When I saw @mipiano post about this month's Hive Collectors topic, I thought what a perfect idea. I gathered all my notebooks, ready to tell a few stories. For those who know me, you will not be surprised to see that I have many notebooks from my favourite Sanrio character, Little Twin Star 😃
Little Twin Star
I have six of these
Two, I have not used yet. They are the top middle and bottom left ones from the photos above. The bottom left one is particularly cute. It's a hard cover notepad, and has various sections inside with different page designs. Some have lines for writing, some pattern backgrounds, and many have different Little Twin Star characters. It's so pretty that I don't want to spoil it by writing in it 😊. The smaller one on the right is a tear out note pad with two different designs. Unfortunately they are not post it notes, just normal pieces of note paper.
Recipe book
I had this for ages, probably from when I started baking around 15 years ago. I haven't updated it much in recent years because I just Google recipes online now. After baking, I often forget to write the recipe down, or sometimes because it was a crappy recipe. The last two entries were from last week when I have been starting to bake sourdough bread.
In the early days, I also worked out the cost for each bake. Like this sponge, it cost 65.4p, probably from 13 or 14 years ago. Nowadays, I can't even buy 2 eggs for 65p. It's shocking how expensive things have become!!!
Sourdough journey
I just started using this notebook a couple of weeks ago. It's to keep notes of every sourdough I make so I know what I did, how the bake came out, what was good or wrong with the process,the mistakes I made, and what should be done differently next time. I'm on my third bake, and so far keeping notes is proving very useful for me.
School book
I wrote about this noteppbook last year so I won't talk too much about it here. That post bought back many nice memories for me from when I was at school. That was a million years ago...
Random notebooks
Here's a bunch of other random notepad including the lovely Hive one which I was very happy to receive last year. The one next to it is a notepad from the travel agent that organised my America roadtrip the other year. The white one above it is a miscellaneous one lying around in the house and has all bits of random notes in it.
Spiral art
A few years ago I bought one of those spiral art sets that I used to play with when I was a kid. I bought a sketch pad, ie a nice quality plain paper note pad and spent a lot of time playing with the spiral art kit. It's both surprising and amazing the patterns that came out, not to mention very soothing in the process.
Learning Spanish
And finally, the black notebook. Last year I started to, or rather tried to learn Spanish. I learn best when I write things down and I have a good few pages full of vocabulary. I've dropped the ball on learning Spanish in recent months, I really must pick it up again.
Learning Mandarin
Talking of learning languages, one of the main objective when I moved to Taiwan was to improve my speaking mandarin. In Taiwan they use a system called zhuyin to learn the language. It consist of a set of phonetic symbols like this ㄅㄆㄇㄈ it can easily scare new learners off. You can see more of these phonetic symbols in my notebook below. I bought 6 notebooks to write down the vocabulary because there are 37 zhuyin symbols and 4 tones, so there can be thousands of combinations. It was a big learning curve, but once I mastered zhuyin, my speaking mandarin improved a lot.
This was a very interesting post to write, going through old stuff and remembering some nice times. The downside is that it's triggered more work for me as I have to pick up learning Spanish again. Last year the aim was to learn it in time for my trip to Argentina, to speak a few simple phrases. I failed miserably. I wonder if this time I can learn a few words in time for my Alicante trip?
