how hard is it to find a calendar!?

very hard i guess. and i knew this. it's the same with purses and diaper bags. for some reason, i can never find exactly the right one. maybe it's because i don't exactly know what is exactly right. i spent at least 30 minutes today in borders, looking at calendars, and came home empty handed - finally giving up when my kids got bored with the extra huge selection of books on motorcycles, classic airplanes and muscle cars they had parked themselves in front of. (although layla had managed to keep herself fairly well entertained by the pocket guide to the kelley blue book... so if you want advice on buying or selling a used car, just ask her.)

so what is it i want? well, in all honesty, i want something that will instantly fix all the disorganized facets of my life. or basically, i want a miracle divided into months and weeks and days.

well, since it doesn't seem that God sells a calendar, my options seem to be limited to that which i have to implement myself. so do i want a wall calendar? a desk calendar? an engagement calendar? i can't seem to sort this out. i've been using google calendar on the computer and i like it all right, but i want something that i can put out for everyone to see. one of those family organizer calendars, but there are a lot of them, and while i've like aspects of all of them, none of them seems to have all of the things i want.

i like the wall calendars for the bigger writing space and the visibility of it. i like ones that have lines on the days (i hate writing on stuff without lines because it's always just a mess and that's what i'm trying to fix by having a calendar in the first place). i also like that you have a big picture of the whole month in front of you, rather than just the current week and it's easy to look ahead to the next month. a lot of the family calendars have places you can put in each family member. while this is nice, it presents two problems for me. first, what do you do when a family member has more than one engagement on a given day? or when there's an engagement that involves multiple family members? secondly, lots of those calendars run vertically from top to bottom, rather than laid out in horizontal weeks. i've tried that before and it screws me up. my brain is so trained to think of time in a horizontal fashion that i can never seem to figure out where i am in the week or month looking at one of those. so that's a no go.

i like engagement calendars for the convenience of being able to take it with you, so you always have your schedule when someone says, "can you do such and such on such and such date?" i also like that a lot of the family planners i was looking at today had perforated grocery lists and menu planners running down the sides of the pages. i'm a total menu planner (if for no other reason than i then know if the leftovers in the fridge are ok to eat or if they should be feared), and it would be awesome to have this right there with my schedule. and the tear out feature is great. however, in order for most of these planners to be functional for their intended use, they're kind of small to be a visible, central calendar for everyone to use as a reference. also, the ones i liked the best for other reasons, didn't have lines to write on on the days.

there were some bigger (letter size) planner types that were spiral bound and showed 2 weeks at a time, lines on the days, and a tear off portion on the sides, but it was kind of generic and i didn't like how they were laid out exactly. i did like that they were bigger and showed more than one week at a time...

i also want stickers. most of the ones that have the stickers i want are not with a calendar i want. but i figure i can always just get the flylady stickers and that should cover just about everything.

grrr... why is this so hard for me?

and where is the calendar that sends you an electric shock if you don't clean the bathroom because you just don't feel like it?