Hey folks! It’s a bit late night, but it’s still Thursday so I thought I’d throw a little Truthful Thursday out there! Well, ‘little’. If you’ve been around, you know that sometimes I’m extremely brief, and sometimes “long post ahoy” doesn’t even begin to express that the post ahead is long.
At the moment, I have no idea how long this post will be, but I can say with certainty that it’s not going to be brief.
First up in discussion will be my mundane life: aka my car, Minerva, this time. Second will be this thing called a Bullet Journal. Look for bright blue spots to determine start places for those subjects.
MINERVA: Thanks to some random bumps in the road and some really old damage, my car needs roughly $1,500 (locally estimated by a family owned and operated shop) worth of repairs. (Fun fact, the dealership didn’t even look at my car to give the estimate and they were at the most basic level over 150 more, so yeah, def ask other places than a dealership for an estimate.) And it’s all critically needed. Three of my motor mounts are cracked, and there’s an oil leak that were it not for the fucking location (on top but in the middle of the engine), would be a cheap easy fix. It’s a gasket, but it’s close to starting to drip on something that will turn it into a fire risk. Officially, this would not be a time that one would suggest a road trip, but I am going to drive very carefully and make my way to my parent’s town about 4 hours north of where I live because on just the parts alone, my mother could save over $300. On the labor hours, she’s saving us over $30/hour.
All in all, the amount of savings I’m getting will be near to half of what we’d be paying were I to get it fixed local to me. All for the cost of roughly a tank and a half of gas. And since I also need to do some grocery shopping, I’ll be doing that on my way home – seeing as their state doesn’t charge sales tax on what it considers to be “nutritious food” and my area has nearly a 10% sales tax on everything. So, I’m looking at one or two brighter moments in this kinda scary situation and keeping myself together.
BULLET JOURNALS. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re a combination of a creative journal and a planner. Part pages to brain dump on, part to-do list. I love the concept. I would check out the official page for Bullet Journals before you begin to say that you can’t do that sort of thing. (Especially if you’ve looked on instagram or youtube for bullet journals. Trust me, they don’t have to be that pretty.)
If you’re like me and have ADHD (or really any mental things) a Bullet Journal is one of the best things ever. Because it is highly customizable and quite adaptive, it’s a system that can work quite well for a lot of people. I personally use a modified version, with habit trackers and daily lists more than the monthly list and a future log. Honestly, it’s because I rarely schedule anything further out than about a week.
It’s also quite helpful for seeing what your tendencies look like, you can track moods, the weather, weight, water intake, everything can be done in the book. And I assure you that someone out there has probably made a tracker for it.
I personally use two journals at a time. One for my actual life, and one for my creative goals. The reason I do this is so that I can actually share the creative one without worrying about sensitive details being seen – and without the fear that someone will judge on my habit tracker. (Which is a lot more empty than I want it to be, to be quite honest. I’m still working on it.) In the creative one, I keep things like my yearly word count tracker, daily word count trackers, my year’s goals for each of my creative ventures, etc. Publishing schedules, plot ideas, useful web addresses, the schedule of NaNoMemphis Events, etc, it’ll all have a place in the creative journal.
Things that pertain to just me and my life will be in the personal journal, from minor work related things to actual schedules and appointments and my weight tracking, the tracking of how I feel, was I focused or not, all of that will be in my personal journal. And my personal journal is also where the monthly to-read and have-read lists will be, and at the end of each month I’m going to see about adding them to a library page in my creative journal.
I could keep going, easily. I’ll probably dedicate a whole post to Bullet Journals later in the month, and I’ll see about pictures for it, but for right now, g’night.