Do you keep a journal?

Old TexMex

Old TexMex

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One part of my job involves keeping a logbook, some friends keep a personal diary/journal. If you do, is it longhand, shorthand or digital?

Just wondering on this rainy, windy day 'cause I just made an entry in my weather logbook.
The early settler family of this island kept a log (1850-1870) and I have been reading it, filled with trivia, but that was a life. Their old place "Rancho del Mar" stood right across the street from my house. Now all that's left are the headstones nearby where they buried their dead.
 
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I used to, dont now but should. Keeping one will come in handy many times for many reasons. Through the years when something significant happens at the time you will think you couldnt forget it or when it happened but you will!
My dad religiously kept one up until he no longer could. They are interesting to go through. Then on one of my first "real jobs", the wisconsin state conservation department, they issued us diarys and wanted us to write down what jobs we did that day and the hours. You would be surprised how often you go back and refer to them on all kinds of stuff.
 
Yep. I've been keeping one since October 1977. I don't write in it every day, but always seem to add a page or two every week or so. I've completed several over the years and I always find it interesting to go back and read some entries that I wrote twenty or thirty years ago.

I don't know if my kids or grandkids will ever find any interest in these ol' journals once I get called over to the other side, but I often wonder what I would give to have my grandfather's journal or my great-grandfather's journal.
 
My grandmother kept quite a few years worth of diarys. I have went through them and they are interesting to me. I never knew her as she died when I was about six months old. Besides just being interesting you will find that they can pay off in many other ways you wouldnt think of.
 
Yeah, I keep one. Started mostly as a travel journal but expanded to other things as well when I felt the need to put it down on paper.

My handwriting is so small and messy that I'm the only one who can read it. Whoever ends up with them when I'm gone will just be scratching their head, if they bother to look at them at all.
 
I don't and I have always said it was because I didn't learn to write very well until I was about 8 or 9, so if I've missed that much time, why bother? :-) ........... Big Cholla
 
You would be surprised how many times you would go back to refer to it even with guns, what did I pay or where did that one go etc. Even on stuff breaking down to refer when you bought it if the guarantee is still good or whatever. Sometimes it can settle arguments. It can help when you do your taxs. My first number of years away from home I worked all over the country and didnt keep a diary. I have been putting stuff together by reading dads diary, "Butch showed up last night from wyoming" or whatever. I kept a diary for about 35 years on and off, at the time my main reason was my job because some of it involved me traveling around the country following company stuff and working unGodly overtime and being able to argue with payroll about it etc.
If you ever get involved in a divorce you will be scrutinizing it, not that in the end it makes much difference. Lets put it this way. If you were to keep one a few years you sure wouldnt throw them away as you would find you yourself cross referencing them a lot for many reasons.
It lessons the chance that you are totally gone and completely forgotten with family many years after death. Not that it would make much difference I guess. Why do we want to remember our founding fathers? I think it separates us from the animal kingdom.
 
Marshwheeling said:
Don't preserve the evidence, destroy it.
Click to expand...

It's kind of analogous to my lifelong habit--my adult life, anyway--of avoiding being photographed by always being the one to take the pictures. I've long tried not to leave too many tracks, a habit acquired in my drinking days when I was bitterly ashamed of how I was living.

I've never kept a journal. In recent years I've thought about it, especially as I've lived alone since I was widowed eighteen years ago. But now my hands are so buggered with arthritis that handwriting is very difficult. So is buttoning a shirt or, some days, tying my shoes.

Somehow doing it on a flash drive isn't the same.
 
I use to write in journals and when I got a computer I could only type with two fingers. It would take forever to type out a sentence ... so continued to put pen on paper. Over the years my hands now hurt after writing for more than a few minutes at a time. So I now type out my thoughts (and still with two fingers!)...only a little faster that I use to.

But nothing beats handwriting it out. It's more personal.
 
Not an everyday journal or anything like that. My life just isn't that exciting that anyone would want to read about it years later.

I am a runner and keep a running journal. Date, distance, route, which shoes, weather conditions, etc. That information helps me stay on track and know when I need to replace my shoes.

I've never kept a shooting journal, but maybe I'll start.
 
I kept a diary of all my trips while I was working, I was out of the country about 50% of the time 1969 - 1999. They make interesting reading, lots of time flogging sugar machinery in places like Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, Philippines, Latin America etc.
Steve W
 
I keep detailed hunting and fishing journals in quad ruled engineering type composition books.

Both help me to be more efficient in the field. They put birds in the bag and fish on the line.

But the great benefit, of the hunting journal in particular, is that it allows me to relive days in the field with friends and dogs that are lost to time or distance.
 
I wrote more when I was still working as WP was easier to access. I just wrote something briefly about particular days. A heavy snow, temps over 100, rain storms, etc. I also recorded the deaths of friends and family members. I made mention of trips and goings and comings. No narrative, just the facts.
 
I'm not that interesting, and I don't need a written record to prove it. :o

I did keep a journal once, but it was for my wife...she was in a medically-induced coma in ICU, having developed pneumonia and a pulmonary embolism following surgery on her back. She was put in the coma by her doctors so they could treat the two conditions, and she was unconscious for 6 weeks. I started keeping a record of what transpired each day, what I was thinking and feeling, who visited her, what the doctors said, and so on. When she recovered, she really enjoyed reading it.

She also had some bizarre dreams, a byproduct of the drugs they used to keep her sedated. She said they were so real...one of them was that Hillary Clinton had come to visit her. I couldn't convince her with my journal that it didn't happen, so I had to show her in the news records that Clinton was nowhere near Texas during this time. She still thinks I may be lying to her because she knows I don't like Hillary. :p
 
I've never been in the habit, but my Dad is in a big way. Day to day stuff is pretty bare bones, but whenever a family situation, good or bad, arises, he gets very detailed. When I was in the hospital for seven months a few years back, he filled up more than five legal pads with all kinds of details. A lot of these I don't remember, because I was in a coma for awhile. I've read excerpts from it, including a section where a doctor was telling him that he should probably start making "plans". That gave me a chill. I never realized all that he was going through at the time, with me being "day to day" in the hospital, & my Mom in the opening stages of Alzheimer's. I told him that I would like to read it from start to finish after I move there this month. That way like GKC's wife, I can get a perspective on that period in our lives.
 
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How many times, even on this site, have people complained about what bad people they had for parents etc? I guarantee you if those parents had kept diarys and in later the kids find it and fairly read them they would probley come out with a different opinion. There are always different prospectives on these issues.
 
daily since I turned 18. sometimes don't write much but something every day. includes events, guns sold, traded, or bought and with whom. money made or lost on them. where I was at the time. most interesting transactions were in asia. some good ones south of the border too.
 
I have kept a personal logbook since around 1989, almost always for work. I call it a "cover and insurance" as I have learned that the documentation you submit can...and often will...disappear. Especially if you are dealing with ethically and morally challenged people. I read back sometimes on those logs and found not only how much I have changed over the years, but how much society and the job has as well.
I never have nor ever will be someone's fallguy.
 
In my usual fashion, I lapsed a few days and just got back to this thread. Enjoyed the insight fellahs, cause I just dug out all my day logs (bridge logs) from 16 yrs fishing on the great barrier reef. I haven't been able to find the same little 6"x5" hardback blank books. Aussie newsagents always had them. Goes to show you how out of style "writing it down" has become, I guess.
 
My grandmother's grandfather kept a daily journal from 1877 to 1908. When my grandmother died about 10 years ago we found them in her trunk. My aunt spent months transcribing them to WORD (exactly as he wrote in them, misspellings and all). I then took the WORD file to a publisher and had made into a bound book and had 25 copies made and gave them out as Christmas presents throughout our family. It was a big hit and the journal is very, very interesting.

Just for grins, I went through and counted all the game he took as noted in the journal.

1429 squirrels
759 rabbits
235 doves
866 quail
147 partridges

It's interesting what you learn from old journals like this one. One thing I noted as I read the journal was that they always went hunting the day after it rained. I didn't understand why until I asked my dad why he said it was because the fields were too muddy to work.
 
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My brother gave me a small, leatherbound travel journal in 1975 on the eve of my first trip to Japan. I was 23. I ran out of pages in it last year, so it lasted 38 years.

In addition to entries from various places in Japan and the US, I wrote pages while in Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Guatemala and French Guiana... Plus entries written on a sailing yacht off the eastern seaboard of the US and on ferry boats in the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea.

Usually I wrote about the environment I found myself in, and the people I met. There are entries, too, for the activities of my children when they accompanied me or I them. Very occasionally I wrote about difficulties I was facing.

It is a nice thing to have, and I am glad I did it, but I am unsure if I will continue the practice with a new journal, although my wife bought me one.
 
Did daily solid from 18-23, fizzled down to weekly at 24 and then nothing....so I need to hop back on it! I liked the weekly, Sunday night you curl up and write, it's great!
 
You never know what will interest the future. I have my father's diaries and letters home during 1917-1919 in France. I've transcribed them and have them in the computer. Facinating reading, although they're not "The Red Badge of Courage". Have some historical interest. Glad I have them and have read them. One of the diaries, has about 3 pages (in pencil) eiher erased or rubbed so as to be unreadable. I have thought of having it restored by some forensic company, but I thought maybe I don't want to know what my father erased.
 
Not since somebody once said "anything you say (or write) can and will be used......"
 
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