notebook nerd: back to Moleskine, stat

Oopsies.  Remember how 6 months ago to the day I was all a-flutter about Ecosystem notebooks? It's OK if you don't -- you can read it here, or just take my word for it. I was totally a-flutter, and even gave three away.

That new annual notebook is always something I look forward to -- oh, the fresh beginning, the excitement of all those blank pages to fill.  I was pretty happy about trying this new book, which I thought would be so great.  Since it goes with me everywhere, the notebook matters to me. It's dumb, I know that, but it still matters.

And now 6 months later, I am admitting:

I love Moleskine and I can't wait to go back.

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2013: here I come!

I made a big mistake in agreeing to work today -- December 31st, 2012.  What I really wish I were going to do, instead of heading to my soon-to-be-old job and working in the quiet of an empty, holiday office, is sitting with my Leonie Dawson 2013 Incredible Life planner and my 2012 black Moleskine and my new 2013 blue Ecosystem planner and dreaming about the coming year.

After Christmas, this is my most favorite time of the year: this Resolution time, this Plan-ful time.

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a whole lot o' system goin' on

As a kid, I would sometimes sneak-watch I Love Lucy, hoping I didn't get caught.  That show was verboten by the parentals.  

I know I'll be corrected by email any minute now for saying this, but we weren't allowed to watch the show.  My mother found the Ricky Ricardo character stereotypical and offensive.  She's right.  And sure, "start 'splainin'" is most definitely making fun of someone's accent, but damn it, that show used to crack me up, made all the funnier because it was forbidden.

I bet most people can't imagine forbidding a kid to watch I Love Lucy.  Maybe you think that's crazy, the equivalent of banning "Miracle on 34th Street."  But guess what? That was verboten also.  My mother had a thing with Nathalie Wood.  She's about to let me know, so I'll pass it on.

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Sunday, starting over

On Memorial Day we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an English teacher at a posh private high school here in Marin.  We were discussing the practice of diagramming sentences, because of a question that had come up in one of the private tutoring sessions she offers after school and on weekends to make ends meet.  As if teaching high schoolers English full-time weren't enough...  

Anyway, I realized over the course of that conversation that I never learned how to diagram sentences the way she was demonstrating it -- that just wasn't a thing we ever did at the French American Bilingual School, where I was a student through 7th grade, or at Everett Junior High or at Lowell.  I do recall quite a lot of use of my Bic 4-color pen, underlining in red, click, circling in green, click, annotating in blue.  But never like the diagram at left.  Nope.  Never.

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