Journal Rookery

No one shall now accuse me of having a shortage of chronologically-kept notebooks. We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a course from Carolee Gilligan Wheeler on making the personalized daybook. Pica was particularly excited about this course, and since I was in much need of figuring out a planner system for 2009, we both signed up for the class. As seen at left, we ended up with two books apiece, with six signatures of 32 pages each, good for making a six-month daybook with a page for each day.

Oddly, I’ve never actually tried to keep a page-a-day planner, for keeping track of meetings, events, and grocery lists. My Hipster PDA effort minimized the chronological aspect of planning, and I’ve never been too interested in DayRunners or their ilk. Carolee’s course was good fun, and ensures that I will have the most unusual planner in the office. (We also learned why never to go to Prague in January).

This brings my collection of journals that I’m currently keeping to at least six:

1. My sketch-of-the-day book — I’m now using one of the many blank books I produced during last fall’s bookbinding courses.
2. The notebook I keep for work. Happily the campus bookstore now stocks Clairefontaine notebooks, so I’m using one of those, alas they stock only the lined, rather than gridded version.
3. An ancient bird field notebook. I’m not very good at keeping field notes, hence it is old and in fact in need of rebinding.
4. My logbook of all the radio contacts I make on HF (a gridded Clairefontaine notebook)
5. Today at Arch Drafting and Art Supply I bought another gridded Clairefontaine notebook which I intend to use for keeping track of miscellaneous radio catches in the wild world of shortwave radio (e.g. pirates and spies hanging out on the lower half of the 6900-7000 kHz segment).
6. The daybooks we made today.

Have I reached the journal event horizon yet?