1.5 Highlighters a Week

I like Foray highlighters, the kind with the liquid ink that you can see in the barrel. The Foray highlighter has a bright, even line that doesn't bleed through the paper too much. It can smear a bit if I'm not careful, but at least it doesn't bleed through. Since I print everything double-sided, that's important.

So the second week of school, as I was merrily reading about Democracy in Latin America and highlighting away (but not too much, of course--it's not like I'm coloring the pages yellow) I noticed that my lines were getting paler. Is it the light? I wondered... But no. After several pages I finally realized that the pen's reservoir was empty. I've run out of ink.

How odd, I thought to myself. I thought that pen was new. I scrounged up an old highlighter (and I mean old--probably five or six years old) and used that for the rest of the evening, although it was nearly dry.

The next day I borrowed a highlighter from work. The ones we have at work are not Foray--they're Hi-Liter brand, and are "SmearSafe". Well, they may not smear, but they definitely bleed. They're also not very bright--sometimes I had trouble telling which lines I had highlighted on a page, and which lines were highlighted on the other side of the sheet and had bled through. How ridiculous is that? The pen was also not very ergonomic, and for some reason I had a hard time telling which way the point of the pen was facing--to make a thin or thick line--unless I looked at it carefully (very annoying when you're reading and highlighting frequently).

So I went and bought a box of 10 Foray highlighters. I've already run another pen dry, and I figure I'm going at a rate of about one pen every week or 10 days. Talk about a lot of ink!

My first test is Saturday. I'll be referencing all those highlighted pages then--wish me luck!