Litha, Books and Stuff

Blessed Litha to all of you who celebrate it, and for those who don't, I hope you are having a lovely Wednesday. It's night already and I haven't celebrated my patron gods yet, nor have I done any ritual for Litha, but I plan to. As usual, it will be a simple thing, lighting candles and some incense, and meditating a bit. Just today in the morning, I thought how curious it was that, when I didn't have my own place, I used to set these makeshift altars, with loads of candles, on the floor, and do my rituals. The spread was quite large, took time to set and time to pick it up, and it had happened that a ritual took me up to four hours of just me talking to my gods. Now I have my own place, I don't have to take down my altar and now my spread is much smaller, much simpler, it's permanent and doesn't change much throughout the year, and my rituals are done in less than 15 minutes. I find that curious.

I've been lagging in my spiritual practice lately, and maybe that's due to the fact that one of my morning routines is to do a localized cleaning in my home, and somehow it feels that I can't possibly add any more things to my morning. Not like moving my daily ritual to the night wouldn't work, BUT my energy tends to be different at that moment. We shall see about that.

Property of Stormberry.

For this year, I've already bought my birthday books, and I've very pleased with them. Maybe "The Paris Apartment" may not be as good, but it still caught my attention. And I just realized all the books I've got have been written by women, and except by The Paris Apartment (maybe), all the books I selected revolve around women, with Olimpia, Fedra and The Lions of Fifth Avenue (Los Secretos de la Biblioteca de la Quinta Avenida) being of a more feminist cut. Also, all books save for The Paris Apartment are in Spanish. Normally I prefer to buy books in their original language, when I can read the original language, but oh well, in the end the important thing is the story, and not the language or the edition.

Currently I'm reading a novel by Jaume Cabré in Hungarian. I believe it was originally written in Catalan, but many things I find them in Spanish or similar to Spanish, and that does tend to irk me a tad. It's like when I was reading a Scandinavian noir novel in French and though I don't speak Icelandic, the interspersed Icelandic names and words with the French felt odd. I wonder if other people is sensible to the language the same way I am.

On book topics, recently I've come to a decision I've been pondering for a while: I'll stop supporting a friend's Patreon account. I have this booktuber friend who got a Patreon account where they offer bookclubs and different activities, exclusive content and so on, and I've been supporting them for years now. They are really creative and give so much that I often thought they were overcompensating, giving far more than what they charge. From the start I've got into the higher tier of the account. Also, though we knew each other from before, in passing and as part of the Costa Rican booktube community, I believe we didn't became really friends until after I joined the Patreon group.

From the start I wasn't participating in all the joint readings and bookclubs they held, but went to the meetings, watched all the videos and so on. It was nice and it was worth it. 

However, for a while now I have really been disconnected from the booktube world, I'm not watching their videos, not joining their reading session and haven't read a book with them in over a year. I hardly even go to the meetings, and when I do, it feels kind of pointless because I haven't read the book, nor am I interested in reading the book. Yes, the people in the meetings are friendly, and some of them tend to talk incesantly about other topics, which make the meting more inclusive, but that's not the point of these meetings. I kept paying my membership because I felt sort of like I "had" to support my friend, that I could affort to help them out, even though I wasn't profiting from it at all. I even ignore their chat, and just get into the chat to get the notification bubble disappearing. I don't read the messages nor am I interested in them.

I was in this point, not really thinking about what to do, just ignoring the whole thing, and sometimes checking something... at 1.75x speed. Then recently they posted a video that was quite... strange. It sounded defensive and bigoted, covertly attacking people who have different reading habits than theirs. Funny thing? Pretty much all the things they mentioned as "reading mistakes" are how I read. And this was what finally did it for me. This was the message, the signal I wanted, the one that said: this has stopped being for you.

The video shocked me, not only because it does felt personal, but because I'm not the only person who reads like that, and so it may get a bad reaction from their audience. It was surely a big flop, even though they clearly stated that "this was just their subjective opinion". (Except that, by the way it was worded it sounded like "it is my opinion, but people who do this are totally wrong". It wasn't an opinion, it was a series of judgemental statements, even though that wasn't probably the intent behind it.) After I decided to unsubscribe from the account, I started thinking about how to let her know, because I don't want to just disappear. I do believe that we are friends (maybe). And so I've been thinking about that. I just don't want to waste money on soemthing I'm not using, and there is not point in hanging in there when the Universe is showing me that our literary interests have grown apart. So, why bother?

I hate conflict, so I'm preparing, and I gave myself until Friday to broach the subject with them, and end my membership next month.

Property of Stormberry

Today, I have also been crafty. It wasn't planned, though I do have thought for a while about making a box of sorts to house my recipe cards. I always take recipe cards from my favorite market, because these often give me interesting ideas for cooking, baking or for fixing an interesting drink. I haven't tried them all, but I never fail to collect them. I rather have duplicates than miss a recipe. As result I have a bunch of them. I used to have them between the covers of one of my cooking books, but the book was already falling apart, so I took them out.

This year, as I was thinking about how to house the cards, I decided to classify them depending on the type of recipe, and then ordered them in a "lattice like" way to keep the cathegories separated, and held the whole bunch with elastic bands. Well, that wasn't very comfortable, but since I don't check them often, it was ok.

Today I thought about baking bread - Brötchen or Semmeln actually - and I was going to get my recipe when I looked at my cards and decided to fashion up a simple cardboard box out of a leftover cardboard piece from a calendar. You know, the type of cardboard used to stiffen the packaged calendars. And so with a piece of cardboard, glue, a ruler, scissors and a cutter, I made it. I also fashioned dividers for each section with colored flashcards, post-it notes, scotch tape and a fountain pen. The box turned out to be a little more snug than I expected, fitting the cards exactly, and not with the 2 mm marging I had planned on giving it. I would actually like to make the box in wood, and carve it with a pyrograph, but that's a project for the future.

Fix the Design

Property of Stormberry

Today, at the monthly Philofaxy Meeting, we discussed a little a small issue I have with the weekly inserts from filofax: the mini calendar. My issue with this calendar is that I don't use it, but I could use the space it is printed on. You won't see it in the picture I've enclosed because I have whited it out and written on top of it with a ballpen. So, you would say that it isn't really a problem, because I have already fixed it: I put white-out on it and wrote over it. Done. Well... yeah... but no.

The Mini Calendar

In this particular insert I'm using - this is the cotton cream week on two pages that came with my planner - the mini calendar is actually the smallest that comes in the weekly inserts offered by filofax, or so it seems to me. This calendar is presented in a vertical format, where each line is a day, so you get from five to seven columns in each little calendar (depending on the number of weeks each month has), while if the calendar had a horizontal format, with each day taking a column (plus a column for the week number) you will invariably have an eight column calendar.

Photo property of Stormberry.
Design by filofax

The calendar takes also the inner part of the page, where writing due to the rings is harder. So, technically, the design is sensible.

The thing is - for me - that I use this space to write up my weekly tasks, and I use two columns: one in black for work related tasks, and one in green or turquoise or some similar color, for tasks related to my studies. Each week I take the page out and migrate my unfinished tasks from the previous week to the new one.

I like writing each week the task list mainly to have a record also about my progress but also to see which tasks are taking longer to complete. It's not so much a productivity tracker as a way to measure the difficulty some tasks take, so that I can plan better for the future. However, my handwriting isn't as small as to be able to fit two lists in the remaining space, which is why the calendar had to be eliminated. The white out was my first option, but as it happens, it doesn't work well with fountainpens or my felt tip pens, nor highlighters. Then I started using post-its cut to size or planner stickers I could write on, but that threatened to add bulk down the road. I could also write over it, but it wasn't as readable as I would have wanted it to be.

I also made a list of the tasks in a separate division, but I was hardly looking at it, and the point of the list was to see it everyday, each time I glance at my planner - which is often - so that I remember what I still have to work on. I have also made post-its with the tasks, that travel forward each week, but they I can't look back to previous weeks to see what I've been working on.

Solutions, solutions

What I've come up, so far, is the realization that, most likely, I'll have to print out my own inserts... as I have been doing for ages. I know the current layout works for me, and I already have templates for it from previous years. However, I want to try out new layouts as well, which is why I have decided to create some adjusted versions of the plotter weekly and two versions of a vertical weekly to try them out. I've printed a test week, as I've been doing with some tests I have been running on other designs previosuly, and I'll see if I can fit my schedule and my requirements in them.

The of "planner peace" is quite an elusive one, and in a world so full of options, everything seems to be working to keep people away from finding their sweet-spot in anything. With planners, things might be a tad trickier because people change and with it their plans and how they plan, and that's ok. This is why I think that taking the time to plan, to be clear with what we need is important. This is also why I love ring binder planners, because I can still use the same binder and add into it the kind of insert that will serve me the best (hopefully) for a while, and I can change it, improve it, as time goes on.