Favourite pencil found

A while ago I was moaning that I'd lost my favourite pencil. I really had lost all hope of it turning up somewhere. But I shouldn't have been so pessimistic. Yesterday, I found it in one of those dreaded bowls that always mysteriously collect paper clips, coins, elastic bands and... my pencil!

 I like it because it is nice and thick, easy to hold, and the tip wears down more slowly than other pencils. Those of you who went to a white school in the bad old apartheid days may recognise it, every art classroom had masses of them. The days of government-issue school art supplies are over, so I don't have much hope of replacing it when it's finally reduced to a milimetre-long stub. Though I am sure there are boxes of them lurking in the back of some dusty artroom cupboard somewhere out there - not enough incentive to get me back to school though!

So what exactly am I up to here?

I don't exactly know, which I guess is the point. I've got a pile of filled sketchbooks taking up space in our study-studio-guestroom, so I thought I would try and make of what I've been scribbling over the last few years.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I've even put labels on the spines with dates. This must be the latent librarian in me coming out. I've dicovered though that indexing only helps if you actually arrange them on a shelf properly in the right order - ha!