Something Made Me Smile Today

Okay,so,he’s not gone yet,but David Archuleta has announced he will serve a full two-year Mormon mission.

I’m pretty well done with my grieving. Oh I cycle through some of those emotions now and then but I was only sad for me. For David I’m 100% delighted. I think he’ll learn a ton and return an even better person.

I’ve been asked by Abrra of The Voice to do something about a countdown calendar for people to use to track David’s mission. So I’ve been thinking.

There are two categories of calendars that should be made. One is virtual so websites can have a countdown. The other is physical so you can have it around without being online. I’ll discuss the virtual category first.

It took me very little Googling to find that there are many,many simple countdown calendars available for web sites and blogs. I suspect that every site out there will be able to come up with something that suits their own style. However few of the free ones offer the ability to add even one photo,let alone what I’d want to do which would be to display a different photo,quote,or lyric every day of those two long years. If anyone is interested in using or helping me with an Ultimate DA Mission Countdown Calendar (web) let me know. It would be a lot of work but maybe I can sell the idea somewhere like David’s Official Site.

Now,for physical calendar ideas. My first idea was to create a page-a-day calendar where you tear off a page each day. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that there is only one site I could find to create one and it would cost a minimum of $20 per year per copy of the calendar. They only offer black and white and all the copies would have to be ordered at one time. Shipping would be a PITB.

Continuing with professionally-printed calendars,we could go with a 24 month monthly format (perhaps like the one I did for 2011). Art could be added to the individual dates for the countdown. I do love spotlighting the best of fan photography like this. If you’re obsessive you could cross out each day as it passes. Cost would depend on the quality we chose.

We could have a poster calendar printed for each year. This would be fun to mark off the days,but I don’t personally have space for one,do you?

It could be a desktop calendar like this with not much room to personalize the dates but cute and doesn’t take much room. By the way,yes,I like Shutterfly and similar services because that way I don’t have to be involved in ordering or shipping and I know exactly what you’ll get.

We could create a journal format so you could keep notes of how you’re doing or things you wish you could share with David. Or something that would fit a standard planner binder.

Finally,I could create printable calendar pages that you could print yourself. The thing about doing this is that many of David’s fans do not have good color printers and 24-25 pages would be expensive to print. These could have great art of course–they could be quite customized. But I would need a lot of encouragement from people who absolutely promised to print them.

So what do you think? What would you invest your money or time into?

PS I hope when I update my theme that the problem with no spaces appearing after punctuation marks will go away. Wish me luck.