More faffing about with notebooks

I have ordered another fauxdori from the same seller, one that fits standard notebooks like Moleskine Cahiers and Field Notes without having to cut them down.  If I have to cut down every notebook I use in the passport-sized fauxdori, I’ll wind up not using it anyway.  Of course, I was an idiot and got my name on it so I can’t return it…  No name on the pocket-sized one I just ordered, though.  It’s the same purple, though, and the same leather.  Also, I bought the first one on sale for $10 off, and got the second one for 30% off because I asked if I could get a discount as a repeat customer.  (I was expecting maybe 10%, not 30%, but I’m certainly not going to argue with a better deal.)

What I’m going to do with the new one: put a Field Notes book in the front, for my daily lists and notes, and a Volant in the back for a journal because it’s got more pages.  I have enough beads and elastic to make more bookmarks, and my pen clip is easily moved to the new notebook.  So it will be identical except for being an inch taller.  Perfect.

With the discount I was able to get one for the Naiad, too, since she has become a Field Notes fan.  I blame myself, for playing her episodes of the Pen Addict podcast.  They mention Field Notes a lot, and she bought herself a set to try out.  She’s never been into fancy notebooks before, and seems to be hooked now.  I’m turning her into a total stationery junkie.  It’s awesome.  I’m afflicting the Valkyrie with a similar disease.  She spent a couple of hours personalizing her Midori passport with cute stickers and washi tape, making the refill books super cute so they’re more fun to use, and she is using Pilot Juice gel pens in them.  I am an evil enabler and proud of it!

 

Fauxdori, day two

I discovered that I really, really hate the Midori brand refill paper.  I went to the local Books-A-Million to see if they had any pocket-sized Moleskine Volants, with the intention of taking them to Office Depot afterwards to have the bottom inch of the Volants cut off so I’d have fauxdori-sized notebooks that I liked better.  I hate BAM, but they’re the only bookstore in town.  They had lots of classic Moleskines but the only Volants were the extra-smalls.  They had some other small notebooks on sale, Miro utility notebooks and Piccadilly memo books.  I got one two-pack of each (on clearance for $3) to try out.  Hated them both.  Went to Office Depot to see how the cutting-down procedure went and the pricing.  I got the four notebooks chopped down for $0.81 and two minutes of my time.  Still didn’t like them, though.

I decided late last night to try cutting down two of my Moleskine Cahiers, since I wasn’t using them anyway.  I used kitchen shears, and the result was a ragged mess.

The weird thing is that I really like the way the ragged edges look.  Maybe I’m odd, and I will be getting the Volants I ordered cut down at Office Depot to use when I fill up the Cahiers, but I really love the torn up edging on these.  They give them character.

Book #1 is to-do lists and notes.  I have my daily appointments-and-tasks layout on the right page, and on the left page I have a Post-It note (one of the kind that’s sticky all over, so it doesn’t fall out) of tasks I need to do that aren’t date-specific.  That way I’m not having to re-copy tasks from one date to the next.  I can just move the sticky note every day until all the tasks on it are done and I start a new one.  I’d take a picture of my current daily page but it’s got some personal stuff on it I don’t want to share.

Book #2 is my attempt at journaling in my fauxdori.  I love the idea of being able to journal in my little book in addition to the planning stuff, but I’m not sure how well that’s going to go.  I tend to get paranoid easily, and there are some detachable pages in the Cahiers.  I’m worried that when the notebook has been filled and put aside it will lose some pages.  But I thought of a solution.  I have an iOS app called Turbo Scan that will let me take pictures and merge them into a PDF document.  The Cahiers are small enough that, when I finish a notebook, I can just turn it into a PDF and back it up into Dropbox.  Ta-dum!  No information loss.  I want to do that with my old journals, actually.  I should start on that, a few pages at a time, whenever I have a few minutes.  I would love to have “scans” of twenty years’ worth of journals.

So anyway, I’m digging my fauxdori.  The leather is a bit slicker than the official Midori covers, but I like that.  It means I can put it in and take it out of my front pants pocket without any friction. My wallet is quite thin, so it doesn’t cause a huge bulge.  It’s nice.  I did order a clip for my Kaweco Sport, because it’s turned out to be a great pocket pen and I want to clip it to the fauxdori closure elastic.  It needs a clip anyway, and the clips are only $3.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at with my new toy.  I mean notebook.  Heh.

 

 

Fauxdori DIY bookmarks

I bought some black elastic cord and some silver beads from Joanns, and now I have bookmarks.

I am pleased.

 

Fauxdori arrived!

It is purple!  And it has my name on it!

I have two Midori ruled notedbooks in it.

I am not a fan of the paper, however.  I need to find better notebooks, or make my own.

I love that it fits comfortably into the front pocket of my jeans without adding much bulk.  Hm.  Maybe in that case I should put up with the thinner paper…

 

Kaweco zombie, arise!

I decided to play with pocket pens this evening.  I was dreading flushing my long-dried-out Kaweco Sport Ice (red, EF nib), so I took out my never-used JetPens Chibi fountain pen.  It’s a cute little bright yellow thing that costs less than $3.  I’d never used it.  It came with a cartridge of Kaweco Pearl Black.  I snapped in the cartridge and tried writing with it.  It’s surprisingly nice for such a little thing, and puts down a much finer line than my Pilot Petit1 even though both are classified as F nibs.  I rather like it, but I’m not fond of the ink color.  It looks exactly like I was writing with a 0.7mm pencil lead or woodcase pencil.  Novel, but not something I really want to write with..

So I flushed the Kaweco and wrote three pages in my journal with it.  It’s a nice writer.  I have a Kaweco purple cartridge in it right now.  If that dries out, I have some cartridges of Private Reserve on the way from Goulet — Ebony Purple and Ebony Blue.  If one of them doesn’t keep the Kaweco nib wet, I’m going to give the pen to someone who can maybe get it working right.  I wanted the PR inks anyway so I had something other than Pearl Black for the Chibi.  But the Kaweco did wonderfully in my journal, and my hand didn’t ache after, so I’m hoping I can make it more reliable.  Lots of people swear by the Sport as a pocket pen, and they’re supposed to be incredibly dependable.  Maybe mine will be, too, with a little TLC.

Speaking of things drying up, I finally figured out what was squeaking on my spinning wheel and gave it the oiling it needed.  So I’m back to spinning quietly.  Many thanks to the Naiad for helping me figure out where the squeak was coming from.  It’s hard to stick my head down low enough to tell when I’m treadling, so I needed assistance!  Basically, there is a part of the wheel the manual didn’t tell me to lubricate.  Now it’s lubricated.  Yay for machine oil!

I have some finished BFL I need to skein and post pictures of.  Maybe I’ll do that in the morning…

 

How to make a notebook Quiver out of duck tape

Someone on a forum I’m on said that she wanted to buy a Quiver for her Moleskine.  A Quiver (the name brand) is a leather pen holder with an elastic band on the back so it can be put on the front on a notebook.  I just thought of a way to make one with duck tape.

Materials: duck tape, scissors, and a loop of elastic big enough to stretch around the cover of your notebook.  You want the band to only have to stretch a little bit, enough to hold it on.

1) Cut two identical pieces of tape long enough to loop around the notebook cover, but they needs to be about 3″ shorter than the circumference of the cover.

2) Put the two pieces of tape together, sticky side in, with the elastic in the middle.  The duck tape needs to be flat.  You’re forming a loop that has duck tape around most (but not all!) of the elastic.

3) Cut two identical pieces, 1″ shorter than the notebook height (or 1″ shorter than your pen, whichever).

4) Put the sticky sides together so you have one two-sided piece.

5) Lay two-sided tape lengthwise over center of longer tape. Put your pens in the middle to make sure you have enough from for them.

6) Tape with a fresh sideways piece over the quiver front and around the back of the longer piece.  You may need to cut some of the tape here to make it look nice.

You’re done!  Slip the loop on your notebook cover, pens facing out.  Duck tape comes in enough pretty colors/patterns that you can make it look however you want.

I haven’t tried this yet.  If you try it and it works, let me know.  If it doesn’t, let me know that too.  I’m curious.

 

I hate bullets.

I don’t like bulllets or checkboxes next to my to-do items.  I just cross them off as I finish them.  But this pin has simple icons that can be easily adapted for my NABJ without a whole bunch of drawing time.  Computer power symbol, simplified house, text balloon for phone, and location pin shape for errands.  Easy.

 

Google Calendar (or “oh, thank fucking god”)

Around ten p.m. I found out that I can completely ditch iCloud Calendar and use Google Calendar within the iOS calendar app instead.

Thank Fucking Christ.

The whole reason I started the paper planner was because iCloud kept losing my appointments.  I still want to do my NABJ for my daily tasks and notes, with the day’s appointments at the top as reminders, but I don’t have to write every single date-based thing in a weekly calendar anymore.  I would have used GCal right off the bat if I’d known I could sync natively with my iPhone.

I exported from iCloud, imported into GCal, and started sorting.  SO HAPPY.

 

More color-coding experiments, and a crap day

When I was getting tomorrow’s daily NABJ (not a bullet journal) page ready I realized that instead of taking up space with @context labels, I could color-code by context and then put symbols in for priority.  So I’m trying that.  Pink for phone, light blue for errands, purple for computer, and blue-black for home (since those are the colors in my Coleto for my calendar already).  Oh, and the blue-black is now being used for appointments and not just labels, starting today, because my MIL has a few doctor’s appointments coming up that she needs me to go with her for.

No picture today, because a) I feel lazy, and b) I’m embarrassed to show that some of tomorrow’s tasks look suspiciously like today’s tasks.  Which leads to a great segue, which is:

I was not in the best shape today.  I was up until 4am.  I just couldn’t get to sleep.  And then I set my alarm for nine this morning so I could get ready for a 10:30 visit to the GP’s office.  I vaguely remember getting up at 8:30 when the Naiad woke up, and then I remember waking up on the couch (sitting upright, under a blanket) at one in the afternoon.  I really crashed, apparently.  During the time I was asleep I rescheduled the GP appointment.  I know this because I changed my calendar, and I’ve been told I made the phone call with V&N in the room.  I have no memory of it.  At all.

I’ll put the rest of the day under a cut, because it’s about feeling morose and is pretty dull reading.  (Posting it for me, so I have a record of it.)  But I’ll share positive things now that I’ve written out the whiny parts: I got a ton of kitty snuggles, my fauxdori shipped today, and I had a nice time talking to my MIL at dinner.  So today hasn’t totally sucked.  And I feel better for thinking of positive things.  So I’m going to go pet a kitty and get some weaving done.  And smile more!

 

Hybrid GTD/Bullet Journal thing

I’ve not had anything pressing to do this evening, so I’ve been looking around for the best way to keep track of my tasks and appointments.  I think I’ve figured out something worth trying.

I like the Bullet Journal idea of keeping everything together on one page.  But I love the GTD way of dividing Next Actions by context.  So I decided to try this with a Moleskine Cahier:

I’m planning to put this Cahier into my fauxdori when it shows up.  Date at the top, then appointments (normally not more than 2-3 a day), then to-do items by context, then notes at the bottom and continuing onto the following page(s) as needed.  I will continue to use a weekly printed calendar to give an at-a-glance for appointments and events, but I want to start doing this daily page every night before bed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I use a Pilot Coleto multi-pen for my planner.  It’s become an integral part of my system, regardless of how I format my days or weeks.  I have a 3-color one and a 4-color one.  The 4-color is the one kept in the pen loop.

Purple: On the calendar, it’s my appointments.  On the to-do lists, that’s “if I have time” actions.
Pink: Calendar is the Valkyrie’s appointments.  To-do list is “urgent” actions.
Light blue: Calendar is the Naiad’s appointments.  To-do list is the “not urgent but do it today” actions.
Blue-black: for labels and notes.

The 3-color Coleto lives in my pen case, and is used just for marking the weekly calendar.  It doesn’t get used daily like the 4-color does.

Green: finance related (like the date a bill is due).
Brown: school dates (no reason, I just like brown).
Red: really important dates.  (I think; I haven’t actually used it for that yet. I may swap it for a pencil insert.)

If I had to pick up a different pen for every color, I’d never color-code anything.  But the Coletos makes it easy.  I love them.

So my fauxdori will have the Not-a-Bullet cahier, a Midori weekly calendar, and something to journal in.  Haven’t decided what yet…