I love cute planners! I keep buying planners with the intention of using them, use them religiously for a few days, and once the weekend comes, I never pick them up again. It drives me nuts and I really need to knock it off.

I’m so jealous of people like Gala Darling who are so organized, and seem to effortlessly keep up to date with cute planners and have everything in order. As for myself, I generally end up working off of small to-do lists written in notebooks on my desk, but while they’re functional, they’re not particularly interesting to look at.

For the month of August, I’m going on an organizational challenge. I’ve decided on a few goals for myself, using the cute planner above. The stickers didn’t come with it, they’re just for added motivation.

• Consistently make and use to-do lists for each week
• Use my planner for day-to-day appointments and such
• Use the cashbook in my planner to keep track of money on the go (I keep track of this stuff online, but not on paper)

I’ll try to give updates throughout the month, and I’ll look back and see how I fared in September.

How do you keep organized?

If you are an unlucky 19 year old in Colorado, the answer is yes!

Aaron Hensen took out House of Flying Daggers on DVD from the Littleton, CO library and forgot to return it. In exchange, the library had him arrested, took him to court, impounded his car, and cost him a total of $460. The library valued the DVD at $31.45 (I’d like to see them find a place to buy it for that; even the Blu-Ray release is about $11), and since they prosecute to the full extent of the law at $30, he got the fiery wrath of the Colorado Public Library System raining down on him.

Luckily, Littleton has struck a deal with Hensen and his family and will be reimbursing him and his family for all the fees and striking the arrest from his record. It still took the story hitting Consumerist for that to happen, it seems. While Consumerist is great because it makes things happen, it’s sad that it took so much exposure for the city to realize they’ve done something so crazy.

The worst fee I’ve ever got from the library was about a dollar when I forgot to return some books on time when I was a little kid. Have you ever racked up some fees being a little library rogue?

Full transcript here, but this line bothers me:

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

This just doesn’t make any sense. Would you buy a car without test driving it? Would you buy a TV without looking at the picture? Pick out a computer without looking at its specs? The answer is (or should be) no, and it’s asinine to think it’s a good idea to do that with a major piece of legislation.

Blind purchases, or buying without investigating the item, are just bad. If you don’t price compare something, you’ll probably pay too much. If you don’t read reviews, you might bypass the better quality model for a cheaper, shoddy one. If you don’t flip through a book before buying it, you might find out it wasn’t worth your money.

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, isn’t it a good idea for your elected officials to know what’s in the bill and share that with us before they put something into law that will effect every person in the US? That’s the type of thing that gets on my nerves, and should annoy you as well.