Making An Adventure Out Of Every Day

The staff of Gryffin’s Landing wishes you all the best for the weekend. We hope you get a chance to get outside, enjoy the spring weather, and spend some time safely with your families.

Yearly Bullet Journal Layout

I started using a calendex last year when I started my second bullet journal, and it is one of my favorite ways to see my long-term schedule. I hated the idea of drawing the same grid over and over for 12 months. I didn’t really want to take up 12 pages on a monthly view. If I don’t see my upcoming events before the week of, I will not be prepared. I thought about adding a little section to my…

Air Fried Meatloaf Balls

I am always on the search for new appetizers! People tend to eat while they party if you give them bite-sized bits to chomp on. Having a meal made of hours d’oeuvres is one of my favorite ways to host a get-together. There are fewer dishes to clean or throw away. People don’t have to decide between eating and continuing to have fun. Everyone can bring something small and it doesn’t matter if it…

I think one of my favorite things to do since I’ve started journaling is making goal lists. It’s so easy to forget how far you’ve come when you don’t keep track of where you started.

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Pumpkin Pie From Scratch

For me, holidays are always a connection to the past.  It’s a time for remembering.  Of course holidays connect me to my grandparents and the family I remember; but they also make me relate with the generations of people who came before us.  There’s a rhythm and a tradition that really makes me feel like I am part of a bigger alliance of humanity against the darkness that would be here without us.

This is the end of my first year using a bullet journal, and I have been so excited to let my journal sparkle and shine like Christmas morning. I want metallics and glitter and color everywhere. I wanted to keep the traditional green and red a central theme. There are so many fun projects to plan for the holiday season; this really helps me get in the spirit.

You can check out my pages for…

These pasties are so delicious!  I’ve made them for pie contests, appetizers, dinner, and for my Harry Potter themed Christmas.  They’re a little time consuming, but not more than any other hand pie.  My mom gave me this neat little plastic pocket pie crimper.  It really speeds up the process.  Her set came with three.  I use the smallest one.  It’s about three inches in diameter.

You can make…

50 Things for your Holiday Bucket List

Do you ever get to the end of the holiday season and realize that you completely forgot to do something that always makes your really feel the holiday spirit?  Holidays get crazy. People come in from out of town, you travel, there are parties and fundraisers and school performances.  All you do is blink and the New Year’s here way too fast.  Since I started these lists in my bullet journal, the …

This Halloween, we are all out of little kids at the house, and I’m tired of carving two triangles and what looks like a piece of cantaloupe for a smile in a pumpkin.

I want it to be SCARY.  I love slasher movies and serial killers, fake blood and well done special effects.  When I carved these, I was thinking of what it would be like if the pumpkin were alive.  I kept thinking of Pennywise,…

        I thought I was going to keep the splash page super simple.  The black, brown and silver looked really classy.  I decided to add just a little spice to it.  I used a stencil because I’m not really great at getting the things I envision in my head onto the page. I need all the help I can get!

  The quote on my daily log is from Wale Ayeni.  “Be thankful for what you have.  Your life is someone else’s fariytale.”  At this stage in my life, I find that quote very grounding.  Reading it every day will help me to remember all the things I am lucky to have rather than fussing over the things I cannot control.

  My weekly setup is really working for me.  I am going to make a stencil so I can do it even quicker going forward.  I decided not to draw in the boarders this month to keep the clean feeling.  I wish I had connected the days for the first two weeks; it looks much better on the last two.

  I’m really excited to do my journal for the holidays.  I’m going to be getting started on it really soon.  I will be adding new pages as well as doing my normal weekly view and my future log.  I’ve been reading a few books recently about people who made big changes to their own lives, and I think I want to add some of the things I learned into my journaling.  I hope a few of the changes will make a big impact on my life as well.

What are you doing this November with your bullet journal?  Post pics on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #gryffinslandingbujo, share them to our Facebook page, or post about what works best for you in the comments below.   Subscribe to Gryffin’s Landing with your e-mail address to keep up with the latest content.  As always, thanks for reading and check back next month to see my next spread.

  In the last few years I have been expanding my repertoire of baked goods. I watched the Great British Baking Competition and I was definitely inspired to spend more time baking. One of the things the baker’s often do is add macarons to their cakes as decoration. They look gorgeous and come in such a variety of colors!

  One of my faults in the kitchen is consistency. I was kind of afraid of…

Dark Chocolate Banana Bread

Last week I got some organic bananas, but I was eating so many apples for breakfast, I didn’t quite get them all used.  They were still edible today, but they won’t be good for much longer.  I can’t finish them all, so I had a couple options.  I could freeze them.  I could dry them, but it’s fall and what’s better than a warm bread fresh from the oven.

There are so many great things that you…

I absolutely love horror movies and haunted houses.  I don’t know how it happened, but for some reason, since I first started dating my husband over a decade ago, I stopped doing a few of the things I enjoyed most in the fall.  It’s not like there was any real reason that I stopped, just that there were other things we both enjoyed doing together, and I didn’t share this interest with any of the rest of our friends.  When I first met my husband, we didn’t really watch scary movies together.  I feel like maybe he didn’t really like them, or at least not the ones I wanted.  More recently, he expanded his movie watching to include more scary movies, so I’m starting to get that fix again.  My favorite horror movies are ones with fun special effects.  Watching scenes like the arrow coming up through the bed in Friday the 13th, or the decaying woman in The Shining make me feel as though I’m watching a magic show.  I love finding out how it was done and appreciating the art that went into it, and I appreciate when I can’t figure out how they made that particular effect happen.  There is something much more visceral about watching scenes where the blood, guts and gore are made of real things.  When the horror is created digitally, it just does not have the same wonder.

Last year, I realized that I had not been to a haunted house for YEARS.  I used to work at several haunted houses when I was a teenager, and I loved it.  My husband still didn’t think that he’d have fun, so I found a few friends and family members to go to some of these places.  I really wanted to make up for lost time.  I ended up going to every highly-rated haunted house near Pittsburgh.  It took every day that I had off for almost a month, and I had a GREAT time.  I think my favorite was the West Virginia Penitentiary.  I think they were my favorite because they had a great, interactive staff, lots of interactive items in the dungeon, and they had a second tour of the historic part of the jail.  Our tour guide had worked there for years when the prison was still active, so he had some unique stories.  It is almost unthinkable that such a place held people during my lifetime.  At the end of the haunted attraction, they had a zombie shoot set up with paintball guns and moving targets.  It was a really unique experience and it was worth the drive.

I really wanted to capture all the fun I had last year when planning my October this year, so I was thinking about all things spooky when I did my weekly spreads.  I hope I use them as much as I did last month.  I had time to make them a little more intricate than my September layout by pre-drawing them.  The worst part is that Halloween doesn’t actually fall in my four October themed weeks!  I might end up adding a fifth week to October’s theme for this special case.  ^_^

I ended up going back to the circular chore wheel again.  My weekly and monthly chores don’t seem to fill it properly any more though, so maybe next month I’ll try out my September layout again.

I added a few items to my habit tracker.  I want to add some more fresh vegetables to my diet, I want to get onto a certain sleep schedule, and I need to empty my freezer to defrost it.  I added a bed time and an alarm time.

1. I decided not to post my layout until I had used it all month.  I wanted to make sure that I didn’t change my layout based on other people seeing it.

2. I did some weekly spreads and actually used them the ENTIRE MONTH.  Most of the time when I create weekly spreads, I don’t end up using them to their full extent.  I make some really vague plans, and then half the time I forget to go back and look at them.

My theme for September was fall, and every week was a different color.  I was thinking of doing a fall theme a little later in the year, but I wanted to do Halloween in October, and pumpkin or just a family theme in November so… it was now or never.  I really wanted to use yellow, brown, green, orange and red.  I wanted to make sure I didn’t use too much orange because I felt like I’d be using it for October, so I decided to do my habit tracker in yellow and brown.  The yellow still doesn’t turn out very well in certain light.  I’m proud of myself for doing a better job of tracking properly with it.  A lot of times I let it go for two or three days and then have to try to remember what I did.

I tried to think of the things I was most excited to do this month.  It was going to be the first football game of the season.  I was excited for fall to start, even though the leaves wouldn’t be changing quite yet.  I was also celebrating the last few times we’d go camping this year.  The river was inspired by the Kennerdell Overlook.

 I am still trying to find something that works for me better than the cleaning wheel.  This weekly color coded layout is my second favorite.  I liked the fact that if I didn’t complete something, or if I got something done early, I could mark it off in the color I used for the week it was accomplished.

Next month, I want to make sure I get my weekly spreads done just a few days earlier, and that I start my important dates page about a month in advance.  I kept thinking of things that were coming up, but they didn’t happen until October, so I didn’t have them written down in a real list.

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