Fiction Reading Journal, Take Two

I didn't think I was going to attempt my own book journal this year. 2025 was such a failure that I ended up throwing it away and that is not like me.

Then I ended up buying a book journal because there was a misprint and I was able to get a B5 size for around $12. But there are pages for reviewing books and I'm not writing that much.

My brain was back to no reading journal for 2026.

Until the two year-long reading challenges I planned to participate were released in December and I was like, I totally need a reading journal.

The picture of the reading journal cover page to the left is from 2025, BTW. It's the one I threw away. I couldn't share pictures of my 2026 reading journal because, well, I haven't made it yet.

I know! I need to get on it. Soon.

The issue? I create a lot of the things I use in my sticker making machine's software, and because I'm not good at this, it takes some time for me to get it done. I haven't felt like doing it, and the few times I thought, maybe I can do it today, it was gray and cloudy. The sticker cutter needs lots of light to read the registration marks and there are times even on sunny days that I need to hold my phone with its flashlight on to get the thing to cut.

This year, I'm going to make changes. For one thing, I'm going to do two books per page instead of one. That's where my journal got ugly, trying to decorate the rest of the page. But this will eliminate that. I will only have room for a book cover and a little room to write down information and a review. If I have stickers that will go with it, fine. Otherwise, the book cover is all the art I'll use.

No bingo boards this year. I hardly remembered I had them in 2025. Also, this book journal will not be limited to one year. If I don't fill it in 2026, I will use it in 2027. Because of this, I'm planning to add calendars and keep track of what I read by month.

I'm debating whether to put the book challenge icons/information in the same section with my review rather than a whole separate section. I need to decide before I start the book journal.

Hopefully, I don't mess everything up again this year. Stay Tuned. 

With Apologies, It's More Planner Talk

I think I mentioned that I'm trying a new primary planner for the year. The Complete Planner from Sterling Ink. (I received no compensation of any kind and paid full price for my planner.)

What intrigued me about this planner was that before every weekly vertical spread, there is a blank page. This gives me room to setup a weekly dashboard.

I've tried setting up a mini-dashboard in my 2025 planner, but because there were no extra pages, I had to do it in the middle of the weekly spread. It didn't work. I still forgot all about my weekly tasks.

However, in 2025, the monthly dashboard worked exceedingly well for me, so I was hoping that if I had a dedicated weekly dashboard it would help me out.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2024. I've always been able to manage my daily tasks by using my daily planner, but the monthly and weekly items killed me. It was a relief to figure out monthly, but I'm still testing out different options for the weekly, hoping to find one that sticks.

Overall, though, I really, really loved my 2025 planner because there was a meal tracking section in addition to the daily, monthly, and weekly pages. There was even room in the meal section to record my sleep. The Complete Planner does not have this dedicated section, and I knew I was going to miss it.

Then I had a scathingly brilliant idea. I am not a weekly vertical planning girlie. I get absolutely overwhelmed with that layout, which is why I struggle so much with weekly tasks. I was going to convert the weekly section to keep track of weather and word count (like I did in my 2025 planner), but that still leaves me a lot of room since I have that blank page in front of each week.

I counted lines and decided I had enough space to add the meal tracker to each weekly spread. Since I didn't want to do all that writing, I printed out some stickers, used a little washi tape, and came up with this layout.

I'm keeping track of the weather and word count at the top. Sleep and the books I'm reading that week are on the sidebar and then meals, vitamins and medication, and below that (unseen in the photo) is water tracking. I'm soooooooo bad at drinking water.

My 2025 planner had little water drops I could check off, but I don't want to use stickers here because of the bulk and I don't have a stamp small enough for the column. I do have a stencil I can use, but drawing 8 water drops for 7 days for 52 weeks? I can't do it. Instead, I'll just make tick marks for each cup of water I drink.

Just in case my Complete Planner doesn't work for me, I also bought the same planner I used in 2025 so I can switch if necessary. I think I'll like the Complete, though. It's just a matter of making the weekly dashboard work for me.

I am laying them out week by week so that I can change if it doesn't work and not be locked into anything.

My other planner, the one I used in 2025, I bought the 2026 version in a smaller size. I want to see if I need the A5 or if I can get by with a B6. I decided in the B6, to only do weather on the weekly vertical spread. I'm putting word count in the yearly tracker in the front. Again, testing it out because (if I like this), it will save me setup time in 2027.

I kind of wish that I could mash the Complete Planner and my 2025 planner layout together. It would be absolute perfection then. Sigh. I'll re-evaluate a few months into the year.

Storm

I am a Minnesotan. I lived most of my life in a suburb of Minneapolis and snow doesn't scare me. I don't like driving in it, but I can.

Or maybe I should say I could. I've been living in Atlanta long enough now that I might have lost my skills.

What I'm not used to are ice storms. I only remember having one in Minnesota while I lived there. It was the only two snow days I ever got while I was in school. I remember coverage of city buses sliding sideways down slight inclines because they had no traction. I remember the trees were covered in ice and took pictures of it because it was so amazing.

So of course, Georgia has an ice storm prediction up for the weekend and I'm semi-freaking out. I'm not worried about going anywhere. It's not supposed to get bad until Friday night and I'll just stay home all weekend. Not a big deal.

Why am I freaking out then?

Losing power.

When I still lived in Minnesota, we had a thunderstorm go through at the end of May and it knocked out power to the house. For six days. SIX DAYS! When I say that I am not a pioneer, this is how I know. It was literally the most miserable six days in existence.

I can live without television. I can live without music. But there honestly is nothing you can do once the sunsets if you don't have power. Want to read? Yeah, can't see the page. EBooks? How are you going to recharge the reader? Phone? Laptop? Same problem.

I do have a couple of power banks and I'll have all my electronic equipment charged to full when the storm hits, but who knows how long the power will be down? I never thought I'd be without power in Minneapolis for six days, but there you go.

There's also food in the fridge and the freezer to consider, too.

I went grocery shopping and spent a ridiculous amount of money on nonperishable items. I also bought powdered milk and gallons of bottled water. If worse comes to worse, I can make milk and eat cereal.

But I hate losing power. Hate it.

And I hate thinking about how dangerous the ice is for people to be out in, either in a vehicle or on foot.

Nope, I'm definitely not pioneer material.

I scheduled some blog posts ahead of time so that it the worst happens, y'all will still have content. Hopefully, I can post an extra one saying the storm missed me. Or at least the storm didn't take down the power. 

Facebook Strangeness

Weirdness on Facebook for me.

First, let me mention that Facebook almost never shows me posts from people on my friends list. About 99% of what I see is stuff from pages.

Which is where the second thing comes in. Suddenly, without any warning, I started getting posts from recipe/cooking pages in my feed. I'm like WTF? I'm pretty sure no one hates cooking more than I do. Why is the algorithm suddenly showing me these posts?

I tried hiding the posts for thirty days, but it didn't help. More and more cooking/recipe posts from a variety of pages kept appearing.

I'm growling, "I can't see posts from my friends, but random cooking pages? That I get all the time."

Most of what appears in my feed isn't even from pages that I follow. Most of them have little suggestions about following these randos.

Which is a clue to what happened the other day. I had another post (ANOTHER!) from some page called Grandma's Recipes or something like that and I suddenly noticed there's no follow suggestion button. Curious, I click the dots and discover I'm already following this page.

What?

No, I am not. Unless I accidentally touched something while scrolling my phone.

I immediately unfollowed the page and will check any other cooking posts that pop up in my feed to see if I somehow am following that one, too.

But the question remains: Why did something cooking related turn up in my feed to begin with?

There's still a mystery to be solved.

ETA: I found another cooking page I was following! Once could have been an accident, but twice? I don't think so! 

Fine Tuning the System or Let's Try Another Weekly Planning Idea

2025 was all about testing out planners and seeing what worked (and what didn't work) for me. I always had a daily system in place, but after my dad died, I needed a weekly and monthly system. I have ADHD and have a hard time staying on track. My dad used to remind me to take care of things. Now I need to remember on my own.

My daily system is easy. I just list everything I need to get done that day on the daily page. I prefer this to a general To Do list because I feel as if I don't have a deadline then and just don't do anything. If it's written on the daily page of my planner, it must be done that day.

I discovered stickers to create a monthly dashboard for my planner. I didn't realize there were planner companies doing this, but I use a Tomoe River Paper planner, and while there was a blank page to create a dashboard each month, there wasn't an actual dashboard. The stickers solved this problem.

I tried this early in 2025 and it worked so well that I kept it for 2026.

My problem is the weekly tasks. If you've been following this blog, you know I've tried a large number of ideas and none of them panned out for 2025.

Then one of my favorite planner companies released a new planner and there was a blank page in front of each weekly spread. This is what I'm test driving this year. Can I create a weekly dashboard similar to the monthly dashboard that will work for me? Will I be able to actually do these tasks and not ignore them?

I'm laying out the weekly dashboards one by one, not setting them up ahead of time, so that if a layout isn't working for me, I can try something else. If this works, it will be incredible! This planner is almost exactly what I would create if I was making a planner. Almost, but short of making my own planner, I don't think I'll ever find one closer to the way my brain works.

Of course, I also bought a 2026 version of the planner I used this year because I loved this one as well. The only reason I'm not using it as the primary for 2026 is there are no blank pages I can use for weekly dashboards and none of the systems I tried inside this planner for weekly tasks worked in 2025.

However, I bought the B6 size for this planner instead of the A5. I want to test it out for space because I prefer the smaller footprint of the B6, but I'm not sure I can live without the room the A5 provides. So far, it feels a little cramped, but we'll see if I adjust.

I also bought two different sizes of monthly booklets for carry. One was the size I used this year, the other is smaller. The smaller size fits in my purse better, so I'm thinking this is the last year for the larger one. However, I also realized that I always refer to my phone's calendar when I need to make an appointment, so I might not need any monthly calendars at all for 2027. The problem is keeping my phone up to date.

The last purchase in my planner system was the standard size weekly vertical planner booklets (Set of 2 for the year). This I use for time tracking and it's worked so well that I want to continue using it. Didn't hit my word count goal? Let's check out the time tracker and see what I was doing.

With my ADHD, I have a problem with time blindness and tracking forces me to be more aware of how I'm spending my day. Like did I spend two hours crafting Saturday morning instead of writing and then crafting in the evening?

My time tracker doesn't lie.

I only record what I did every half an hour, so it's not too intrusive. If I spent 16 minutes crafting and 14 minutes cleaning, I record Crafting on the line. When I first started this system, I would take a highlighter and outline the time I spent writing, but now I don't have to do that. I'm more aware and I credit time tracking for limiting my time creep.

Last 2026 items: I still have the 18 month writing planner I created for myself and am using it, but decided that I didn't need the month layout or the dashboard layout built into the planner. I just need the weekly dashboard page to set goals and keep track of how many words I write.

I also bought a monthly planner because I had a scathingly brilliant idea, didn't write it down, and waited for the planners to go on sale. By the time they did and by the time it arrived, the scathingly brilliant idea was long gone, not so much of a trace of it remaining. So while I'll use this planner for something, I have no idea what. It's just a monthly calendar with 10 blank pages behind each one.