The notebook I just finished had a rather tight elastic, and I ended up keeping it tucked around the back cover most of the time– I realized I like being able to just open the notebook up without fiddling with it. I’d like to keep doing it, but alas, the red Moleskine I just started has a looser elastic, so it doesn’t wrap around the cover as tidily.

I’m a bit uncertain about using a red notebook after years of just using black ones. I certainly have plenty of non-black notebooks in my collection and have used many of them over the years, but more recently, I’ve found it so satisfying to have a row of uniform black-covered notebooks. I did use a red Moleskine diary a couple of years ago, but I didn’t carry it with me every day. The shade of red is rather glaring, I’m really hoping it gets dirty soon! (In case you’re wondering why I bought a red one in the first place, it was because I happened to stumble across a sale where it was only $3.00!)

As for the other notebooks, I sometimes carry the extra Moleskine sketchbook with me to use if I want to do a more elaborate drawing or painting that wouldn’t work well in the squared notebook. And I keep the HandBook journal at home, where I’ve been using it for collages and drawings on the weekends. The sketchbooks always take me much longer to fill.

The other notebooks I’m using now, less actively, are a large Piccadilly that I paste recipes in, and a small lined Piccadilly where I’ve been recording all the books I read. I also have a pocket size Moleskine Volant that I use for notes in my French class.

So that’s 6 notebooks going at once… I should probably come up with reasons to start a few more!

Since I’d also bought a softcover page-a-day Moleskine 2010 planner and never really used it beyond a few pages, I’d thought I might repurpose it for 2011– the days of the week would be off, but that didn’t seem like a big deal. But what to do when I got to days I’d already written on last year? Ultimately I decided I didn’t want to carry such a chunky thing around with me anyway. And I’m away from home enough that I didn’t want to count on leaving the diary there and and trying to record things while they were still fresh in my memory.

So here’s what I think I’m going to try to do– I’ll just use whatever notebook I’m using for everything else! Each week, I’ll take a page spread and turn it into 7 days of space to record stuff. I’ll flag the current week with a colored tag so I can easily flip to it. I’ll use my handy-dandy date stamp– not because I am too lazy to write out the dates, but because it looks cooler that way. I’m also thinking this will be a good way to use up my current notebook faster– it’s an unlined Moleskine that seems to have more show-through-y paper than others I’ve used in the past, so I’m not totally happy with it and already want to move on to something else.

As you can see from the above, I hadn’t quite worked out how I wanted to space out the page– I think I’ll end up doing 3 or 4 days on each page to get one week on a spread.

We’ll see how I end up liking this method– I’m a little reluctant not to have a separate notebook for this information, but I actually don’t refer back to it enough for that to be an issue. It’s the act of recording it that gives me a sense of discipline about what I eat and how often I exercise, and though it might be nice to go back and count things up at the end of the year for some sort of scorecard, I know I’m just not anal enough to do that!

How about you? What’s your 2011 diary/planner plan?

I love the colors– the outside covers are slightly faded and scuffed compared to the inside front covers. The back covers are just plain cardboard.

You can see below that I stapled all around the edges of one of the front covers. I don’t remember if this was intended to be decorative or to somehow reinforce the cover.

The notebook with the red cover shows off a rather handy modification that I sometimes performed on my spiral notebooks– I’d unwind the spiral, add more paper, and then rethread the spiral back through. I liked having the thickness of the pages be almost equal to the diameter of the wire spiral binding. On this one, I also added the front and back covers of another notebook in order to divide the pages into sections.

The notebook I added must have been a later incarnation of this brand as they added a barcode to the cover, thereby throwing off the pleasing symmetry of the earlier version.

The first page became an index for the 3 sections, but I never bothered to identify them in any particular way.

Throughout all 3 notebooks, I filled the pages with various jottings and doodles and a lot of lists. Below, I was listing tracks from an LP that I wanted to record on cassette tape. (Any ’80s music fans recognize what album this was? The tracks listed here were the more obscure ones, not the hits!)

It’s nice to have nothing more pressing to do than cut out maps and go to the pool! Though I guess I was doing some chores around the house, given the page below:

I also wrote a lot of notes about schoolwork. I like the page below, as you can see what my top school supply priority was!

These old notebooks are always a fun trip down memory lane….

Or do you think you can’t know the perfect notebook until you find it?

Or is it impossible to have just one kind of perfect notebook?

Did you ever think you knew what the perfect notebook would be only to find out that it wasn’t as perfect as you’d hoped?

Is there a notebook available today that you think is perfect, or do you think perfection is unattainable?

If you could change an existing notebook to make it perfect, what would you do?

Please discuss!

The back is a nice plain cardboard, quite thick.

One thing I love about this notebook is the ratio of the thickness of the paper to the diameter of the wire spiral. I really hate it when spirals stick way out beyond the paper, but this one is nice and tight.

The spiral is in surprisingly good shape considering that this knocked around in my bag for quite a while. I guess I’m so fond of notebooks that I unconsciously take good care of them.

As always, I find random things jotted down on pages. I’ve yet to answer the question below:

I must have started this notebook right at the beginning of the school year, as I was writing down course materials I had to buy and notes about classes.

There were also a lot of notes about how much money I had and was spending, homework assignments, and other random anxieties of a college student, plus several pages that a friend scribbled all over when one of my roommates let her into my room to wait for me while I was out. At the time I was rather annoyed that she’d wasted all these pages of my nice notebook, but it’s a funny thing to look back at now.

I never use spiral notebooks like this any more, but I do love looking at all the old ones I’ve saved. You just can’t buy them like this any more…

My boyfriend and I have been dating for 10 months, and we’ve grown extremely close to each other. He’s a wonderful guy, and we’ve talked seriously about marraige. However I have a small problem: he’s read my journal twice now. The first time he read it, he’d found an old one, and read something I’d written about an ex. We had a little fight, but I thought we’d worked it out. However a couple days ago, he began asking questions.. ones that concerned particularly topics that I’d written about a week ago in my journal. I knew he’d read it again, and I asked him about it….

Read more about this dilema, and the interesting dialogue in response at CafeMom.

I’ve had some major issues with this myself– my mother and sister both read my journal when I was going through some difficult times in college, and when I argued with my mother about the invasion of privacy, she basically said that it was her duty to know what was going on with her child, and that I shouldn’t have written anything down that I didn’t want others to read.
I also had a relationship with someone who read my journal more than once. The first time, I didn’t mind, because it ended up helping resolve some doubt about whether we were actually interested in each other, so the journal was actually what got us together. The second time, I’d written something that was so blown out of proportion that it led to us breaking up! I think for that reason, I’ve had some periods of time during certain relationships when I tended not to keep a journal, or perhaps to leave things out of it that I knew could be difficult to read. I’ve also had phases where I kept two journals, and kept the one with the super-secret stuff in my office where I knew my partner couldn’t read it. I’m glad I don’t have to do that now– as the comments at Cafe Mom point out, it’s all about trust, on both sides. I trust my partner not to look, and there’s nothing in there that I’m ashamed of anyway.

Does anyone else have any stories to share about others reading your notebooks?