Have had a few comments from people about my life sounding pretty exciting and jampacked, and while I admit that I am having one merry hell of a good time, it's not necessarily all a continuous bundle of joy. Consider my Wednesday night, if you will:
Since I was about 15 I've been using a diary to keep track of where I'm meant to be, and since I was about 18 I've opted for the refillable style of diaries, like Filofax. For a few years in fact I had a Filofax, but then opted for a larger format model to cope with all the extra crap I tend to drag around with me.
The diary I'm currently using I've had since 2001 – it works perfectly well, and refills are freely available as it takes the DayRunner style pages (which I tend to prefer – nice heavy paper, good layout). As my 2006 has started to show signs of starting to get organised I thought “I know, I'll pop online and order some new pages !”. The DayRunner site however didn't provide opportunity to order to countries outside the US. After an email to them, I was quoted US$10 for the diary pages, and US$16 for postage. I've no idea what method of postage they use – perhaps they've got a squadron of specially trained seagoing giant pandas who paddle these orders over ?
Being your consummate cheapskate I figured there had to be an easier way, and figured that there must be a UK stockist – after all they were obviously available in Australia (and how I got hold of it in the first place), so it made sense. A little digging proved that Selfridges are in fact a DayRunner stockist. Good news ! So after work Wednesday I toddled in to Selfridges to procure diary pages. Easy enough ?
Mental note for future reference: Never trust a place called “Selfridges” that doesn't have a single fridge in stock. In fact, nor did they have any DayRunner pages. The only thing they DID have was Filofax pages. Good, no problem there. At least there wouldn't be, if the two were in any way interchangeable. As it turns out, A5 Filofax pages have 6 holes in a particular grouping pattern, whereas DayRunner cunningly have 7 holes, grouped differently. So no chance of just buying Filofax pages and being done with it.
Aha! But excitingly, last time I bought DayRunner pages, I also bought their special hole punch, so that I could put extra pages in for whatever reason (in case they introduce a new month called Febtober, or something). So no problem – I ended up buying the Filofax pages and planning to then use my holepunch to give them the right damn holes.
At this juncture I discover just how pissweak and ineffectual this holepunch truly is, and resign myself to the fact that I can only punch one diary page at a time (with difficulty). So *that's* how the rest of my Wednesday night was spent. Individually punching holes in diary pages. Man, do I know how to party. It's alright, there are only 52 weeks in a year, after all.