daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
Today started off with a bit of rain, but the cloudy skies eventually left and a bright sun appeared. I was happy to be able to use three of my stamps in the Hobonichi today! ☀️📖
I didn’t bring my Canon Selphy photo printer to Japan with me, so now I’ve got over 30 photos to print, cut, and glue into my Hobonichi. Once I catch up, I can finally close the book on my A6 Hobonichi (pun intended) since I switched to my A5 Avec Cousin for the rest of 2026. Next time I take a long trip to Japan, I think I’ll just bring the printer along. It’s not too big, and it weighs almost nothing, so it should be an easy addition to the bag. 🧳
I’ve been using the Hobonichi Cousin Avec for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really enjoying the bigger size. My little A6 techo is compact and cute, but the A5 is just a better writing experience overall. The pages lie flatter, so I can use my Clampy, and I get to write at my normal size instead of concentrating on keeping my letters tiny. There are still spots where small writing is a must, like the daily timeline in the photo, but even there I’ve got twice the space to work with. And on the free-writing pages, I can just write without worrying about size at all. As a bonus, I’ve got more room to print bigger photos too. Overall, I’m happy with the mid-year switch to the Avec ✏️
Three months into my Hobonichi Techo A6 and still really enjoying it. 📓
Writing small has been a challenge, but I’ve slowed down and started paying more attention to how I form my letters. It’s a different kind of writing than my morning pages, which stay big and loose since that’s all about getting thoughts down fast.
The slow, deliberate approach has been a nice surprise. Turns out I like it a lot.
I finally settled into a journaling layout that feels right. 📓 The left side tracks the day’s timeline, the right side gets a few short notes. Top left is for the day’s high and low temps, and top right has a checklist for tracking my language learning.
I keep tweaking things here and there, adding icons with a stencil or pasting in little bits of ephemera. I’m having a lot of fun with it!
January finally started so I have officially begun my first Hobonichi Techo. As you may know, I went with the original A6 size because it is so compact. But maybe I should have gone with the A5 cousin since I naturally write kind of large. Oh well. I’ll give the smaller format a go!
I also bought a Canon SEPLHY CP1500 printer, which is really fun to use. I’m looking forward to see how my journal turns out.
Usually it’s just one cat keeping me company while I write my morning pages, but today both sisters joined me. I wonder what the occasion is?
