We are completely sold out of refills for Scholar, our popular academic weekly planner. Quo Vadis received a huge wave of reorders this fall from college bookstores, stationery stores and art supply stores near universities. All of our online customers have sold out their stocks of Scholar refills, too.
Some good news - there are full books of Scholars still available at Barnes.
Unless, I’m really busy, I tend to procrastinate by cleaning, organizing, or just generally straightening up; that way, I can tell myself that I am, in fact, accomplishing something, even if it’s not my work. This is a disastrous habit to have in a newly-moved-into house, especially since I also like to take my time as I figure out where everything goes. Before, I lived in a one-room studio apartment, so there wasn’t really that much choice. Now I’ve got two whole floors and a basement to contend with!
Nonetheless, I’m having a great time setting everything up. I’ve also become a big fan of hardware and home improvement stores: we need to paint the walls, rake the yard, weatherproof the windows and doors… A house is an ecosystem, I’m discovering, and it takes a while to learn how everything fits together. Non-city dwellers will no doubt be amused, but I haven’t had to program a thermostat in years, much less deal with a water heater!
I just wish I were better at ignoring these distractions when it comes time to sit down and work…
My father told me one of his favorite Christmas memories were the times when the two of us would track where Santa was in his journey to deliver presents. Tracking Santa took us almost the whole month of December.
I didn’t have the best grasp of geography in kindergarten and first grade, but I was sure since Santa had to cover the whole world before arriving in New Jersey (where we lived) on Christmas Eve he would need to get an early start.Â
“He’s in China” - “He’s in Greece” - “He’s in France” - “He’s in Greenland” (getting close!) - “He’s in Canada” (probably the 23rd) and finally, close my eyes Christmas Eve and know Santa was almost here.
Santa’s travel itinerary was in our imagination, but now you can follow him and the reindeer online here and here!
Around the same time another father, President John F. Kennedy, responded to a little girl in Michigan who wrote to him afraid the Russians would bomb the North Pole and harm Santa.
After writing that he shared her concerns about atmospheric testing, he concluded, “However, you must not worry about Santa Claus, I talked with him yesterday and he is fine. He will be making his rounds this Christmas.”
For decades, Chase’s Calendar of Events has served as an authoritative reference guide to holidays, anniversaries, and miscellaneous special events. Published by McGraw-Hill, it’s got entries for everything from Flag Day and Washington’s birthday to National Horseradish Month.
If you’d like to see a particular event included the book, simply fill out an online form, and the editors will consider it. There are no guarantees, however. According to a New York Times article last May, “An organization has to agree to sponsor the holiday, or there has to be some sort of ongoing promotion or tangible enthusiasm for it.” You can’t get too greedy, either: the National Confectioners Association, for example, currently recognizes four separate chocolate holidays. “As a consequence, I won’t have that in the book,” explains Holly McGuire, the book’s editor. “If they’re not taking a stand, then I’m not going to.”
Yesterday marked Chase’s 50th anniversary. According to the McGraw-Hill website, the first edition (for the year 1958) was 32 pages long, contained 364 entries, and sold for $1. Next year’s edition, by contrast, runs some 750 pages long, contains more than 12,500 entries, and sells for almost $65 on Amazon.com.
Thousands of years ago, people began noting the passage of time through the changing of the sun, moon and stars. We still do, although we rely on them less now because of watches, clocks and calendars. (You can find the phases of the moon in your Quo Vadis planner!)
When I look up at the sky and see the constellation, Orion, it tells me more than any book winter has arrived.
But the light I see shining from the stars forming Orion left 1,500 years ago - when Clovis I was king of the Franks. (Yes, the same dynasty heavily implicated in Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code!”)
The concept of “light travel time” or “light years” as we often refer to it, seems fantastic. A light-year is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at the velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year it can travel about 10 trillion km or 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles.
If the Sun’s light takes eight light-minutes to reach Earth, then something catastrophic could happen to the Sun and we would not know for eight minutes. The center of our Galaxy is 26,000 light-years away.  The light we see from there left when our ancestors were painting scenes in caves. The farthest object we can see with our eyes, in a dark sky without the aid of a telescope, is the Andromeda Galaxy, more than two million light-years away. What was happening on Earth two million years ago?Â
I moved into a new apartment over the weekend—a cozy, ramshackle townhouse near the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn that’s larger than anywhere I’ve ever lived since I left my parents’ house to go to college. Moving is always stressful, but I’ve learned my lesson over the years, and this time I hired a professional moving company to help me cart over all of my stuff. I was very organized about it, too, diligently labeling my boxes according to their contents. After we’d loaded the truck, I sat back, congratulating myself for having figured everything out. But when we got to my new place, I quickly realized that the process wasn’t going to be as smooth on the other end: rather than simply labeling my boxes according to where they’d go in the house (kitchen, bathroom, basement), I’d scribbled out a list of their contents that wasn’t meaningful to anyone but me. “Modernist, medieval”—those were books, and they went downstairs. “Dictionaries and reference material” went upstairs, in my office; ditto for the “cables and cords.” I ended up having to inspect each box before the movers took it inside so I could tell them where to put it. (Not the end of the world, of course, but hardly what I’d foreseen when I spent so much time labeling them in the first place!)
There is evidently such a thing as too much organization.
