Why I Hate December (or don't like it as much as I ought)

During this festive, joyful month, I regularly find myself slipping into bah-humbug mode simply because there's so much darn work involved in having fun. Must prioritize. Must prioritize. I'm flying out on Saturday. The xmas shopping is all done. (Well, except for an item or two that don't need to have until 12th night, but since I have essentially no shopping days between flying back and 12th night, this is not much leeway.) Between now and then I must do extensive laundry, do the month's finances, pack, do the xmas cards, and ... well, ok, that's the absolute minimum. (And, were I being honest, the xmas cards are technically optional, but I'd rather not consider them so.) You wouldn't think this would be a great deal to get done in 5 evenings, and yet I'm feeling schedule-oppressed.

At least my project at work looks to get completed before the end of the week. This isn't the current Major Investigation project, but the "personal development" project that involves adapting and converting an Access database designed for a different department into something my department can use for tracking and trending investigations. By the end of today I had finished designing the Excel workbook that converts and formats the new data for importation, modified all the file addresses and references in the Access macros, modified the macros for the departmental differences, tentatively identified the aspects of the program that are harmlessly redundant or irrelevant, and cleared out and manually re-loaded the "historic" data that the program updates. By 5:30 I'd gotten to the point of running an actual test-update with the new version of the database. When the first test turned up a fatal flaw, I had the good sense to shut the computer down and go home. Debugging is better done in the morning than the end of the day. (And I have a good notion of the clumsy work-around that will solve the problem. The elegant version can, if necessary, wait for after vacation.) The really tedious part of the conversion will be going through dozens of query-tables and reports to figure out how many of them are actually likely to be useful and how many were one-off solutions to particular questions that nobody in my department will ever need to ask.

What I really want to do is go to bed early. But instead I need to start the laundry and reconcile the checking statements.

Just me, doing numbers-geeking

Ok, ok, so I freely admit that I trend data reflexively, even in my spare time for fun. One of the things I've been doing for the last several years is that when the gas & electric bill gets paid, I note down the individual gas and electric charges for the month in a spreadsheet. (And then graph the trend on a 12-month chart with the years and charge types color-coded.) As it happens, I have one month's bill that corresponds to the month after I started going to my new gym and before I turned on the heater pilot for the winter. The former is relevant because it means that I do my showering at the gym rather than at home. It appears that during a typical non-winter month, fully one third of my gas consumption was going to heating my shower water. Mind you, this isn't as massive a consumption as one might think, given that the bulk of the remainder is running the laundry (with a smaller amount for cooking). But ... amusingly ... it gives me a tangible number to discount against the monthly gym membership. In contrast, during the coldest winter month, gas consumption is 3-4 times that of a typical summer month. Ok, back to writing out bills.