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Does anyone else happen to have one of these neat pocket pens, made by the cigar accessory company Xikar? This is a tiny pen, close in length to a Fisher Bullet, yet quite a bit slimmer. This version has a Redwood barrel section, and was available at one time in another variety of wood. It is currently not listed by Xikar, and I found only one other site that advertised it at one time. It uses any Parker-style refill, and came in a decent cardboard box. It's a shelf queen for me, since i have many, many other pens that are more practical for daily writing. But it is nicely made and I was lucky enough to get this one as a Christmas gift maybe 4-5 years ago. Any other experiences with this Xikar or similar pens in their collections?

My ballpoints and rollerballs get used rarely these days, but I do keep track of them. I have a number of Parker Jotters, and other pens which take that style of refill; most of those have either Fisher Space Pen or gel refills in them. The gel refills are either Monteverdes or this style of Parker. I opened up a couple of my Jotters yesterday to see what refills were in them. One had a blue Parker gel as in the above link. The refill was covered with slime, sort of like silicone grease. It was all over the entire refill. I tested, and it was still writing just fine apparently, but I tossed the refill anyway, not knowing what it might do next. Today, I remembered that I had another Jotter with a red Parker gel refill in a cup on my desk. I opened it up, and sure enough, the back end, away from the point, was greasy with the same sort of substance. It hadn't sweated as badly, and there was none at the business end of the pen. I decided to leave it in there for now. My guess is that some of the gel is separated from the ink and is bleeding out. I just wonder if this is a common thing that other people have noticed. Could it be doing this because my pens are used so rarely? Has anybody noticed this with other brands of gel refill? The Monteverde refills that I had in pens were not doing this.