for the love of a calendar

I love a new year, a fresh start, and best of all — a brand new weekly desk calendar. For a design geek like myself, it can't be just any calendar. Here's what works for me: 1) it needs to have one week per spread  2) it needs to lie flat when open, spiral-bound works best 3) each week must be divided into days, with ample space for writing in appointments, birthdays, etc  4) it can't be larger than 6" x 9" since it sits open on my desk all year long, and 5) it needs to look good.

After years of buying all different kinds of calendars, I finally found the calendar of my dreams back in 2001. On my way home from work, I stumbled into the Ordning + Reda store on the Upper East Side and there it was...

The Ordning + Reda cloth diary. It was the perfect size. It came in an array of colors. It had the perfect amount of space between the lines for my tiny handwriting. The paper felt nice. It was beautifully designed (I love those little red numbers). And it was Swedish (everyone knows Sweden is the land of all things beautiful and well designed).   

For the next few years, all was well. I developed a little system with my calendars. Birthdays and anniversaries were written at the bottom of the page in red, appointments and other to do lists were written in black. In 2002, I got married. And JR started giving me a calendar for Christmas, a different color each year. 

And then a horrible thing happened. Ordning + Reda closed their US stores! But we were not deterred. In 2003 I found one at the Swedish import store in midtown, but they stopped carrying them soon after. Then JR found them at the Bodum store in the meatpacking district, and for the next few years I always found one waiting for me under the Christmas tree. But last year the Bodum store stopped carrying them, and as far as we know, they aren't available in the US anymore. Last year I protested and didn't have a desk calendar at all. But I miss it.

I've considered a few options, (like this, or this, or this, or this) and this year I decided to go with the Kate Spade weekly calendar. It meets all of my requirements (even if the lines are a bit too widely spaced for my writing) and though I don't love it the way I love my old calendars... it'll work.

 Now does anyone have a connection in Sweden who can hook me up for 2010?

five a day

I always have a journal going, in one form or another. They are constantly changing shape. Sometimes a sketchbook with lots of little drawings and diagrams, or little notes crammed into corners of my weekly calendar. I've had collections of ticket stubs, or leaves, or a notebook full of quotes lifted from books I'm reading.

One of my favorites was a little moleskine book I used right before I married John (also known as JR). I stamped each page of the book with the date, and wrote 5 things that happened each day. I can read the pages and remember exactly how I felt, where we were walking that day, how happy I was riding the subway on my way to meet him.

 (The little numbers circled at the top were a countdown to our wedding day).

magical thinking

Children say the funniest things, yet all too often, I seem to forget them after a day or two.  I'll start telling my husband.. "C said the funniest thing..." and then I can't quite remember. Or I get it a little mixed up and it's not nearly as funny as I remember.

So I started writing down the funnier moments of the day. I keep a jar on my desk, and when the kids say something particularly worthy of recording, I grab a scrap of paper (phone bill, envelope, chopstick holder.. whatever is lying around) and I quickly jot it down. I read about Joan Didion doing something similar when her daughter was a young girl in The Year of Magical Thinking.

The jar is filling up quickly, and when I'm having a below average day, I reach in and pull out a quote.. and suddenly I'm laughing and running to hug my little comedians.