Fill in the calendar

This is the time of year when I'm filling up my calendar.

After a blissful week of almost no fixed appointments/meetings, I've flipped the calendar to September and am getting brave enough to start filling in all those meetings and obligations that I have.

I've put some of the prayer meetings in. There are about seven school prayer meetings that I go to in a month (one for each grade of my kids, plus a weekly all-school one). Then there is a monthly OMF one on the other side of the city. Twice a year a bunch of missionary women from a variety of missions get together to pray too.

Then there are a number of over-nighters that both of us have scheduled. I've got an OMF Ladies Retreat later this month and only two nights later am going to a three-day coaching workshop. Later in October I have an overnight running the Writer's Workshop I mentioned yesterday. That's about it for 2012, though we do are planning to book some time away the week before Christmas.

I've also put some of the student-free and school days-off into the calendar. Parent-teacher interviews and various half-days. These are important to know about! I'm wondering if we could go camping one more weekend before winter? We have a long weekend coming up in October . . .

Unfortunately my wall calendar only goes up until the end of January, so 2013 will have to wait until Christmas time.

I'm probably old fashioned, but I like to have these things up on my wall calendar, as well as in my iPhone. The whole school uses iCal, a Mac calendar that is regularly updated. Middle and high school teachers even use it to put the day's homework! (Useful for checking up on our kids!) And it is very useful to have all that at my fingertips when I'm out and someone says, "Can I meet you on such and such a date?" But if I don't have everything on both, I can easily double book. I know it isn't the most time efficient, but it helps me to see things laid out as they are on the wall calendar.

In the southern hemisphere the Jan-Dec calendar makes sense because that lines up with our school year. Just wondering why north AmericansEuropeans don't use a July-June calendar? Maybe they do? The north American/European year seems to organised along those lines. The Dec/Jan divide seems to be just a bit of inconvenience. I know that many Japanese calendars are designed to be April-March.