Midori Traveler's Notebook Setup 2016

Hey all! I'm finally finally finally getting around to this long-requested update on my Midori Traveler's Notebook! I really have no excuse, except the usual -- life happened. (How many times have I said that here?) Seriously though, a lot of stuff has happened since last year when I first got it. We moved, and now I'm pregnant! Those are huge life changes, so I guess I really have an excuse, huh? 

Anyway, if you've been reading this blog, you would know that I got my Midori Traveler's Notebook last year. It was my husband's Valentine's Day gift to me. I did a massive post on my setup then, so it's about time I did an update, since it's a new year and all. Actually, the first part of the year is over, so I've been using my book for more than a year now. Okay, enough of my rambling. Here we go. 

The Happy Planner 2016-2017: Sugar & Type

Today I got some happy mail, and it's a really good one! This is the 2016-2017 18-month Happy Planner by Me & My Big Ideas. It starts from July 2016 all the way up to December 2017. I also ordered the Hello Magnetic Page Clips to go with it, and everything's too pretty for words.

The Starbucks x Moleskine Planner: My 2016 Work Planner

TGIF! The first work week of the year has just ended, so it only seemed appropriate for me to post about my 2016 work planner -- the Starbucks x Moleskine Planner.

Last year, I used the Starbucks Planner as my work planner. This year, I'm doing the same. I didn't plan on it (pun not intended, heh), but ever since I started collecting this planner I always wished Starbucks would collaborate with Moleskine. This is the year that it finally happened, and I couldn't resist. I had to get it. 

The Papayat Ka Rin At Dudurugin Sila Planner 2016

I don't really need another planner -- I'm pretty much set for 2016 -- but I had to get this one because it's just hilarious! It's the Papayat Ka Rin At Dudurugin Sila 2016 Planner by Tita Witty aka Witty Will Save the World. I have their slumbook (called Akala Mo Lang Wala Nang Slumbook Pero Meron Meron Meron) and I love it. I still make my friends sign it after all these years, and people just have a lot of fun signing it. I figured, if the slumbook was hilarious, this would be too. Well I wasn't disappointed! I don't really intend to use this as a planner. I'm treating it as an activity book of sorts that I can pull out when I need a laugh. Here's what's inside:

  

The Erin Condren Life Planner: My 2016 Life Planner

Now that we're in the last month of 2015, it's time to talk about planners for 2016. It has been a year of planner love for me, and I'm still obsessed. I try to keep it practical though. I want so many -- Kikki K, Kate Spade, Filofax, Rifle Paper Co, the Happy Planner -- it's ridiculous how many cool planners are out there. However, I can't stand not using a planner for an entire year, and I just can't think of collecting planners and never using them. That's why over the past month I thought long and hard about what worked for me and what didn't work during the past year, and I had to pin down exactly what I want to use for next year. I decided that I will be using three like I did this year -- one for work, one as my journal, and one as my life planner. [Check out these posts -- Midori Traveler's Notebook: My Life Planner + My 2015 Journal and Work Planner.] Next year, it will only be slightly different. I'm merging my life planner and journal, then using a separate work planner like always, and I'm starting a separate creative pursuits planner.  

Let's start with my life planner for 2016, the Erin Condren Life Planner. I've been using my Midori Traveler's Notebook this entire year and I still love it to bits, but I felt like I needed more space. Next year, it will be my planner for all my creative projects, but for everyday things, I'm moving to the ECLP. I've been wanting this planner forever actually, but it's pretty pricey, and for the longest time I kept holding off on buying it. Then I told my friend Clang about it, she loved it, and we thought we could save a lot on shipping if we order together. When we checked the website back in November, we saw that the limited edition rose gold planner was back just in time for the new year. When it first came out several months ago, I let it slip by even if I was so tempted to get it, because I still had my planners for the year and I didn't want an 18-month planner. The holiday release sealed the deal. I wasn't going to let it go again. 

Life Update and First Home Project

Hi! I'm Jullienne and I used to blog around here. I know my last post was back when summer just ended, and now it's December and the year has flown by. I kept meaning to make a hiatus post or something, but I somehow just didn't end up doing it. It is what it is -- but like always, I have a good excuse!

The reason why I've been missing in action is because we moved! Life has been a whirlwind of boxes and to-do lists -- among other things -- since we left our rickety old apartment back in July, and between that and work stress, I didn't have the energy to blog. I haven't been reading other blogs either (sorry about that). I wanted to wait until we were settled, and to be honest, we're not even 100% there yet. We're most probably at the 75% point currently.

The Sugar Cube

Home Base: Creative Pursuits - What's In My Kipling 100 Pens Case

My pen collection has grown considerably lately, what with all the scrapbooking and planner stuff I've been doing. I heard about the Kipling 100 Pens Case, which is well-loved by the creative community and immediately thought -- that is so perfect! As it turned out, I know someone who works at Kipling, and she was a huge help in helping me get it. [Thanks Ate Millet!] It's not available locally, so it had to be sourced from Hong Kong. I got it a few weeks ago, and I'm so happy with it.

The Kipling 100 Pens Case is, as its name says, a case that can fit 100 pens. I love that it's so roomy, and not only do I store my pens in it, but it also holds the tools that I use most often. Here's a peek into what's inside. 

Midori Traveler's Notebook - My 2015 Setup and How I Decorated It

Hi! I'm J and I'm a planner addict. Well no, not really. I'm just really obsessed with my planners, especially my life planner, the Midori Traveler's Notebook. In my last post, I talked about how I chose it as my life planner, and what I got for my initial kit. Now I'll be sharing my setup for this year, and how I decorated it.

Midori Traveler's Notebook: My Life Planner

If you haven't noticed, I've been planner-obsessed lately. I fell down the rabbit hole into the world of creative planning, and found a new hobby. It couldn't have happened at a perfect time. I've been feeling stressed, and planners have become one of my outlets. I actually have three right now: a journal, a work planner, and my life planner -- a Midori Traveler's Notebook. 

My 2015 Journal and Work Planner

In my post introducing my love of planners, I promised to post about the planners I'm using this year, so here it is. Last December, I somehow ended up getting enough stickers for both the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Giving Journal and the Starbucks Planner. I resolved to make good use of them both, and so far, I've been able to do that.

Home Base: Creative Pursuits - Sticker and Pen Storage

Hi! In my last post, I talked about rediscovering an old love of mine, the planner. I touched on the stickers and pens I use with it, so this time around, I decided to make a quick post about how I store my stickers and pens. Over the past months, my sticker and pen stash has grown, and until now, I've just been throwing all of it into a Muji bag along with my scrapbooking paraphernalia. The stickers got smooshed, and I had to rummage through the bag every time I needed a pen, so it eventually came to a point where I just had to get organized and find decent storage.

This is what I ended up with! 

Home Base: Creative Pursuits - The Start of Planner Love

2015 has been crazy so far, but luckily, I've been feeling crafty lately, and that's becoming a great outlet for me. I joined the wonderful world of Project Life (a type of scrapbooking), and I decorated my office cube (with a bunch of doughnuts). I'm surprised at how much fun I've been having!

My most recent creative activity has become a daily one. I've discovered the very stress-relieving art of planner-using! It's a new year, and that usually means I have a new planner, since December in the Philippines is all about collecting stickers for planners. I'm always in coffee shops so I never had any problems getting the coffee shop planners, and it has become kind of a tradition for me to get planners every year, ever since Starbucks started the whole planner thing. However, last year, it was the other way around. The planners ended up as an excuse to get coffee as a break from the office vending machine, which has become too familiar to me. As a result, I got both of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Starbucks planners. I've been using the Starbucks one as my work planner/notebook, while the CBTL one has become my daily life planner. I'll talk about that more in another post though.

Erasable Pilot Frixion pens from National Bookstore

For now, I want to share how I've been using my daily planner. Let me tell you, it has been such an outlet and a time management helper for me! I've always had paper planners and journals because I remember things better when I write them down. I've tried using my phone or my old HP travel companion as a planner, but that didn't work out. I need to write things down.

Home Base: Creative Pursuits - My Doughnut-themed Office Desk

The creative bug bit me pretty hard lately, and I've just been tinkering with a lot of things around me. A few months ago, I saw that my officemate's desk (I don't know her name) had a silver and white theme, and felt inspired to decorate my own desk. These are pics of my first cube at my fairly new workplace. I've since moved, but the decor is still the same. 

 Doughnuts!

Home Base: Creative Pursuits - My First Project Life Album aka My First Foray into Scrapbooking

Hello! Happy new year! It's been a while, I know. The last part of 2014 was incredibly busy for me, and I really didn't have any time to spare for The Blue Purse. I felt bad about neglecting my little corner on the Internet, so I'm back, with a new year's resolution to always make time for this site. I hope I get to stick to it!

So it's a new year, and with new beginnings come new things. My new something is scrapbooking. It has always been in my life, because my mom made tons of scrapbooks for recipes, pictures, newspaper articles she loved, and the like. I loved it. I'm quite relentless about documenting things, and I really wanted to do some memory-keeping of my own, but I always thought it was a lot of work. There was too much cutting and pasting and whatnot for me so I never got into it.

Then last year, I discovered Project Life, and my thinking changed. With it, all you have to do is get an album, insert cards and photos into pocket pages, and you're done! If you're feeling more creative, and you want to do some cutting and pasting, you can too, with embellishments and other accessories. Project Life made scrapbooking so easy.

Over the past few months, I've slowly been collecting supplies. I looked for local suppliers because I really hate having to deal with customs and international shipping, and I'm so glad I found a few. I just got stuff I need for a basic album just to test it out and see how I like it. I also dug up the DIY supplies I somehow accumulated during my wedding preparations (cutters, alphabet stamps, Muji pens), then I bought a couple of Sharpies, pens, and stamps, and I was good to go. I had to wait until I had the time to actually do it though, and I finally found the opportunity during the long holiday stretch.

Home Base: New Crystals

Earlier this year, the hubby and I plus our friends discovered crystals. They're not only pretty -- they're also incredibly helpful. Long story short, we've found them to be amazing at bringing good vibes into our lives.

We've all been going back to Binondo ever since (hello Sheva, Cielo, and Verns), because there are a lot of crystals on our list and we have yet to find all of them. We got a few new ones recently so here's an update.

My current stash

His current stash

Home Base: Discovering Crystals

Pretty crystals all in a row

Recently I've developed a fascination for crystals. The hubby and I were having a spate of bad luck, so Cielo, a Chinese friend of ours, suggested that we get a few crystals for our home and for our personal use.

Crystals are nothing new to us. We know a lot of people who use them or have them in their homes, because though we live in a very religious country, we also live in a very superstitious one. Crystals are believed to have an energy that helps us connect to our own energy. They are said to help in healing the mind, body, and spirit, and that's not a bad thing.

A then remembered that he actually used a citrine crystal a few years back just to help manifest things. The crystal has since disappeared (people say crystals may either crack or disappear when they're done doing their job). On my end, I do yoga when I can and I've been meditating since I was in college, so working with crystals feels like a natural progression from what I've already been doing. We figured it wouldn't hurt to try.

Home Base: The Life Domestic - Birthday Breakfast and Dinner at Kanto and Mozu

I just realized that I never posted about my birthday here. It was pretty uneventful since it fell on a weekday this year, but I celebrated it with my husband in the best way possible given the circumstances. How? Why by starting the day with a food trip and ending it with another one, of course!

We woke up early to have breakfast before work at our new favorite 24-hour all-day breakfast place, Kanto. It's a hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurant that serves gourmet food -- what a juxtaposition, right? It's a new neighborhood discovery for us, and I'll be posting more about it on Food Tales of a Kapitolyo Resident soon. It was one of the very few places open so early in the morning in our area that's not Jollibee or McDonald's, so it was the obvious choice for us.

Kanto

Home Base: The Life Domestic - Our First Anniversary

My husband and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary yesterday! We seriously don't know where the time went. Our anniversary fell on an awkward day this year though. It came on a Monday right at the tail end of Holy Week. My family usually just stays home to reflect and have a bit of quiet time on those days. We also didn't want to celebrate with the Easter crowd, and then we started having car trouble over the weekend. After all that, we decided to just restaurant-hop in the city and enjoy our favorite places. One year and counting!

The day started with a long and leisurely brunch at Cafe 1771 in El Pueblo. We sat at Whimsy -- the cute, bright, and utterly charming cafe area of the restaurant.

Home Base: The Life Domestic - Insomnia Busters

For the past few months I've been having a tough time falling asleep at night. My normal sleep time these days is 2am or 3am, and there have been days when I was only able to catch the zzzs at 4am and 5am. There were a couple of times when I was actually up until 7am!

I have always had some form of sleep trouble. There are months when I am perfectly fine and then suddenly, I'm not. The weird thing is that I sometimes fall asleep when I'm not supposed to and I'm actually doing stuff. I've fallen asleep while watching TV, reading a book, and texting on my phone, but this has never happened to me at night.

I figure stress is the main cause of my insomnia problems so I'm mainly trying to be happy and not worry too much. I've also stopped having any form of caffeine in the evenings, and sometimes I just have warm milk instead. I also try to relax at night now. I avoid cramming work and pulling all-nighters if I can help it. I am also currently trying to stop surfing on my phone whenever I can't fall asleep because it only makes me even more awake.

There are three things however that have helped me immensely. I call them my insomnia busters. Note that I have never considered sleeping pills, and I've only been trying natural remedies. Here's a rundown.

Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Herbal Tea
This tea is wonderful at helping me get drowsy. I first tried chamomile tea in Shanghai and I was really surprised then that it made me really sleepy. When I started having bouts of insomnia, I tried the K-cup version for the Keurig, and thought it was even better than plain chamomile tea!

It's a blend of chamomile, spearmint, and lemongrass, that's why it's so good. Other ingredients include tilia flowers, blackberry leaves, orange blossoms, hawthorn, and rosebuds, which give it such a soothing scent and flavor. We only had a limited number of the K-cups though and have yet to find a seller here. Luckily, I found the tea bag version at the grocery store and bought a box. Now whenever I still feel active around bedtime, I just steep a bag. This tea really helps me relax before bed. It's a real cup of comfort.

Home Base: The Life Domestic - How to get Sticky Labels Off Jam Jars + An Introduction

When I got married to my awesome husband, I was the most undomesticated person ever. Sure, I lived independently for four years, but I had a housemate during most of that era (holla Sheva). We were focused on our careers, we rarely did anything for our house, and we basically lived on canned goods, instant noodles, and fastfood takeout and delivery. I never had any interest in domestic life.

It is only now that I'm married that I got the compulsion to learn how to cook, decorate the house, organize things, and such. I don't know why that is, but something about married life just brought it out of me. I can now relate to my mom's hobbies, like shopping for the home, cooking, and crafting, among other things. That is why I started the Home Base section -- so I could obsess about these things.

Anyway, I was really amused yesterday when I found myself re-purposing something, so I thought I'd post it here. Have you ever tried to get sticky labels off jam jars? I keep used jam jars because reuse, reduce, recycle, right? I hate having to peel the labels off and then have to deal with sticky residue afterwards.

Last night, I tried getting a label off a jar, and underneath it was some really sticky residue. I tried hot water on it but it didn't work, so I went off to Google. Apparently, a ton of people had the same dilemma, because there were a lot of solutions online. I skipped through a ton of suggestions because they were kind of a hassle (soaking the bottles in hot water for several hours), dangerous (using some form of acid on the bottles), or not available to me (Goo Gone). I found one person who suggested peanut butter and I thought, why not? I have it in the fridge, and if it doesn't work, I'm going to give up on the idea. Obviously, it worked.

Clear glass!

I peeled the label off and then used a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter to get all the remaining paper and sticky residue off. I took a good amount of pb, rubbed it onto the glass, and then wiped it off with a paper towel. I did that about three times, and surprise! I had a clear jam jar.  

What do you use on labels and sticky residue? I wish I could do this to books. I hate those sticker price tags!