2 posts tagged “life”

I got my new wall calendar in the mail today and my evening has been mostly full of me filling it out.
Sounds boring, but I mention it because I have discovered something about myself, want to share it, and I'm curious about the rest of you guys.

I don't fill out my calendar with a pen and then hang it up on the wall. I use a variety of cute stickers, gel pens, and hi-lighters. The calendar itself is a Rilakkuma (Relax Bear) wall calendar covered in Japanese-styled cute. January is pink, and the picture above the dates features Relax Bear sleeping, with his little bear pal dressed in a cow suit (no clue why), with a baby chick sleeping next to him. The date area is now covered with ninja stickers, lines of different-colored hi-lighter ink, and a lone sparkly blue dolphin sticker. Each Saturday has a black slash through it. Blue gel pen is prominent.

Why all the "ZOMG KAWAII!!" and sparkly-ness? It's because I need it.

I figured this out last year, and for my whole life I've always tried different things to keep me on schedule. Plain stickers with text on them? Nope. Writing with colored pens? No. Electronic computer calendars and phone alarms? Never worked. Calendars that we got free in the mail? I didn't look at them. Daily desk calendars? I wouldn't tear those off for months at a time. Day planners? I lose them.

But last year I decided to give day planners another try. I had always used the ones I got free in the mail from like funeral homes and car dealerships. You know, the ones with those plain textured vinyl covers with the name of whatever business embossed in gold lettering on them? Blargh. So I bought myself a cute black Japanese planner with a loop for a pen - Monokuro Boo, for anyone familiar with San-X stuff. I also bought a cute matching pen and picked up a Relax Bear wall calender, along with some random cute stickers "just for fun". (I love shopping at Kawaii Gifts)
We got home and I realized that I had a lot of stickers. I would normally snag them if I was walking through a craft shop and saw something that caught my eye. I mean, they're cute, they're like $2, so why not? I'll use them somewhere, right?  Wrong.  Most I did was put them on cards when I remembered I had them, and use them to decorate the edge of my computer monitor and my CPU tower.

I decided to use them to indicate birthdays on this cute calendar, and IT WORKED. 0_0 I didn't lose my day planner because not only had I paid money for it, but it was just so damn cute. Even the interior pages were covered in cute little piggies. The wall calendar was not only cute, but large and brightly-colored, so I had to notice it. I might ignore things in black ink, but stuff written with gel pens and hi-lighter accents? I always caught it.
Granted, I did lose the planner here and there, but I always found it again, and I used it. I found tiny mini-stickers with different symbols and little bears on it, just right for the main monthly pages, so I bought them and used them in the day planner, and I used it more because of it.

This year I'm tying the same thing, but different. I'm not really writing on the wall calendar - I'm sticking to color and sticker codes. I find that I glance at that, then I want to look at the planner for the fine details. I don't like writing details on the wall calendar; too hard to write neatly vertically, and my handwriting is atrocious to begin with.
My new planner is a Circa notebook with custom-printed pages, inside a pretty Celtic embossed-leather cover that Brian wasn't using. All it needs is a pen holder, but I'm not too worried about that - There's always a pen within arm's reach of it. I've got the little calendar event stickers tucked in the inside cover, right where I can find them. It's not cute, but it fits perfectly to the left of my keyboard. I like to touch the embossing, so I pick it up and use it.
I'm extending The Cute to the rest of my desk, and it's working. I've got a tiny kitty notepad instead of plain post-its, and I haven't lost it yet. I've got a plastic kitty folder to hold my monthly business receipts in, and that's working well so far to keep things neat on my desk.

So, that's what works for me. I'm wondering what you guys do. Are you still loking for a method? Have you gone through more than a few computer programs? Everyone learns differently and has their own scheduling needs. What works for you, or do you just not bother?

Tell me, I'm curious!
Crazed

My Resources:
Super-Cute Office Supplies - I'm sure there are other sites, but their physical shop is in here in Pittsburgh, so I love it.
Circa Notebooks - Expensive, but oh so nice.
Printable Calendar Pages, etc - FREE AND AWESOME. I love these guys.

No, seriously.  Good things and bad things have happened since I last posted here, and things keep coming at me left and right.

First off, the Bad -
Sanjuro died early December.  She had mammary cancer, and was clearly not very happy with life.  There wasn't anything we could do because her age, combined with the inherent frailty of rabbits in general for surgery, meant that her chances of survival were very low.  But she wanted to go, so we let her.  We were all really sad, but she's with Bun-Bun now, and happy.

Work-wise, I haven't been able to do much chainmaile at all in the second half of the year.  No big deal, because the Ren Fest's new contract was downright draconian and pretty much left me with no rights, so I didn't sign it.  Things didn't go that well this year, because a LOT of people bailed.  Maybe the new owener will start listening.

Now, the Good -
Cheeks was very sad at losing her "big sister", but luckily the WPA Humane Society has the Bunny Blind Date program.  You bring in your rabbit in need of a pal, tell them what your bun is like, and they bring out some good candidates for a meeting.  The meetings are surpervised under the watchful eye of a bun-experienced volunteer in case of any fights (and to prevent them before they happen - there are signs), and they can explain the bunny bonding behaviours if thigns are going well.
Things went AMAZINGLY well for Chee! ^_^ She met Little Joe, and it was love at first sight.  At least, it was for Joe.  Cheeks is a girl in need of much attention and loves, but she seemed a tad nervous.  Joe was smitten from the onset, and when he first approached her she loafed up and demanded that he groom her ears.  He was more than happy to oblige, and she soaked it up.  It was exactly what we had hoped for! ^_^
Little Joe is a gorgeous cinnamon-sugar boy, the runt of his litter of Flemish Giants.  He's actually a bit smaller than Cheeks.  He has green eyes (very odd, but very pretty), huge ears, and is a bit shy but incredibly polite.  He would much rather kiss your hand than have you pet him, and spends most of his time within three feet of his girl, when he's not actively snuggling up to her or grooming her ears.  He even likes Bentley, who's learned that these two won't pick on him, and they often gather together in front of heat vents.
He has earned the nickname "Sir Joe the Little", because while he is shy and afraid of thigns like the vacuum cleaner, if something happens that alarms them he assumes a defensive position between whatever it is and Cheeks.  So he's not the bravest knight in the land, but he's chivalrous to the core.  If we're vacuuming he won't budge until after Chee  runs away from the machine, and then he's on her heels.  If she hides behind or under something and there's no room for two, he will stand outside and guard.  He'll be terrified (I feel so bad cleaning) but he'll stay put.

I did well at the shows I was able to do, though!  So to me the year was a success, business-wise.

Brian won the 2008 NaNoWriMo!  Awesome, awesome, and more awesome.

And the biggest, best news of all - I'm pregnant. ^_^ We're expecting our first child at the end of May, and it's a girl.  I'm about 21/22 weeks along now, and things are going great.  We'd been trying for a year when it happened, and honestly the timing couldn't be better.
After Otakon I wasn't able to do much beacuse the crippling fatigue left me so that I would sleep most of every day.  And then I fractured my wrist in October falling down the steps, and it took a month to heal because it wasn't in a cast.  I didn't know that pregnant women couldn't get even a extremity X-rayed - apparently the radiation can travel via your bones and get in other places.  The doc at the ER thought it was a sprain because of my grip strength, so I got a heavy-duty splint instead of a cast.  Of course, I didn't bother trying to tell him that my crazy hand strength comes from bending metal all day long; he seemed annoyed that I even showed up at all.  But, you can splint a break and it'll heal okay, but if you cast a sprain that can make the damage worse, so it was erring on the side of caution.
I normally heal injuries and sickness in half the time of most people ('tis a mutant superpower), but I have a freakish pain tolerance level.  Normally that is a handy thing, but that means I don't notice/feel a lot of low-level pain that most people would, so I would be lightly using my splinted right hand because to me, it felt fine 90% of the time.  And usually light use of a sprain is okay, because it actually helps.  It should have healed within two weeks, but it took four.  I have sprained thigns (badly) before, and I normally heal in a week, maybe more if it's a major muscle.  Small breaks, like in my toes, mend in two weeks.  But what pain I did feel and the swelling just wasn't going away until I realized that I must have fractured something, and using broken bones doesn't help them knit.  So I bought a sling to sort of remind myself that using my dominant hand was a no-no, and it got better in a week of not using it.  Still, I lost a whole month of chainmaile time, and then the holidays were upon us, so it was a whole autumn of no chainmaile.

Luckily, I'm getting back into the groove now that I can stay awake for more than two hours at a time, and the work is going well.  We've got happy animals, the house is nice, we're healthy - Can't complain!