Just in case my niece and her friends can’t entertain themselves, I’ve been enlisted to draw some animals for a birthday party game.

Is it sad that I’ve gone into the Apple Store four times just to play with the iPad Pro and its heavily-backordered “Pencil” stylus? It’s frustrating that I can’t walk out the door with it. I mean, I could try, but I’d probably end up at the wrong end of an iTazer.

The demo models don’t even have the drawing apps I want to use (like Procreate), but I can already tell that this hunk of tech is the next-generation Wacom Cintiq I’ve always wanted. The huge advantage of the Cintiq is that you can hook it up to a desktop PC, or even get one that has a PC built-in. This allows you to use it with professional software like Photoshop and Illustrator.

But there are a few disadvantages: Even the sleekest Cintiq weighs over twice as much as the iPad (3.75 lbs vs. 1.57). The screen is objectively worse (you can–gasp–see the pixels!), and there’s a noticeable gap between the LCD and the surface of the glass. Somehow, Apple has minimized this gap on their Retina displays, and the upshot is that drawing on the iPad Pro feels a lot more like putting pencil to paper.

But surely, you think to yourself, Mark can’t be in the target market for a creative appliance christened “Pro”. After all, the fact he was paid $10 to draw a guy’s bulldog (not a euphemism) doesn’t make him a professional artist!

Well, you’re right, but I still think Apple truly had people like me in mind when designing this thing. Plus “iPad Pro” has a nicer ring to it than “iPad fer Dorks.”

Off to Southern California in a couple days to see my pal and his gal, who are much cuter in real life, get hitched.

A fun side effect of my two New Jersey sketching sojourns is that my pen and ink work is now immortalized in the album liner notes of a folk band called Midland Uprising. If you purchase their new album Awake For Days, you will be forced to look at my hastily-formed drawing whilst learning new things about each of their catchy tracks.

It took me a while to figure this out, but the splashes of color on the front cover are actually from my earlier sketch of musician Brian Yost as he performed with his other band Leaf Pile in Jersey City.

Binge-watching HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and sketching my impression of Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks.