A New Notebook

There is nothing quite like the feeling of a fresh clean start.  I made a few goals for myself this year, and one of them is to write everyday.

This is my stack of notebooks that I use each week.  Each one is for a different project or purpose, and no two of them overlap.  And this stack right here is why it will be impossible for me to move to a digital organization.  Besides, I can’t doodle in a digital notebook.  Last year I started a blog notebook, which is just what it sounds like.  It’s a place for me to keep all of my ideas of things I want to blog about, or reminders of posts I want to write.  I have a few pages for each month, plus a lot of blank pages to fill up.  This year I WILL post about my very favorite Valentines tradition!  I’ve been doing it for four years and I still haven’t ever blogged about it because I never think to take pictures and write about it before V-day.  This notebook is probably the one thing that has helped me to be able to write new posts each day for the past six months or so without it feeling like an absolute chore.  It really has helped make blogging easy for me.  Something about all those lists makes me OCD heart very happy.

I bought my 2011 blog notebook back in October on a post back to school sale.  It was less than a buck.  And it looked nothing like this at the time.  It was garish and terrible on the outside, but inside it was nothing but clean new pages.  And I’m a total sucker for clean new pages.  I knew I wanted to do something to improve on the covers, but I couldn’t decide what.  Until last night.  First I removed the covers (carefully slipped them out of the wire binding) and lightly sanded down the shiny ugly surface.  Then I sprayed them with two coats of primer and painted them with acrylic paints.  It was a really fun project.  This morning I finished them off with two coats of spray on polyurethane to help protect my paint job, and give them a new shiny finish.

There are already dozens of pages full in this book, and I can’t wait to fill up the rest of them.  As for the rest of that stack?  Well, one of my goals this year is to write everyday, in at least one of those journals.  I love having an online journal in the form of this blog, but there are somethings that I like to keep a secret between me and my pen.  (Like in one of these little books I have a list of gifts to make for birthdays/mothers/fathers days this year.  And I’ve already finished my Christmas 2011 gift list and have already started creating those little and not so little surprises!)  We are one week into the New Year and so far I’ve managed to write each day.  They say it takes 21 days to make a habit, and I’m 2/3 down.