Calendar Journal

I finally got around to making one of those calendar journals I've been seeing online.I've been waiting to find the perfect box to put it in, but when I found this plain white one for free, I decided I would try to make it work. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

The concept for the journal is that you have a piece of paper for each day of the year, and each day you write down something you did that day or a funny thing that happened or anything significant really, and you write down what year it was. Then you reuse the calendar each year and are able to look back at what you did on that day in the past. 

Here's how I did it. 

I started with this plain white box I found for free. It's a recipe box and I think those work perfectly for this project but If you can find any small box those work well too.I may paint this or find some stickers eventually to make it look better.

Most of the paper I used for the cards inside was from this colorful card stock. I thought about using plain note cards, or even colorful ones to make it easier, and you could, but I wanted to do something different. I decided to make it look like I found a random scrap of paper, jotted down the memory and the date and threw it in the box. So, my papers are all different sizes and shapes. I used envelopes, printer paper, guest checks, journal paper, old cards, and anything I could find. It made it a longer process but I love how it turned out. 

Corey always has a lot of guest checks left over from work, and it was really easy to get the right shape and size I wanted from them without doing a lot of measuring and folding. They are also lined which I like and aren't too flimsy. Also, I knew I needed 365 little pages, so I thought it would be okay to have 60 or so of the same kind. 

I just simply cut off the parts that already had writing....

And this is the little paper I put into my journal. 

Obviously you can fold any kind of paper anyway you want and cut it to get several  papers to add inside.

I also did throw in about 80 note cards to speed up the process.  

Finally, this is what all the scraps of paper looked like together. 365! 

Next, I had to make the pages that would separate each month. I took an old planner and used the  calendar pages from last year. Obviously you could also stamp your months on or write them in or even use magazine letters, I just really loved how these pages matched the card stock I had. 

see how bright and colorful the months are in this planner! 

I made 12 card stock pages that were all the same size but a little bit bigger than the rest of the pieces in the box so that they would be visible above them. I used 3 colors and made 4 pages of each color. 

Next I cut off the month from each calender page in the planner. (from 2011) 

Finally I had a stack of colored papers to use as dividers and I had each of the months I needed to label them. 

I glued the months onto the top left of each page, and alternated the color of card stock I was using. I love how colorful it looks! 

To find the right placement for each divider I place January in the front , then counted out the number of pages behind it to match the number of days in January. Once I had that many pages, I placed the divider for February behind it. This is how the calendar looked when it was finished. 

The final step was to go through each month and write the date on the top left. (Here I wrote 6/17)  This was the card from the day before I made the calendar so I decided to fill it out as an example. I wrote the year, 2012, and then a message about what was significant about that day. "Took Jones up Sugarloaf Mountain. "

I think eventually, I'll find a bigger, prettier box, so that I can add pictures. 

I decided I didn't want it to just be a plain box, so I added a quote to the top. 

Memory Box

My mom has a giant wooden chest that she has been saving sentimental things in since us kids were born. she has tiny baby shoes, and things we made, school papers, and awards. I love looking through it, and quite a few years ago I decided to make one of my own. My mom calls her box "the forever box." I like to think of it as a place to store memories. I have two boxes of my one. One is for memories with my friends and family, and things that are personal to me. The other is a collection of things I've kept since I met Corey. 

This is the box I use for the items I've kept since I met Corey. I love the cute little flowers on it. 

This is a bigger, less-fancy box that I keep the other items in. It's pretty full now, and I think I'll get a different box eventually and decorate it myself. For now, it's not really the box that matters though, it's what you keep inside. 

This is what one of the boxes looks like inside. Just on the top I can see a box that has sentimental jewelry in it, a wrist band from an amusement park, a medal I won, letters, and notes my friends and I used to write in high school. It looks like there's some pictures in there too. There are countless things I've kept in here.   

This is the box I keep for the memories I have with Corey. It opens like a book. 

Corey and I are pretty simple people, and we don't really do too many things or go too many special places. I try to remember to collect something from the the special things we do, but a lot of the things I've kept are just things from ordinary days spent together, but they mean just as much. 

This is the tag from the first Christmas tree we got together. 

This is what is left of a little toy we used to call "Happy Henry." He was a red stress ball with yellow , stringy hair and a  big smile. We used to bring him to the casino with us for good luck. 

A birthday card Corey made for me, and got our other friends to sign. 

A wrist band form a night out at the upfront. 

A tag from the first, and only time we ever went snowboarding together. Corey fell and hit his head and had to be helped to the car. It was scary and I guess we just haven't gotten the courage to try it out again yet. 

A birthday card I created and sent to Corey a few years ago when we spent the summer apart. 

A list I made for him last year of the things I love about him. 

The little air freshener that I kept from the car we have shared. He's been to a lot of places with us. 

The phone Corey had when we met. I'm not sure if it even works anymore, but there might be some old pictures or texts on there. Some of the first phone calls and text messages we  made to each other were on there, so I decided to keep it.


There are a lot more things in here that I've kept but I just wanted to share a few. I think eventually, when we have our own house, I might take some of them and make a shadow box with them to hang in our bedroom. 

Livening up the front porch

The people who had lived in this house before us left behind some really useful things. A huge box of paints and supplies, old boards, pots, and potting soil. I was taking Jone's on a walk around the block and was inspired by a lady I saw gardening in her yard. I knew I couldn't actually plant a garden since we are just renting, and there isn't much room for one, but I really wanted to liven up the front porch with some plants. I invited Lindsay to come over and we headed out to Meisters Greenhouse to find a few good deals on plants.

I bought all these plants for about 8 dollars. We also tried to dig up a daisy to plant, but that didn't turn out good in the end. Probably because I didn't keep it wet until I planted it. 

Next we stopped at goodwill. I bought a tiny white vase, a square purple pot, a white pot, and a frog decoration for 5 dollars. Then I bought a strawberry plant and lettuce seeds at Walmart for 4 dollars. We already had the left over paint and a few other pots to paint so we headed home and got started. 

Before we got started. 

Lindsay and I set up a card table in the bedroom. We watched netflix and painted our pots.

Our final masterpieces! Lindsay's is on the left, mine is on the right. The smaller ones we got from Goodwill. 

Potato vine. I hope it grows up the railing. -Also my little frog decoration

Strawberry plant

A pretty weed. Eventually I want to plant a few daisies in here. 

Parsley plant

A Wave Petunia. We used to get them for my mom for Mother's Day as kids. 

The plant in front of it Ted got as a gift from someone; I'm not sure what it is.  I also have a tiny square planter that I planted lettuce seeds in. Somehow I managed not to take pictures of those. Once I get markers in them, I'll take more pictures. 

Earlier that day I also found a few cinder blocks and a board that I turned into a bench for the porch. 

For now I just folded a blanket and put that on top as a cushion. eventually I would like to make or buy a cushion for it and then maybe paint the cinder blocks to match. 

We felt so ambitious that we decided to make a shelf for my books as well. I used a piece of an old door frame that I found in the attic. It works well! 

What a productive day!! 

"Smart House" doesn't seem so far fetched now...

The Avengers has renewed Corey's love for superheros, so he started downloading all of the Marvel movies so we could watch them together. We started discussing which movies we had or had not seen and which ones were our favorites. He's seen many more than me and obviously knows a lot more about superheros than I do, but once I found out that he hadn't seen the first Iron Man movie I made him download it right away. It was done and ready to watch in less than 10 minutes. Corey said, "It's crazy that you can download a movie faster than I could go get it from the store."

So that made me think...

We are advancing so fast! I remember the first time my mom got an old computer from one of her friends at work. They bought it so that we could write our school papers on them, save them to a floppy disk, and bring them to the library to print. I suppose they also got tired of using a type-writer. We had a small house so we set up the computer in the laundry room and I would sit on top of the shaking washer waiting for my turn on paint. At that time I still typed with two fingers and didn't know how to change the number one into an exclamation point. 

It's probably only been 10 or so years since then, and I now attend a university that issues us laptops with our tuition and requires us to bring them to each class. Email has replaced letters and texting has replaced phone calls. I never even had a cell phone until I was in my junior year of high school. Kids have cell phones in Kindergarten now! Like nearly everyone else,  I have a "smart phone" now which actually makes the Disney Channel movie, Smart House, seem quite reasonable. 

Corey sits across the room at his computer desk, playing a video game on one monitor and watching Iron Man on the other. I have an mp3 player, kindle, and phone attached to my computer. I hear the clicking of my keyboard and Corey's mouse, beeps from IM's, vibrations from my text messages, and the sound from the movie, all at once. Yet, I feel completely relaxed. This is relaxing to me. 

The laptops are a huge thing our school advertises. They brag about the "Northern Network" and their advanced technology, and of course every tour mentions how Obama came all the way here just to show the rest of the world how advanced we are...how it makes our school so much better. Oddly enough, they also advertise that we are "Northern Naturals" Somehow though, the combination of the two in this picture just doesn't seem right. 

A few months ago I read the book Feed by M.T Anderson. It takes place sometime in the future where people have computers implanted into their brains. They actually see a screen in their mind and are constantly bombarded by advertisements, suggestions, and messages. It seems completely chaotic and makes my head hurt just thinking about it, but is it really any different than how things are today? Granted, I can turn off my electronics whenever I want, but sadly, I don't always choose to do that. Almost every night we sleep with a movie on, and my phone is always somewhere near by if not right under my pillow. There are online universities now. Online stores, textbooks, movies, music. Will there become a day when we never leave our house? Kids are home schooled through the computer, parents order food and clothes online. Doctors will be analyzing our symptoms through a webcam. Who knows what is possible. 

As a future educator, technology both excites me and worries me. I'm excited to use technology to help teach. It's a great way to make sure each learning style is met and it can make learning fun, interesting, and each lesson plan unique. However, I can already see the effects of technology in my own life and my own education. Sometimes  I accidentally tune out the people I'm with  for the conversations taking place on my phone or computer. I don't know how to do basic math without a calculator. I don't bother learning how to spell words correctly because the computer will simply fix it for me, and I often spend an entire class on my laptop, rather than actually listening to the lecture. I walk with my head down in my phone rather than seeing the world around me, and I'll spend a warm day inside with my "toys" rather than enjoying the nice weather. Granted, I do go to the beach or lay in my hammock, but not without my phone and/or kindle at my side. 

Times have changed. All in all, it's scary to think of where technology is taking us. Don't get me wrong, I get just as excited as anyone else when a cool new app comes out for my phone, I especially love my Kindle, and I couldn't be sharing this with you now without my laptop.Technology has many benefits of course, but maybe it should remain an aid to society and education, so that it does not become a crutch.