The ultimate stationery sin
I must confess to a terrible sin – in terms of stationery use. That sin is: Planner Abandonment.
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| Old vs New |
Planner abandonment is when you replace your planner/ diary/ organiser/ datebook/ whatever, before it is actually full, because you just aren’t using it, for whatever reason.
In my case I feel especially guilty, because I got a Canine Partners diary when my Spark Notebook ran out. It is just a generic diary that the charity had branded with the Canine Partners logo, but it’s still very important because of that, and it’s also a lovely colour.
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| I even doodled this for myself to find at Halloween. |
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| And I already used a bunch of stickers in here. |
If there had been a photograph of the planner layout actually on the website, I probably would have seen that it wouldn’t have worked for me. But there wasn’t, so I took a gamble, and I tried to power-through with it until now.
The layout is page-per-day, and this would generally leave me too much room as it is, but in addition to this, the lines all the way down have times next to them. This is almost always useless to me, unless I have an appointment. The majority of what I write down in my planner are cleaning tasks or reminders to start on documents, and these are not hour-specific things, and trying to make them hour-specific is a horrible failure because I usually need to nap or rest right when I’ve scheduled something.
So I tried to stop assigning arbitrary hours to my tasks, which meant either writing across the whole page in a diagonal line, or just using the tiny note space at the bottom, which left so much blank space and made me feel very unaccomplished as a person in general.
I’ve been starting to use my notebook for more things, such as the habit tracking I mentioned the other day, and tasks lists. It was just so much nicer to use my notebook for this general stuff. Then I just stopped looking at my planner altogether.
This turned out to be rather problematic, as one of the things I use my planners for is marking whether or not I’ve taken my medication. There were days that I knew I took it, but couldn’t be bothered to look in the planner and write it down. Then over about 4 days between last and this week, I forgot to take it. So I’m having a weird time right now.
I had wanted to go a trip to Paperchase in search of a 2017 diary around my birthday, but I ordered a mid-year one when I finally realised I hadn’t been taking my meds and I was all over the place.
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| The year looks super short when you display it like this. |
I got an Agenzio from Paperchase. It’s a salmon-ish colour, which isn’t usually my style, but I thought it was livelier than the black and I’ve already customised it with tape.
The layout is pretty much perfect for me right now; it has a week on the left page, in thin strips that are perfect for appointments or specifically-timed things, without so much wasted space if not much is going on. Then on the right, plenty of space for some of the main tasks of the day. And I still get to use my notebook for a lot of stuff, such as more in-depth task breakdowns, habit graphs etc. I’m a happy Letti about this.
The traditional Collins and Letts type of diary has just never worked for me, and that’s OK. I just feel guilty about wasting half a Canine Partners book.
The only issue I have with my new Agenzio, is that the website listing said it started in June, and I thought, that’s fine, I’ll only have missed a couple of days of use. It actually starts in July, so I’ll have to carry on with my notebook for a little while. But it’s not the biggest deal.
In other news, I finally had my audiology appointment today, 8 months after my original Specsavers hearing test, which in itself was around 6 months after I noticed I was really struggling to hear people.
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| My original Specsavers audiogram, showing Moderate-Severe deafness. |
Normally, the quietest sounds heard are between 10 and 20 decibels. For me, the quietest sounds I was hearing were over 50 decibels, and at some frequencies they needed to be 70, so I had Moderate hearing loss just branching into the Severe end of things.
I had a hearing test again today at my appointment, and the audiogram looked very different, with a lot of downward spikes. I now have Severe deafness.
They can’t really tell me why yet. They think it might be connected to the Auditory Processing Disorder I had before, which meant that even though I received the sound just fine, my brain would garble it, e.g. someone would say “bread” but I’d somehow hear it as “flamingo.”
Now my issue is that I don’t get the sound in the first place, but apparently this could still be a processing-based matter. Or it could be Ehlers-Danlos again, making my ear components so squishy that they don’t pass on sound properly. Sometimes, people just go deaf. Who knows.
I had moulds taken of both ears with some blue stuff, which felt pretty funny to have in there. I’m going to try hearing aids, and even though that’s what I’ve wanted for the last 8 months, my heart sank as I agreed to them. Not only because my partner has already stated that he doesn’t want me to have them.
I worry about the possibility of my hearing getting worse year-on-year. What if I go totally deaf one day? Of course Profoundly deaf people can still be happy. But I already miss things.
I really miss the sound of dog paws pattering on the carpet. I don’t hear Freya moseying around any more and it bums me out so much. She now has her camping bells on full time so I can hear if she makes a big movement for any reason. When we first got those, I could hear them tinkling with the slightest movement and it was annoying to keep them on for no reason. Now I rarely hear them go off at all, although they probably drive my partner mad.
I worry about not being able to hear my future children’s voices, or Will’s voice, not being able to hear the joyful shrieks of future dogs as they run around the garden, not being able to hear Eurovision, and to be forever subjected to awkward cashier interactions. We’ll see what happens.
Unrelated:
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| I don’t think I shared my Ananas drawing from a while ago. |
