Testing...

NOTE TO THE (Holidailies) POWERS THAT BE: I named this "testing" for a reason... Last year my links weren't working right, so if somebody could have a look I'd appreciate it!! (When I look at myself on the participants list it still seems to be doing something wonky with the links.)

(I did actually put the paragraph above on the Holidalies entry, but then it worked fine so I took it off again. Yay!)

(Last year I was feeling overwhelmed anyway and I used the link issue as an excuse to quit, but this year I'd like to have a more serious try at it!)

OK, hi I'm Mel and I've been hanging around Holidailies for, I dunno, 15 years or so? Maybe a little more, I've lost track. I'm not going to do a real introduction thing again. Been there, done that, have a bad attitude. (In my defense, I'm sickly. Not Covid sickly, just "maybe it's a cold" kind of sickly. No fever, none of that stuff. Not the flu, either, presumably - at least, I had my flu shot this year.)

I may not run to very long entries this year, but hopefully there will be more of them!


(P.S. There are a couple of catch-up entries here from earlier this year if you REALLY want to know how my pandemic went.) (my Dreamwidth main page is here.)

Happy!

My goal today is to write something coherent and with slightly fewer parentheses than yesterday. Realistic goals, that's the ticket.

I have been really planner-obsessed this year, so maybe I will talk about that. I've used some kind of planner off and on for years. I still have a couple of little coil-bound books that I used in college around somewhere, and after that I used actual planners sometimes and other times I just kept a little calendar in my purse and scribbled on that. When I used to be a secretary, we used Franklin Planners, so that's probably where my current planner obsession started.

The last five years or so I've used an Erin Condren planner. I used the Lifeplanner, the big coil-bound weekly planner. (With much nicer coils than those old ones!) And I liked it, but somewhere along the line I started looking at Happy Planners. I bought a Lifeplanner for 2020 late in 2019, but somewhere around the beginning of this year, I started experimenting around with things that were marked down on Happy Planner's website.

And boy, did I experiment. I won't say I tried every format HP has, because they have a bunch, but I tried several. The first thing I bought was a horizontal planner, which I really liked - but I use it as a journal, not as a planner. I ended up with more than one of these because I use one for talking about books and one for everything else.

Then I tried a mini planner. It turned out to be entirely TOO mini for my taste, as a planner, but it's okay for just, like, note-taking. That one was a vertical planner, so later I tried the bigger vertical one (they call it "classic") which is almost the same size as a regular Erin Condren, and so, unsurprisingly, I liked that one fine. I was determined to use up my Lifeplanner for this year, because they're expensive, so I'm kind of in the middle of transitioning between brands.

Not entirely, though. I bought a little EC "Petite Planner" just to try it out - it's a daily planner, and it turned out I really like using it to scribble in at work. So I'm still buying those, for now. Before that I tried the HP "skinny classic" - so called because the pages are the size of a regular classic page cut in half vertically - and it worked ok for work, but I always ran out of room and ended up taking notes on random pieces of paper that I then promptly lost.

So the experimenting paid off in the end, and hopefully I'm set for planners for a good while, now. What I do really love about Happy Planners is that they're loose-leaf. Very versatile. And when I'm not trying every format they produce, they're cheaper.

People look at planners and say, "Oh, you must be so organized!" But really I'm massively DISorganized and that's why I need a planner so much. That's my theory, that if you're really a naturally organized person you can do without a planner. My planner is just my brain on paper.

(And don't tell me I should go digital. I like the act of writing it down, it seems to help somehow.)

Book report

(Possible spoilers here, although I tried to be relatively discreet!)

I was poking around in old entries last night, and I found where I said in 2018 that I had read the first Expanse book, and I enjoyed it, and also that I had no idea where the series was going. Now I can't even remember the name of the first book. I'm going to have to go look it up. (later - it's Leviathan Wakes. I get those names mixed up.) Anyway, I have now read all of those books there currently are to read, which I believe is eight out of projected total of nine. And I love all of them. I think if I had to pick a favorite I would pick the "middle" one - book 5, which is called Nemesis Games. It's got incredibly harrowing stuff going on in it, but I love the way the characters all fan out at the beginning and later come back together. I looked on Goodreads and apparently the ninth and last book is set to come out next October. It's called Leviathan Falls, they say. (Maybe that will help me remember the whole "leviathan" thing!)

Another series I've been reading since 2018 or so is Seanan McGuire's October Daye books - from hard sci-fi above we go now to fairies. I love both, honestly. I said in 2018 that I had already read nine of them. She puts out one a year and is now up to 14, and I have read them all multiple times. She has a contract for another three, I read. And I'll keep reading them as long as she cares to keep writing them! I got to the big reveal in the last book and had to go way way back (book 4 or 5, I think?) to find where that plotline quietly started. So I've been reading and re-reading a lot.

I've read other stuff, too, and I have a good list because as I mentioned last night, I now have a reading journal. Maybe I'll come back to this topic later, but this is enough for tonight!