Jackie Wells-Fauth
I am a person who is devoted to calendar watching. I have to be, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to remember what day it is, let alone the month or year! When I get up in the morning, I chant to myself, “Today is Thursday, May 14 in the year of our Lord 2026.” Okay, I don’t say, “year of our Lord” but it sounds elegant and sophisticated.
I am a devoted calendar girl. I always carry a large, book-sized calendar and when I am making any kind of appointments or plans, I have that calendar in front of me to write it all down. I refer to it fondly as “my brains.” And because of all this care and attention, I manage to make it to about half of the things I have scheduled!
I do try. I check it every day at breakfast and then hope that I will still remember that I have a hair appointment at 2:00 that same afternoon! People give me those little appointment cards, and I am grateful for them. But if I don’t transfer that information immediately to the calendar, I’m in trouble. The cards accumulate in my purse and get used to make other notes on, or to mark a page in a book, or just to pick my teeth, but I must have the appointments they proclaim written down on the calendar or I will be getting a call: “Yeah, this is the eye doctor—just wondering if you remembered your appointment that is like, now!”
It’s disconcerting: I have had to rush to massage appointments in my sweaty garden clothes or the dentist’s office with sticky caramel desserts still on my teeth! This year, I even tried putting together two calendars: one for carrying with me and one for my desk at home. Surely that would make me more efficient. It doesn’t. Now, I just miss half of the appointments on one calendar (that I didn’t write on the other one) and half of the appointments on the other calendar!
My children did not inherit this problem. In particular, Tracie has developed her father’s strong sense of organization. She is, of course, using a calendar that is on-line and she refers to it as “the family calendar”—each and every time she gently (or not so gently) reminds me of an event that should be there.
“I didn’t realize that you guys were going to Colorado next week,” I whine. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s on the family calendar,” she replies (somewhat smugly I think) “Haven’t you been checking it?”
“Oh, sure! That’s right, I just forgot about it,” I say, even though we both know that I probably couldn’t find the family calendar with both hands, a flashlight and tech support.
So, I decided that it would be good training for me to try to use the calendar on my phone. Then, when I have mastered that, I could go on to tackle “the family calendar.” I got out my paper calendar and began entering events on my phone’s calendar. I was so excited when I got it all done! It was so easy! I might be ready to master the family calendar after all!
Except when I started checking events, every one of them was listed as starting at 9:00 pm. Birthdays, anniversaries, appointments of all kinds—every one was on that calendar at 9:00 pm. Well, that’s ridiculous! What good is a calendar where everything is automatically at 9:00 pm? You’d think they would have some way to set a time…oh, there it is. I forgot to make that little spinny thing turn around to the proper time. So, I spent another hour trying to make that ugly, uncooperative time wheel spin correctly. That little bugger spins really fast and now, not everything is at 9:00 pm, but there are a couple that stopped spinning at 1:00 am! And I decided I would just be fine with that!
All right. So now, between the appointment cards, the two paper calendars and the phone calendar, I’ve got my schedule all down. No more missing appointments or forgetting birthdays for me! It takes me an hour and a half to check what’s going on for any given day, and most of them don’t sync with each other, but I’m on the right track, okay?
So now, all that’s left is to tackle “the family calendar.” I either have to figure it out (without direction from the Microsoft corporation) or I have to admit that I can’t make it work. And that’s going to be a little tricky.
“Mom, I heard that you are planning to visit next month. I don’t see it on the family calendar,” Tracie said this last week.
“About that, I’m sending you a letter through the US mail complete with stamps and everything. Be looking for it. It’s called, “Confessions from a failed Calendar Girl.”
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