I’ve been faithfully keeping a diary since October 27, 2018. It has become one of my most successful new habits. I write a brief summary of my day every night before bed, and the next morning, as I wake up, a flip back through the pages to a month or two earlier to get a sense of the passage of time. Here’s an entry from February 28, 2019, for example:

The day before Ethan had sneaked into my bedroom, found my diary-keeping Platinum Preppy fountain pen, and had bitten into it, destroying the pen, staining my duvet but, oddly, not becoming covered in black ink himself.

Mindful that positive reinforcement is better than negative, I resolved, as I wrote in my diary, to solve this problem of fountain pen eating through misdirection. So far it’s been working.

Today I got my renewal notice for Amazon Prime, and I decided that, like eating fountain pens, shopping at Amazon due the shiny allure of “free” shipping that Prime provides is bad behaviour, and so I cancelled my membership, effective next month.

I’m hoping that, like Ethan is now encouraged to chew on proper-for-dogs bones from Blue Ribbon, I will now be encouraged to shop locally, to borrow more books from the public library, and to make fewer impulse purchases.