calendars

I think I've completed our calendar-shopping for the new year, with the acquisition of a page-a-day calendar. Our requirements for a calendar in this category are:
1a) It features cartoons;
1b) specifically cartoons that we like;
2) It does not have "Bonus Material" on the back of the pages.
The reason for requirement #2 is that we use the old pages as notepaper.

Barnes & Noble is where I went in search of this, as the independent bookstores (even the one with the best selection of wall calendars) tend to be weak on page-a-days, and B&N wasn't too hot either. There were only about 6 offerings that met criterion #1a, and only one of those did not boast on its package of violating #2, so I can only hope that it does fulfill its promises of meeting #2 and #1b also.

Our wall calendars usually come from our favorite used-book store in Mountain View, which always has a big selection of nature calendars, both scenery and animals. Occasionally I've gone for a scenery one, but usually I get one with animals that we like, which in practice means we rotate from year to year among domestic cats, big cats (e.g. tigers), and penguins.

(I haven't had a Tolkien calendar on my wall since 1974, I think, which was the last year - at least for quite some time - that the US edition had Tolkien's own illustrations on it. The illustrators of the succeeding years I found repulsive, and after a while I just stopped keeping track.)

Again, another requirement for the wall calendar is that the squares not be filled up with chitchat, because B. uses it as her appointment book. For my appointment book, I use one of these, which I've been buying, usually from the same little stationery store in Menlo Park, every year since I was 18. I like its display features: I can see at one glance all my appointments for a month, and the approx. 1-inch squares are not too small to write my needs in. Occasionally I've been wooed by electronic organizers, but I find those unsatisfactory and have always returned to this. I still have all the old ones, which are occasionally useful, such as the time I made a list of all the books that our book discussion group had ever discussed. I usually get the new one in September, when my concerts and trip plans for the upcoming year began to pile up. (And any appointments I have that affect B. get copied on to the wall calendar.)

This calendar also includes an address book. But what I do with that is another story.