I don’t have many plans for midnight tonight.  In fact, I will probably be sleeping at work if my client has no inclination to stay up and watch TV.  Even looking at pictures of Times Square in NYC on TV gives me a severe case of claustrophobia – no way would I want to be there on New Year’s Eve.

But I do have one ritual for the New Year to which I have been pretty faithful.  Every year I get a new calendar book and during the first week of January I like to go through it and transfer all my important dates and addresses.  I like to page through the old one and notice what I wrote, what I did or didn’t do.  Even the weeks when I wrote nothing have significance  because I was probably too busy to write. If I can remember why I was so busy, all the better, and I put that in.  I try to find three of four really important happenings that I can transfer to my family timeline notebook.  I count it as a good investment to spend one day a year remembering what life has been like.  I often end up thinking “oh yeah, that was such a fun time and I had completely forgotten about it!” Looking back helps me get more mileage out of those precious moments of the past.

Someday, all these date books full of the appointments and thoughts of my life are going to be fertile ground for a book to spring out.  It might be a memoir, or something completely fictional – I haven’t figured that out yet.

This is my old datebook.  It’s one of the best priced ones I have found so I ordered a new one just like it for 2015.  It has a lot of useful information about the area where I live and enough room on each day to serve like a mini-diary or journal. It was sturdy enough not to get bent up or lose pages and it features a tear off corner that makes it easy to find the current page.  I ordered it from www.datebook.com. They have one for most metropolitan areas.

I’ll probably be working on my datebook tonight for a while, but the bigger project will be getting ready for Jack’s football party tomorrow.  That will definitely be the first priority.  Happy New Year everyone!