Starting Over, Again....

 I've decided to try to blog again.  I'm not sure if it will last or not.  I got back onto instagram today and am preparing to get back into that habit of taking pictures to post there.  The past year has been terrible.  My aunt died on Black Friday last year.  My mom has spent a good chunk of the summer in the intensive care unit with a rare heart condition.  Corona virus makes having a high schooler who has no school a pain in the ass, but she did officially graduate in August, so we all breathed a sigh of relief then.  J isn't going to college this semester due to several factors.  I'm not sure how I feel about that.  I really didn't want her to take time off, but I was also afraid of her being unleashed on a college campus without people that know her keeping her in line.  She gets belligerent and then violent and I was afraid I'd be getting a call from the police that she'd attacked someone.  

On the social media front, I found a youtuber and Instagrammer that I like, Daksina, who lives in the UK and does massive journals with lots of artistic elements that I think I can sort of adopt.  She uses a Stalogy B6 planner, which isn't commonly available locally, so I looked it up on amazon and it would take a few days to get here and costs over $20.  I decided to improvise with a A5-ish sized dot grid notebook I got from Michaels a few months ago when I bought one in every color they had with a good coupon.  I bought some Cricut paper packs with Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse to tip in.  I ordered a pack of vellum paper from amazon that should arrive tomorrow.  I can use either scotch tape or double sided tape to insert these pages of artistic pieces and accents.  I designated a page to each day of the first week of September.  I want to put my to do lists and some memory keeping on each day.  I want to use stickers and other artistic elements and ephemera. I've decided to do a No-Spend in Sept & October, so it will be a challenge to do something new with my planner/journal and not spend money.  Hopefully I can use some of the shoestring hints Daksina talked about in her youtube video.  I have found my old cut stickers so hopefully some of those will come in handy.  

I also loaded up my Twisbi Eco with some Noodler's Nikita ink.  I plan to use that until the ink runs out, which should be about a month of journaling, I would think.  It's unusual to use red ink, but I wanted a nice bold solid color.  I was bored with the azure blue that it was filled with previously.