The Unbearable Thinness of a Year

I need to reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It's been too long. It's one of the first books I read out of college. One of the first books I chose to read as an adult, not had to read. No matter how many years I use a Filofax, I'm amazed on a daily basis how little paper a year fits onto. Not a year's worth of thinking or feeling, but certainly a year's worth of doing. A year seems like so much more to us little humans.

This picture shows the entire thickness of a year in week-per-2-pages in a Personal-size Filofax. And yet, it is so much more. A single word written in a diary can capture 1 or 6 or 60 hours of emotion, of thought, of revelation.

How much more does one need?

Erratum

The trendy Filofax UK site, http://www.itsawayoflife.info, has not been abandoned, contrary to my report on Nov. 2, 2006. It has been updated since I last wrote, and appears that the webmasters are updating it about once a month. So while it's not what you can call an active Web site, and no longer has a link on the Filofax U.K. main page, it's still being updated and maintained.

Happy Turkey Day!

If I were any kind of a blogger, I'd be supplementing this post with a photo of one of the many wild turkeys that bop around suburban (and even almost urban) streets where I live. But I have captured no such pictures; so I found a piece of clip art that looks very similar. Due to recent deadlines, the energy I have to devote to this holiday has been minimal. Since this blog's readership isn't exclusively, or maybe even primarily, American, I suppose I don't have to do a Thanksgiving entry at all.

But since I'm American, it's relevant for me to share how Thanksgiving appeared in my Filofax:
- 2 days before: purchase champagne, wine (beaujolais nouveau?), 3 kinds of cheese, 2 boxes of crackers (we were bringing the wine and hors d'oeuvres to my mother-in-law's house)
- 2 days before: send TG e-cards to parents, brother's family
- 1 day before: put champagne in fridge, charge digital camera batteries
- Thanksgiving morning: find a (silver?) tray in dining room or basement.
- Thanksgiving morning: remember that I forgot to put doilies on the shopping list
- Thanksgiving morning: arrange cheese and crackers (directly) on tray; cover with plastic and store in fridge
- 1/2 hour before leaving for mother-in-law's house: take cheese tray out of fridge
- just before leaving: put batteries in camera, put pics of nephew to show people in Filofax, figure out a way to carry wine and cheese tray

My parents didn't do Thanksgiving this year, but they always made an astoundingly delicious meal. They drew up a backwards-timeline, so that they knew when to start each item in order to have the meal ready to serve. A big item was putting the bird out to brine in a bucket on the deck, in a cooler if necessary. If I were doing dinner at my house, I'd do a backwards-timeline, too.

They use letter-size paper, the same size they keep all their recipes on. I have a letter-size recipe book, too, but in order to integrate the shopping and related tasks, I may want to use an A5 Filo.

Mark Your Meteors

NPR brought music to my ears this morning -- news of an exciting natural event that some of our gentle readers will want to mark in their Filofaxes. The Leonid Meteor Shower is on! In North America, where this writer is, the visible dates of the shower are Friday, November 17 and Saturday, November 18. And, according to the radio, this year's show will be a spectacular. Instead of the usual 20-30 shooting stars per hour, we'll be able to see 200-300! Apparently, this boon is due to the earth's passing through a particularly heavy band of debris from an ancient comet.

I found this page from StarDate.org, which has all the information you need to mark your Filofax for meteor viewing for the year. (This link is to the 2006 metor calendar, which is almost over. Presumably, StarDate will produce a similar page for the 2007 meteors in due time.) This page also has some handy tips on meteor viewing (Pack comfortable chairs, bug spray, food and drinks, blankets, plus a red-filtered flashlight for reading maps and charts without ruining your night vision. If you can see each star of the Little Dipper, your eyes have "dark adapted," and your chosen site is probably dark enough. Under these conditions, you will see plenty of meteors).

Space.com offers thorough and technical information, but I find the site hard to navigate. So no guarantees, but here's a currently working link to the site's Leonid page.

Holiday Harbingers

Apologies for my recent scarcity. I've been busy with work. I'm in the publishing business, and this week marks the deadline for getting new books into people's Christmas stockings.

Which brings me to today's topic. An inspiring comment from a fellow philofaxer got me thinking about using the Filo to mark the changing seasons.

So, when does the Christmas season start? There's the old cliche about the commercial holiday season starting earlier every year, but this year I'm able to say that it's gotten ridiculous. Starbucks had their gift displays, holiday coffees, and red paper cups out in force barely a week after Halloween. There's a radio station in town that always plays "all holiday music, all the time" starting the day after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November). But this year, they've started already! Six weeks of all-Christmas, all-the-time? That's just insane.

Two days ago, I started seeing Chrismas-present-themed commercials -- from Garmin, the company that makes GPS devices. Ah, just what every woman wants to unwrap on Christmas morning! (I can hear the divorce papers rustling now.)

Don't get me wrong. I love Christmas. The Christmases of my childhood were magically wonderful -- no matter how crummy and impoverished the rest of the year had been. I even make my own Christmas cards. But there's just something dispiriting about starting the holiday season on November 1st. And so unfair to November as a month. It's like they're trying to create a double December. November has every right to be annoyed.