I decided today to make a little search to see if I could find a vertically-oriented Moleskine Reporter. I first went to my local Barnes & Noble which carries Moleskine, but no luck. I did find the new A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, though. I've been looking forward to this book for months. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I could have saved some bucks by getting it at Amazon but couldn't resist - and at least I get B&N's 10% member discount.
So then it was on to my local high-end stationery store, Ideal Stationer's in Mill Valley's Strawberry district. I found their Moleskine section and thought they didn't have any. But then I looked closer and found that they indeed had both the pocket-sized and the larger reporter moleskines! Yay! I first got greedy and wanted to get two of each but calmed down enough to realize that I should test them out to see how well I like them before stocking up. They look really cool. That's part of the problem. Hard to resist.
I took my pocket reporter on my afternoon walk down to downtown Mill Valley to the Peet's Coffee & Tea and back. Since I don't tend to wear ultrabaggy jeans, the fit in my back pocket was a little snug. OK. But not ideal. But then, jeans really don't work very well to carry all my gadgets around. I've been using my iPod shuffle for music and I do wear it around my neck quite frequently - one more place to carry something. Cargo pants are really the way to go. I like my new black jeans from the Gap, though, so I might experiment with a little black leather fanny pack and see how that goes.
So, back to my Moleskines. Part of it is just the novelty. The new form factor is just more unusual and therefore cool. It is definitely a different feeling. More casual. More mobile. Less of a diary or journal kind of feeling. I love the way they look. Now it's just a matter of seeing how well they do in practice.
One last little thing. While at Ideal, I bought some clear Avery 5667 laser labels - 4 across and 80 to a page. I played around and got the format just right in FileMaker which has that label as one of the automatic format label choices.
I picked out 80 of my most frequently used contacts - friends, healthcare, hair salon, clients and colleagues and printed them. Then I pasted them into a pocket Moleskine address book. Looks great! I decided I want to have a phonebook that doesn't require a computer to get to. Sometimes I need a number and the computer is asleep. Then there are power outages. I plan to also paste these little addresses (a shorter list of them - maybe 20 - into my regular moleskines so I'll have my most used numbers handy.
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