This is my symphony

Several years ago, my husband converted me to Google calendar (which I still love, by the way, for our shared family planner), and when that happened, I gave up my circa 1998 black leather Day Runner  without looking back. All that time spent transferring phone numbers and birthdays every January—who needed it? Not me! I was a citizen of the Digital Age.

But this January I got a hankering again for one of those little bundles of organization. You know, the tabs for notes, the address book, the nifty little slots for business cards, and the cute zip lock pouch. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, I wanted to go retro, but there it was. Unfortunately, the pickins’ were slim Office Max in that beloved 5X7” size I loved so well. In fact, I don’t even think they had a Day Runner. I contemplated a Filofax from Amazon. I even looked at printables on Etsy. Bah.

About the same time, a couple of the vloggers I follow unboxed their Erin Condren planners and I think I can safely “blame” Michele1218’s video for pushing me over the edge. (I knew a teacher who used one of EC’s teacher planners, but I didn’t know about her Life Planners.) So I stalked the site online for a few days and joined a couple Facebook groups just to see what the fuss was about.

What I liked about this new wave of paper planner addicts was their penchant for embellishing their weeks, very much like the scrapbooking I do. Now, some of it is a little overboard for my taste, but it looked fun, all the same. I also liked their DIY spirit–all these women laminating scrapbook paper to make something called a dashboard; cutting the Life Planner apart and re-punching it to fit a Filofax; making their own customized stickers, for goshsakes (and buying $150 Silhouettes to do so!); runs to Target to see if the Dollar Spot had added Easter post-it flags; back and forth flurries of RAKs (Random Acts of Kindness) in which planner junkies send a small package of planner goodies to surprise another junkie.

I was in.

Ten days later I had my very own Ready to Ship Life Planner, complete with a some extra doo-dads: a few cards and stickers, a couple of paper clips. And that much talked about coupon code I needed to customize a cover of my very own.

I love it. Like I said, my tastes run to the understated. I had a couple early mis-buys:  shiny vinyl stickers in bright primary colors, some pastel Sharpies that just aren’t me. But a couple hours of browse time later (and a quick run to Hobby Lobby) and I found my look in the sticker line Sn@p by Simple Stories—they’re  happy, but not cutesy, in muted colors that are a perfect complement to the Erin Condren palette.

What’s this craze all about? Let’s face it, life is hectic. I’ve got appointments and shopping lists and work outs and school deadlines and birthday parties and church … you get the idea. All that hectivity can sometimes whorl around me, kind of like the cloud that surrounds Charley Brown’s Pig-Pen character. Putting it down on paper gets it out of my head–it’s a physical way I can control the, well, uncontrollable.

So that’s the fancy pants reason for you–but it’s also plain old fun!