I love writ­ing. As in, tak­ing a pen out and drag­ging it across a piece of paper. It’s a dying art.

Paper­mate recently released their InkJoy series of pens. I bought a 6-pack (well, 4) and love the writ­ing plea­sure this pen pro­vides. It glides across the page unlike any­thing else I’ve tried.

It’s a ball­point, so the ink is maybe more per­ma­nent than a gel pen’s. And it just glides more smoothly than a gel pen ever could.

Oh — my color of choice is blue — peo­ple are more prone to believe it’s real. (That line of think­ing goes back to the xerox days — when black always meant a copy.)

Finally, no dis­clo­sure needed. I bought these with my own money. Office Depot adver­tized them, and the ad con­vinced me to give them a try. I’m glad I did.

Are you run­ning out of energy at about 10 am? Does that lull hit around 3 pm?

I found a good, healthy solu­tion — the Rise Bar.

I’ll start with my dis­clo­sure — Rise Bar was a spon­sor of Pod­Camp Den­ver, the event I led last week­end. So I had the oppor­tu­nity to try sev­eral fla­vors. Every kind I tried was tasty. (I wasn’t able to try all 12 dif­fer­ent flavors.)

Rise Bar has a unique twist on giv­ing you healthy energy — dif­fer­ent bars are designed for dif­fer­ent times of the day.

My favorite part about Rise Bars is that the ingre­di­ents are all healthy. And they’re proud enough about what’s in each bar to make the type very vis­i­ble! (See the photo.)

My wife has a gluten intol­er­ance. All of them are gluten-free.

All the ingre­di­ents are organic. I used to be skep­ti­cal about the value of organic food, but when I eat it instead of reg­u­lar food, I can actu­ally tell the dif­fer­ence in how I feel. (I’m not say­ing that I have con­verted com­pletely to eat­ing organic food; but I eat it when I can.)

My friend Tim can enjoy them with a clean con­science — the Energy+ Bars are vegan friendly.

Lest you think I am totally rav­ingly pos­i­tive about them, I have to admit that I got a few for my kids, and they didn’t like them very much. (I think their taste buds are pretty slanted toward over sweet­ness. I can’t stand the break­fast cere­als they like.)

So visit Rise Bar’s site. You can order online or they have a store loca­tor. And if there’s not a store near you, they have a let­ter you can print out to take to your gro­cery store. Then they can eas­ily stock Rise Bars!