Passion

I'm giddy with excitement.  My Passion Planner arrived today.

Fred & the Passion Planner

(That's Fred.  He's helping out by covering up my address.)

I'm not sure how I learned about the Passion Planner.  I think one of the knitting bloggers that I follow may have mentioned it but I really don't know.  As you may know, I'm a planner geek.  I LOVE my planner.  Well, I should say that I LOVE having a planner.  The right planner.  Having the right planner is a very important part of loving my planner.  For years and years I'd used a two page a day Franklin Covey loose leaf planner.  It was fantastic because I could add & delete sections as needed and there was plenty of room to track all the different hats I was wearing.  But now that we've finished our homeschool adventure, the kids are grown & I no longer have to keep up with their schedules and my husband has finally automated his businessey secretarial duties that I used to have to do (Thank the Lord!) I find I'm only tracking myself these days.  I no longer needed such a complex (okay, thick) planner.

I'd bought a generic 2016 planner from the store (okay, two planners) but I wasn't really feeling the love.  Then last week, while trying to watch Super Bowl commercials in advance, YouTube kept putting Passion Planner videos on my screen.  So I ordered one.

Anyway, I'm super excited to have received my new planner in today's mail.  I'm going to be fabulously organized and passionate about reaching my goals for the remainder of the year.

It's a good thing the planner arrived when it did because I've suddenly lost all passion for my Etsy shop.  For the last week or so, I've had no desire to knit for the shop.  I only want to knit mitered square or 10 stitch blankets.  And Freds.

Friendly Fred

Isn't Fred cute?  Well, goofy may be more accurate.  What ever.  I just love Fred.  Friendly Fred. He sits on my desk and doesn't say anything ugly when I knit mitered squares instead of hats & shawls for the shop.  Maybe I should change his name to Mute Mike.

And now, Fred & I are off to plan our passions.

A brief psychotic break

All the recent rain caused me to have a slight, brief psychotic break.

I stopped knitting and decided to create a calendar instead.

DIY Calendar

I'm an old fashioned girl and much prefer paper calendars.  I'm also crazy-picky about my calendar.  I get bored easily so it needs to be pretty, but not so pretty I'm afraid to write on it.  It needs to have lots of room to write a variety of things.  It needs to be roomy enough to hold my to-do lists, shopping lists, dreams, desires, books to read lists, knitting deadlines and of course all the normal calendary stuff like appointments, vacation days, work schedules, and of course, paydays.  I like it to be colorful, but not color coded.  Like I said, I have high expectations and I'm picky.

I also like to journal a little bit about my days.  Not Journal journal, just a few words up to a full sentence to remind me of the how the day went.  I also like to "artsy" it up a bit, except that I'm horrible at painting, drawing, and pretty much anything else that's done freehand.

It's next to impossible to find a calendar that suits me.  In the past, I've kept two.  One for the scheduling & normal calendar stuff and one for the journaling/artsy stuff.  But often, the one or two word journal entry would make much more sense if seen along with that day's "normal" calendar page.

DIY calendar

 So I decided to make my own.  I bought a cheap spiral bound art journal and began making my own.  And thus, the psychotic break.

What the hell was I thinking?  So, yeah, it's fun playing with the colors, and the YouTube videos I watched about making your own calendar/journal were inspiring, but.... Good Lord!  I worked on this project for four days straight and only got one month's worth of calendar created.  At this rate, I will finish making 2016's calendar sometime in 2035.

I think I should probably just stick to knitting.

Meanwhile, because it is October & the season of scary things...

Mr. Spider

Mr. Spider is still hanging out on my front porch.  No one has had the nerve or the will to remove him.  And now, since he hung out there all through the not a hurricane, but a hell of a lot of rain weeklong weather episode, I feel like he's earned the right to keep his place.  He does have some pretty brown stripes and I'm quite proud to say that, proportionally, he gained more weight eating that butterfly last week than I did during my Week Of Never Ending Rain junk food binge.  Yeah, I think I'll let him stay a while.