LadyGypsy.net – the blog of Kimberly Dowd of New Jersey

Post-divorce anniversaries are awkward. The date itself has never failed to trigger a reaction. I know it’s April 5th. It’s part of my blood. I can’t forget it.

The strange part is that because I stopped counting each year (or in the early part, half-years), I have to do the math to figure out how many it would have been.

2011 – 1997 is 14.

14.

On this day I tip my virtual hat to BvP and hope he’s doing well, wherever the tides have taken him.

After much deliberation over the price, I bought myself a Moleskine in 2005. This wasn’t too rare, as I have a love of stationery and notebooks and am only limited by the lack of stuff to write into a notebook.

What *was* rare is that I dumped the notebook into my bag and actually used it. While I’ve been blogging forever (in blog-years, anyway) this wee notebook held the minutae of my week to week existence. This notebook, with its coffee-stained pages, cracked spine and missing bookmark ribbon is the closest thing to a personal diary I’ve ever had.

I wrote on the very first page on 3/13/05, when I was keeping track of my carb intake.

Here’s the question I was going to ask John McCain at the Town Hall back in 2008, but never had a chance to:

It’s littered with little quotes and gems like this:

And even when I had to tear a page out, I documented why:

There are plenty of pages where I kept reminding myself what I needed to buy when I moved out of the house:

(‘body poof’ – hee hee!)

And there are pages too personal to scan:
> The pages on which I practiced my “new-old” signature in the days before my divorce to get used to signing “Dowd” again.
> List of legal documents to bring to the courthouse with me.
> Notes from my tenure as Courier-Post Online manager, including details of great projects that never happened.
> REALLY bad NaNoWriMo ideas

But more often than not, there’s a cheeky page that makes me smile:

(I held this up during a webcam conversation w/ WM. Never let it be said that I can’t sell myself from time to time.)

Partially inspired by Secret Agent Josephine, I recently started sketching out summaries of my days when I had the time. This was from Sunday:

Those five years of shopping lists and quotes and doodles and directions and names of wines I liked covered what was probably the five most tumultuous years of my life. (actually, 3 years..the last 2 have been pretty calm, touch wood.) I will keep this little journal forever – it’s a compendium of dreams and despair and dreams yet again.

But there are only 8 pages left.

I wonder what the next 5 years will bring?

(I also went through some of my notebook pages on my World of Warcraft blog)

Don’t bother, she’s here.

Notable about this picture is that only one poor schlub is really trying to win the costume contest at the 1984 Halloween parade. Everyone else is doing the usual over-11 costume of “hobo” or “50′s girl” or “hooker.”

Everyone except the clown at the far right.

Hang in there, little clown…even though all you got was an Honorary Mention, life gets better for you.