A couple posts ago I talked about my planner, and how I’m ecologically against buying a new partly plastic planner every year when my refillable leather planner folio has been going strong for 30 years and has another 30 in it.
I was about to order the 2021 At-A-Glance 70-008 refill, which is all recyclable paper and metal. But in shopping for it, I chanced on the At-A-Glance 064-287 refill. It’s 1/8” taller and a bit wider too because of the tabs. Also, it turned out to have a bit of plastic coating on the tabs and it’s made in China instead of the USA, so its environmental footprint is bigger. But it looks like exactly what I need, and it’s still a significantly lighter footprint than buying a whole new planner every year.
The 008 planner refill (on the left) has half-hour increments to the day, perfect for business scheduling. But a little less ideal for school, where hourly schedules have to share with daily priority lists. You can see I was heading in that direction on some dates in the current planner, altering the left sides of each date box to an hourly breakdown and repurposing the numerals 1 through 5 as a priority list. But the 287 planner refill is already set up that way, and each date box is a hair bigger too. The monthly tabs may be handy, we’ll see, but I’ll probably continue my practice of trimming the bottom left corner as I go; that’s a nice Sunday evening/Monday morning ritual.
In other news, it looks like San Diego K-12 schools have the OK to open for the fall semester, which for many starts on Labor Day. Although my fall classes have already started and are all online, that bodes well for getting the hands-on classes I need in the spring semester! Yay! If I can knock off the stat class online during intersession, I could be finished with my AA a bit earlier than I’d anticipated!
Today wraps up the second week of classes. So far, I’ve watched two lectures, two films, did three chapters of reading plus some additional material, selected a final project, and participated in two discussion exercises. On the lectures, I’m so happy to be online where I can pause the professor to take notes and rewind to get the notes right. I really think online education is more effective than in-person for certain kinds of classes, and introductory science courses may be right in the online wheelhouse.
