5 off Temu, and it writes pretty darn well, if you ask me, even compared to the favorites like Lamy. It comes with its own piston filler, not sure if it's a converter or not, I didn't try to disassemble it yet. Just filled it with ink and started writing. 

I got a couple more pens in my next shipment from Temu, so stay tuned. One's a Jinhou "porcelain art" special, then one with what looks like a fude nib, and finally a retractable nib pen, which was apparently all the rage in China. The Jinhou is about $8, and the other are about $2 each. We shall see if they are garbage or not next week.