It’s a truth universally acknowledged that most people going about their daily lives don’t worry much about the price of packing peanuts. They are an annoyance that manages to find their way to secret places you discover weeks after spilling them whilst opening a box.

Today, I was worried enough that I looked up the price. I was also worried about boxes and duct tape. This was from a blend of wishful thinking and immediate desperation.

What happened is today I sent out five orders. Those orders included four boxes with ink and a package with one pen I stopped using a while back. The pen was easy. It involved a small box and a padded envelope. The biggest boxes of ink were also easy as I had a couple spare boxes from previous shipments.

Everything after that got weird. First, I didn’t have any boxes that fit the orders and had to fabricate them from other boxes. This required a pocket knife, several swear words, forgetting the notion of “measure twice cut once” (my version is more like “cut, measure, swear, improvise”), and lots of duct tape. The result was a couple misshapen boxes with duct tape in odd places. Including duct tape to hold down folds in the duct tape.

As I got to the the last box, though, the supply of duct tape began to look disturbingly low. (More on that in a minute.)

As I packed, I used up a supply of packing peanuts i’d saved from an order I’d received from somewhere right after I started reselling ink. Unfortunately I used the last of it before I got to the last box.

The last box was an odd construction of bubble wrap, badly cut cardboard that required a lid and duct tape. The problem is, there didn’t seem to be enough duct tape but, luckily there was.

Now , as result of all that, I’m spending time looking up packing materials instead of looking up pens and ink. I’m not sure that’s an improvement.