Year of confusion

By Ed Piper

I spotted a calendar with foreign landscapes that caught my eye. That was okay. But I made my first mistake by making this foreign calendar my appointment calendar. (I tried an electronic calendar; not working for me at this point.)

Beginning in February, I began noticing that I was mixing up Wednesday and Thursday commitments. You see, the European calendar I bought, though beautiful and a great memory of a sojourn, starts the week with Monday, instead of Sunday. It began throwing me off.

The issue wasn't the German-language words. I can handle that. In fact, that's part of the attraction. I don't speak German, but I can negotiate obvious things like the sequence of the days of the week.

A subsidiary issue was the lack of U.S. holidays. Calendars we buy here in the States note Easter, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and the like. Not calendars made abroad.

I decided to stay with it, having already recorded two months of commitments. (This includes my substitute teacher assignments, so I really didn't want to transfer all of them over.)

Finally, later in the year, seeing I didn't want to go through the same thing in 2018, I bought a U.S. calendar. That was my second mistake. It had too much writing and detail in each day's box, to allow for plenty of room for my sports events and the like. (I love studying about the Civil War; this second calendar includes an event from that epic struggle for every single day of the year. Impressive.)

I finally came to my senses, and the solution, two weeks ago. I ordered a tried-and-true calendar, of a type I had used before. Though not on as thick of card stock as in its previous iterations, it runs Sunday through Saturday, and it allows voluminous space (with manageable page dimensions) for each day of the week, including days each weekend.

I'm so looking forward to the freedom and convenience of the new year's calendar, that I have already referred to it several times in the month of November, December as well. Refreshing.

Back to this side of the Pond for my daily schedule's format.