Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 5

Lessons Learned

I thought I'd come up with alternate uses for the planners that were not going to work for me as actual planners. This has been an epic fail for me.

Item 1, the planner I thought I'd use as a memory planner. Sigh. It showed me how bad I am with inked stamps and that I don't feel like fighting this every day. Especially because (see item 2)

Item 2: I have four journals now that I have to record stuff in every day. FOUR. One is the Five-Year Diary, so it's not exactly a journal and serves (sort of) a different purpose, but this is like three too many.

I would be okay with the Five-Year Diary and one B6 sized journal, but I have an A5 journal and 2 B6 journals and OMG!

I keep telling myself I don't have to do this, that I can drop a couple of them. Unfortunately, my brain does not like this idea and the thought of abandoning them is untenable.

My solution for the memory planner is that next year I will buy stickers and redate the entire thing and use it in 2026. I will have to figure out how to cover up and re-use the pages I messed up trying to stamp, but I'm confident something will come to me.

On the journals? I'm just plugging along.

Item 3: The monthly planner was unneeded, and I've moved these items into my everyday planner.

Item 4: The weekly planner was also unneeded, and I've moved these items into my everyday planner.

Item 5: The EveryDay Carry (EDC) Planner. This is kind of working out for me. I like having it all on paper in front of me, and one of my weekly to-do items is to synchronize my planners. Um, I'm mostly successful with this. The one thing I don't like is this planner has a bunch of weekly pages and blank pages and I only need the monthly view. Next year I will buy a calendar booklet and not get an actual planner.

Item 6: the writing planner I wanted to try out, and thought would be my writing planner has turned into my secondary planner. As in it has all the items (or most of them anyway) from the everyday planner, but I keep this one on the other side of the house from the official planner. That way I don't have to run around to check my day.

I had hopes for this, but I've purchased actual author planners in the past and literally never used them even one day, so I'm not surprised. Plus, it's not a bad thing to have a reference handy. BTW, this planner would be totally awesome and a definite contender for everyday planner if it were one volume and not two. Two volumes are a deal breaker for me.

Item 7: the planner I tested, and thought would be my entertainment review book. Sigh. I had such high hopes for this one. I want to consume more entertainment, but I spend so much time writing that it's hard for me to find time to read for pleasure or even watch a movie. Especially when I have so many podcasts I enjoy listening to and they take up what little time I do have. Um, did I mention I'm over 120 episodes now on one of the podcasts I used to love?

And okay, I'm also spending way too much time writing in four journals to read or watch a movie. Gah! Four journals.

I'm sort of looking forward to 2026 when everything will be streamlined, and I won't be spending my entire life journaling.

Algorithm Hell

I'm sort of in algorithm hell on YouTube.

I like to listen to music to help me fall asleep and stay asleep all night. I've found a few live sleep stations that I like to listen to.

When I'm writing I sometimes like to listen to focus music, usually geared toward people with ADHD, but not always. Sometimes I like a pomodoro timer with music to help me write.

Sometimes when I have a headache or have had a stressful day, I will put on some relaxing music. A few weeks ago, I put on something that I think was called soothing cello.

In no way, shape, or form do I want the algorithm to recommend more of these videos to me. When I want them, I will seek them out, thank you very much.

And then it got worse. I watched a video on how to clean my oven without chemicals. ::sobs::

My suggested videos are 90% stuff I don't want to watch and don't care about. Maybe 95%. Watching without being signed in is not an option. I pay to watch YouTube without ads. I'm not logging out and being subjected to the constant interruptions.

I could probably go through and delete these videos from my history except that I kind of don't want to do that. If I want to rewatch that video on how to clean my oven with baking soda paste, I want a fighting chance to find it again.

There should be a check box that says something like check this box to exclude this video from your suggested videos.

It's so bad right now that I'm afraid to watch a video I spotted on how to organize my craft room for fear that my suggested watch list will become 99% videos I don't want to see.

Big algorithm is making it really hard for me to enjoy YouTube.

My Prime Beefs with ADHD

There are a lot of things about my ADHD that make me nuts, but I swear, number one on the list is not being able to find things I know I have.

Today, my pen ran out of ink. I know I have two boxes of this pen, so I went to my office to grab a replacement.

There weren't any, at least not where I thought I put them.

I looked through those drawers twice. Then I thought, did I take them out of their boxes and put them in a pouch? I like pen/pencil pouches, and I have a bunch of them. I hoped I didn't do that. Looking through that collection could take a while. As a last-ditch effort, I checked the drawers in my desk. I did put some pens there, too. I just didn't think the Juice Up 04 was one of them.

It was. I found both boxes in the second drawer, buried beneath loose Ink Joy pens.

The good news is I didn't have to buy more. I've done that more than once. It's still frustrating, though, to not remember where something is.

My other big beef with ADHD? The overwhelm.

When my dad came to live with me and we moved to a different house, everything just got dumped. Now that he's gone, I'm trying to get a handle on all the boxes and clutter and get rid of it. I was talking to my brother about how overwhelmed I felt. He was like, I don't get overwhelmed, I get it done.

Me: Dude, you don't have ADHD. That's the difference.

I've broken things down into tiny increments to avoid overwhelm as much as possible and there are times I still feel like it's too much. I've added time increments to the tiny steps. Like I just have to work on cleaning up my office floor for 15 minutes. Usually once I get started, I keep going.

I've had two 15-minute times. One was actually 90 minutes and the other about 30 minutes. The office is starting to look better, but there's still work to do and it's still overwhelming.

And even though I put my pens in what should have been a natural spot to look, I still couldn't find them immediately.

The Name Game Part 10,035

If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that I do not get to name my characters. They tell me their names, and if I don't like it? Too bad.

Sometimes I get things like: My name starts with an R. And then I'll spend hours combing through baby name websites and books trying to find the right R name. Hours is understating it. It was weeks because this heroine had a name classified as a male name in all but one resource. If I hadn't stumbled across that, I might not know her name yet.

Then there are the characters who are sort of easy. I was walking down the hallway and I heard Mika. And while I had no clue who she was or what story she was from, at least I didn't have to work for her name. (Through a Crimson Veil)

I preface this blog post with all this information because it explains why I am in a tangle with names in my Paladin League series.

If I were picking names, I would have chosen ones that were a lot different from each other so that there would be no confusion. Instead, I have Case (Wicked Suspicion) and Cal (AKA Baggs). I have Iona and Ian (AKA Rusty).

To combat this, after Case's book, he is only referred to as Lurch. His first name is no longer mentioned. There's a book between Case's story and Cal's book, so I'm hoping that helps.

Iona also goes by Io. Ian is Ian. This one is going to be painful. I'm still debating how to handle this. I have one possibly good idea. If Ian was called Rusty by his family the entire time he was growing up, maybe he would think of himself as Rusty and then I wouldn't have the I-name issue.

The thing that's so frustrating to me is I worried that Ayla and Iona were too close. They are twin sisters. I probably couldn't have changed either name, but I might have been able to coax a nickname out of one of them.

I never considered the other books and other characters.

Although, in my defense on this one, Ian was going by Zack when Ayla and Iona made their appearances in my brain. Don't even get me started about the characters who give me the wrong name and then change it on me at the last minute.

Review: OliClips

I did not receive compensation of any kind for this review. I paid for these products myself when they had a sale.

I've been using magnetic bookmarks in my planners forever. Years ago, I picked up a set of three at a craft store, and paired with some decorative paperclips that I received for free with sticker orders, I managed to separate my planner.

It wasn't until I got into the Tomoe River Paper planner community that I heard of OliClips. There's like an umlaut involved, but I don't know how to make an umlaut in Blogger, so apologies.

My first attempt was an OliClip knock off. It was okay, but it looked like a knock off. It was out of alignment, kind of banged up in appearance, and generally not ascetically pleasing.

When the real OliClip maker had a sale, I tried some of their small clips. What a difference! These were awesome and so much better than the craft store magnetic bookmarks I'd been using. The next time they went on sale, I tried a bigger size clip and the new (at that time) slimline version.

The big clip is excellent for thick sections of paper. I'm using this in my everyday planner to separate the weekly section from the daily pages. The smaller clip couldn't handle the thickness.

And the slimline. I love the slimline. It seems to have less magnetic power than the small OliClips, so I reserve them for particular uses, but the reason I love them so much is how they work in my time tracker booklet.

I was using the small size OliClips in my time tracker, but the bottom righthand clip covered up the page at the bottom. One of the things I use my time tracker for is to record the number of words I wrote that day and I put that number on the last row of the grid. It got annoying having to slide the clip up and down at the end of the week. Too high and it covered up my timeline. Too low and I had to move it to record my word count.

It took me until the end of January to go, hmm, I have a couple of extra slimline clips. I wonder if that will solve my problem? It did.

I was using a decorative paperclip in the top left, but it kept falling out, so I added another slimline up there. Another problem solved. All my annoyances were solved with two small switches.

Anyway, if you were wondering if the OliClips are worth it. I think they are. I wish I'd found them earlier because they are so much better than those weak magnetic bookmarks I had been using before I bought them.

Highly recommended. Your size depends on how much magnet you need, so choose wisely.

And as a reminder, I did not receive compensation of any kind for this review.

Souped Up

One of the things I love having for dinner before it gets too hot is soup.

When my dad was alive and living with me, he did the cooking because he enjoyed it, and he was good at it. Me? I hate cooking. I get bored, wander away, and up with stuff burned to the bottom of my pans.

I really, really missed my dad's Tortilla Soup with Chorizo and Turkey Meatballs. It was a recipe I found at Cooking Light back years ago. A search of their site didn't turn it up, but I found a blogger who has the recipe posted and linked to that site for you.

As much as I wanted the soup, it seemed like too much work. Like was I really going to make turkey meatballs? No. But a friend told me there was premade turkey meatballs available at the store. Okay, call me stupid, but it never occurred to me that they sold premade turkey meatballs. I knew they did premade beef meatballs, but turkey?

My ignorance ties into something else I hate. Grocery shopping. Ugh! I make a list, I run in and buy what is on this list, and I get the heck out of there ASAP. I've since learned that a lot of ADHD people (like me!) do not like grocery shopping or cooking. With my get-in-get-out mindset, I don't do any exploring.

With the knowledge that I didn't have to make my own meatballs, that I could buy pre-chopped onion, and that the only thing I would have to prepare would be the poblano pepper (it's mild!), I headed off to buy what I needed to make my favorite soup.

The premade turkey meatballs worked great. They weren't as good as homemade, but since I'm not making my own, it was good enough. The prechopped onion was also most awesome. I hate cutting up onion. I tossed everything in a big soup pot, added all my ingredients and let it cook for about half an hour to make sure the premade meatballs were hot.

Shock of all shocks, I actually made a good soup!

I added more corn kernels and tortillas than the recipe called for because both items were getting a little old and needed to be used up. I also added a lot more chicken stock than the recipe called for because I wanted more soup. And after I had a bowl, I added even more stock and seasoning so I would have lots and lots of soup.

The biggest issue I had was that I couldn't find things. The kitchen was always my dad's space, and he set it up in a way that worked for him. For example, before he moved in with me, I had my spices setup in an organized, alphabetized order so I could locate them.

My dad liked the spices he used all the time in front and everything else shoved in the back of the cabinet haphazardly. I needed ground coriander for the recipe. Could I find it? No. Do I own any? I assume I must since my dad always made the soup. Did he skip the coriander? Maybe. That means I might not own any. When I have a little time, I'll have to take out all the spices, inventory them, and reorganize for me.

At least I was able to find my big soup pot and the ladle. 

Epic Fail Time

I never enjoyed crafts when I was younger, but now I knit, and I did learn to crochet, although I forgot how and would need to relearn. I play with stickers in my planners and vellums and washi tape.

For the life of me, I cannot use ink stamps or stencils without it looking like a five-year-old child decided to play with those tools.

The stencils should be easy enough that even I can successfully use them, however, this is not the case. I've tried different pens, holding the pens at different angles, and everything else I could think of. My stencils still don't look like any of the stenciling I see online.

I'm even worse with ink stamps. Especially the clear, silicone-looking stamps.

I found videos on YouTube that say the problem is likely over inking the stamp. That makes sense, I thought, so I went out of my way to not over ink the stamp. I still end up with a hot mess. Especially on my fingers, the table, and the paper I'm trying to stamp.

The smaller the stamp, the better the job I do. Mostly. My small weather stamps (sun, cloud, rain, snow, etc.) usually come out okay. Not always. Sometimes I still end up with an extra line of ink when I stamp, but at least I have a fighting chance. These are wooden stamps with rubber impressions.

The bigger silicone style stamps that need to go on acrylic blocks are my Kryptonite. I probably have a 5% success rate with the damn things. Otherwise, it's a hot mess.

I honestly have no idea why this is so challenging for me, but apparently my crafting ability ends with yarn, stickers, and washi tape.

Fitbit Hell

I don't remember how long ago I bought my Fitbit Luxe, but it's definitely nowhere near as old as my previous Fitbit which lasted forever. I can't remember the name of that one, but it was the same size and shape as the Luxe.
Anyway, the Luxe has started to become a problem. Instead of charging it twice a week, I need to charge it every other day. That's not as big a problem as how far wrong the battery reading is. I just swiped and it says my Luxe was at 77%. Good, I thought.
And then thing wouldn't come on when I tapped it.
Back on the charger long enough to restart it and now the battery is listed at 1%. Really? A minute earlier it said 77%. Did the restart take 76% of the battery? I doubt it.
I only wear the Fitbit now for sleep information because I have my Apple Watch for steps and works outs, so I thought I'll just buy one of those cheap knock offs and use that.
The cheap knock off is fine. Mostly. Except that it lights up brightly enough to signal the International Space Station every time I move my arm despite the fact that I have it on manual. I also have doubts about how accurate the sleep times are because it will say one thing when I wake up in the morning and then an hour later it says I slept more. I didn't.
That drove me back to the Fitbit. It might be a pain, but at least it doesn't light up unnecessarily. But here I am, blogging nearly half an hour after I wanted to go to bed because the Fitbit is charging from the 1% it claims it was at. It also takes forever to recharge. Grrr.
I'm to the point where I actually debated buying another Fitbit Luxe. Guess what? Unavailable. Double Grrr.

Planner Review: Part 2

Just an FYI, I received no compensation of any kind for this post, and I paid full price for all my planners. My credit card is still unhappy about this fact.

On Tuesday, I talked about my 2025 planners, including the monthly, weekly, and the EveryDay Carry (EDC) planner. I also reviewed how those were working for me. Today, I review my daily planner selection. The winner is at the bottom!

Since I was switching from the planner I'd been in since 2015 to a new planner, I bought a number of different ones because I wasn't sure which one would work.

The Hobonichi Cousin in A5. It's fine. All the other planners I bought are boutique planners, so if worse came to worst and they ceased to be created, I could move into this planner. I'm not a huge fan of the quotes because they squeeze the page, the colors are not my choices, and the timeline on the daily pages is not usable for me, but I found a shop that sells a sticker timeline that goes over it and I can deal with the rest. If I had to.

Hemlock & Oak Dated Daily. Hemlock & Oak makes a really nice, nice planner. I used it as a daily journal in 2024 and loved the hell out of it. This is the only planner I tried for 2025 that didn't have Tomoe River Paper, but a thick, regular paper that doesn't show any bleed through and I also have zero ghosting. I still love this planner for journaling, but I don't think I would want it for my daily planner. It's in an A5 size and is thick and heavy. I don't carry my desk planner with me, so this wasn't a deal breaker for me and there's plenty of room to write. I'll continue this as a journal.

Sterling Ink Daily Planner A5 and B6. I really like Sterling Ink planners. I had a weekly for 2024 that I journaled in, and I enjoyed it immensely. My weekly was a B6, and I like that size, but I wasn't sure it would be big enough. The B6 might be a little small for me because I would have to record my water, vitamins, etc. in here on the daily page. The A5 has more room. The biggest drawback for me is this planner has no weekly pages--only monthly and daily.

Plans by Just Scribble Horizontal in A5. I really, really like this planner, and if it were in one volume, it would be a contender for my winner. Unfortunately, it's in two volumes and that's a deal breaker for me. I'm using it as a secondary everyday planner. As in it's a reminder for me to glance out when I'm on the other side of the house, but it's not my primary planner. I'm hoping that for 2026, there's a single volume option.

What I like about this planner is that instead of being setup with all the months together, then all the weeks, and then all the days, Plans has it setup so that the month comes, then the week, then the 7 daily pages for that week, then the next weekly pages, then the next 7 daily pages, and so on. I like this setup a lot. I also love the horizontal weekly setup with the blank page. This planner is so awesome! But as I said, two volumes are a deal breaker for me. I need/want one book. I'm not looking for portability in my official planner. That's what my EveryDay Carry planner is for.

The winner for me is Nisha Fernando Designs Journey Planner in A5. I found this planner late, after their preorder closed, but as soon as I saw it, I was like, I think this planner would be perfect for me! And I was right.

What I like about this planner: It has an entire section to record meals. It also has space for water and vitamins. I adjusted it slightly because I take medication for my acid reflux with every meal, so I needed AM/Noon/PM and not the single vitamin dose the planner offered. It was a simple fix. There's also a section off to the right (not in the picture) that I was able to adjust to record how much sleep I was getting every night. And there's the little barbell to check off workouts. Win!

All planners have a monthly section, so nothing unusual here.

I decorated my monthly page with washi tape. February was a nice, light month. All the monthly reminders are out of the picture. If you look closely, you can see some ghosting. That's that Tomoe River Paper does, but that doesn't bother me at all. I love the crinkly texture of this paper, and the major win is that I can have the room and pages I need in one book because of how thin the paper is.

This is a vertical weekly planner which I work around with washi tape and stickers. I don't plan in my weekly pages because my brain doesn't process information in this mass of days. I tried weekly planners before switching to daily and it was too easy to ignore everything when it was all lumped together.

Here's a picture I sent a friend to show her what I was doing. I used thin washi tape to divide the page. At the top, I'm keeping track of the temperature, and I have a stamp set for sun or rain or clouds that I use up there as well. The bottom section is for word count. My goal is 1000 words a day. I record what I actually wrote below the goal.

The most important section is the "THIS WEEK" part on the middle right. This is where I record any weekly tasks that need to be done. Since this picture was taken right after I setup the planner, I only have the four tasks I want to do every week.

There wasn't enough space on the side bar of the monthly pages (above) to keep track of my monthly To-Do list, so I needed a work around. The Journey Planner has a blank page at the beginning of each month of daily pages. I found a sticker company, Mandy Lynn Plans (again, no compensation was received by me.) that makes monthly dashboards. Problem solved.

The colors of the stickers are much more vibrant than the picture shows. Apologies for being a horrible photographer.

The sticker kit gives me a variety of options for the headings on each section, but the ones I use every month are "This Month," "Important Dates," "Goals," and "Notes." There are tasks I do every month like my newsletter. Important dates can be things like doctor appointments or holidays. Goals are whatever I want to do that month. The important section for me is "This Month." I put check marks in the circles to the left as I complete an item.

And last, but certainly not least since this is the most important for me. The Daily Pages.

You can see the thinness of the Tomoe River Paper in this picture because the stickers on the other side of the page are clearly silhouetted there. Stickers are from the Scooby Doo collection from Capitol Chic Designs (Again, I received no compensation for this post. I bought my stickers from this shop.)

The timeline is printed on the left side of the page and goes from 6am to midnight. There's space above the 6am, so if I need to write something in earlier, I can. Same with space below midnight. There are small marks to divide the page, but I didn't want it halved, so I took a light marker and drew a line down the page to separate the timeline from my daily To-Do list.

I was going to use a dot marker to create check circles to mark off when I accomplished an item, but I discovered that the ghosting was too much, and I switched to a highlighter with a square nib.

I've done other little things to the planner. I've added tabs to all the sections. I've decorated my pages because the A5 allows me room to do that. There's also a section full of trackers, but I've found that I don't really keep up with trackers, so I'm haphazard on using them.

This planner is amazing for me. It gives me the space to have everything in one place and to organize it in a way that makes sense to me and works with my brain. I found my new everything planner and I'm so grateful it exists.

Planner Review: Part One

This year is the year I changed planners for the first time since 2015. The planner I was using was a daily spiral book with Saturday and Sunday sharing a page. I was pushing against that shared weekend page from literally the first day I got the planner, but it had so many other cool features like a place to track water and meals and vitamins and meditation and things like this that I put up with it.
2024, though, was my breaking point.
This was my first full year after my dad died. He'd lived with me since 2016, after my mom passed away, and while I kept track of daily things, he kept track of longer-term items.
With him gone, I needed to stay on top of everything myself which meant my planner needed to do more and be more because I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I cannot rely on my memory.
I always knew I needed to write things down. I've always created workarounds and systems, but I also always had my parents to remind me of things that fell through the cracks in my brain. Without that, my planner needed to do this. My usual planner suddenly was too small, too unusable for what I needed.
I went to a fine-point pen. I wrote two items per line. I manipulated that thing every way I could think of trying to make it work. By September of 2024, I realized I needed a new solution. This planner would never work for me again.
Just so you know, I paid full price for all the planners I mention here. There is no sponsorship of any kind involved.
In 2025, I ordered a ridiculous number of planners. I thought I would need a monthly, a weekly, and a daily all open at the same time, so I purchased one of each. I also bought an EveryDay Carry (EDC) planner.
My monthly was a Sterling Ink B5. The weekly a Sterling Ink B6, and the EDC was a Sterling Ink N2 (which is the same size as the Hobonichi Weeks). I also bought multiple daily planners, uncertain which one would work for me. My options were: Hobonichi Cousin A5, Sterling Ink Daily Planner A5 and B6, Hemlock & Oak Daily Planner, Plans by Just Scribble, and then I spotted Nisha Fernando Design's Journey Planner. It looked perfect for what I needed, and I ordered it in A5 size.
What I learned: I do not want a separate planner for my monthly and weekly views. Instead of being helpful for me, it was annoying. The planner that's become my everyday planner has monthly and vertical weekly pages and I'm using that instead of the planners I bought.
The EDC is good. It's better for me to make appointments and ensure I'm not double booking myself from a paper planner than from my phone. Yes, I do still add everything to my phone, just in case, but my brain just registers commitments better on paper. With the caveat that I have a weekly task to synchronize that planner to my primary planner so that there are no oopsies.
Next blog post will look at my daily planners.