(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 44)

Loyal Sunday Paper readers will probably remember that this time of year is exciting for me:

It’s usually when I get my new yearly planner.

(Actually, by this time I’ve probably had it for a month already.)

But this year, for obvious reasons, a new planner is neither something I need nor am I racing out at the usual time to go get one.

(And before we go any further, let me address the incongruity of the picture that goes along with this piece: I just figured that instead of putting a boring picture of a planner I’d show you this year’s Jack-O-Lantern. More on that in the ‘Notes’ section. OK. Now back to the planner.)

It probably won’t surprise you to hear I use a planner and not an app - I think most of you know that I’m comfortable with technology, but I prefer old-school pen and paper for a lot of things.

My scheduling is one such thing - and I even got to the point where my calendar was color-coded: I’d use a red pen for my comedy stuff, blue for writing stuff, green for my own doctor/dentist appointments, and purple for the girls’ appointments. Sometimes if I wanted something to stand out for some reason I’d use a regular black pen.

I keep the planner on my desk and refer to it often through the day…and nothing gave me more of a thrill than to see the red fill up the monthly calendar with comedy dates.

In 2020, I had a couple of reds filled in all the way through to September…and of course the March Exhibit ‘A’ show was the last red that would actually take place.

In theory I could still use a 2021 planner for some of my writing assignments, but I’m finding that the white board in my office serves a good enough purpose to remind me of upcoming deadlines or ideas.

And I honestly don’t know what 2021 is going to hold for the comedy bookings.

Obviously 2020 is going to be remembered for so much of what didn’t happen.

But if I ever went back to my stack of calendars in a few years and looked back through it will be 2021 that will be missing.

Because that’s the year that’s probably going to be remembered for not making any plans in advance.

Notes

*Before I get into everything else - you can Like my Facebook page here and you can follow me on Twitter here.

*Perhaps you remember that last year I carved a disaster of a pumpkin. Wait, I worded that wrong. The pumpkin was a nice pumpkin. My carving of it was a disaster. We thought it would be a good idea to do a Spider-Man jack-o-lantern and found a cool one on-line to copy and I just couldn’t re-create it. And as I was doing it the girls thought maybe Captain America would have been a better idea. It was. And it was nice that we had this year’s idea ready to go a year ago. Here’s last year’s post with a picture of the horrendous jack-o-lantern as well as links to previous years’ pumpkins that you can click around through. This year’s, of course, is pictured above. It took no time to carve, so all things considered, I am very happy with it. (Like a pitcher throwing a 1-2-3 inning after getting tagged for a homer in the previous inning, this was a bounceback pumpkin.)

*How was your Halloween? Ours was pretty nice actually. A quiet, relaxing day. As you may or may not know, it snowed here Friday, and there wasn’t enough melting on Saturday to make it a welcoming approach to the door for trick or treaters, so that kind of solved that issue we were wondering about. (I’m not sure anyone was coming by anyway.) The girls were pretty happy, too - Kathy took them to CVS and they bought some of their favorite candy to enjoy during the day to make up for no trick-or-treating.

*So the snow was kind of convenient for the Halloween uncertainty, but it’s a real inconvenience for the yard work I need to do. (And I also hadn’t put some stuff, like deck furniture, away for the winter yet - I was planning on it this weekend…and now some of it is buried in snow.)

*Did you turn your clocks back?

*I’ve been looking forward to Tuesday for a solid four years. (I thought I wrote something about that election four years ago that I was going to link to but I can’t find it.) It has not been a good four years. Hopefully Tuesday gives the majority of this country something to look forward to for the next four years and beyond.