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Noodling around the house
Emptied another file drawer. The "get rid of all but one filing cabinet" project is going forward no matter what happens on the real estate front. It's fascinating to contemplate the half-life of "important papers". Eventually, everything becomes obsolete and irrelevant. It's comforting, in a way, that decisions that may seem nerve-wracking today may be crystal clear in five years. There will be no more linguistics undergrads popping up in my in-box asking me to dig through my memory of their classwork in order to provide a recommendation letter. The receipts and presentation handouts from the conference in Paris are long since irrelevant. And, as previously noted, there's no point at all in saving the hard-copy printouts of my dissertation data when I have the original computer files. (Although it occasionally reminds me that I should at least leave the world the legacy of the tidied up database of Medieval Welsh preposition data.) On the other hand, I found some things stuffed into the file folders that had no business being treated as old reference materials (e.g., the commercial pattern for the Boksten Man's clothing that I bought back in '99 in Denmark). This is why I actually look through the files before tossing them in recycling.
My excessively-over-engineered integrated financial tracking database has passed its next test: rolling over to the new year. There are certain features built into the files that assume each year's data will get archived out of the working file. Well, ok, one is a feature and one is a bug. The cumulative budgeting figures (i.e., whether I'm on-target for the categories with a specific budgeted amount) work off a "total in-category divided by day-of-year" so there's an awkward period between the start of the new year and the point when the old data gets archived when a year-plus's expenses get divided by just the "plus" number of days. The bug is that some of the internal complexity of the files makes navigation start to get r---e-----a-----l-------l---------y slow as more and more records are added. For most data entry it doesn't cause problems, but when I want to review the running balance for one of the sub-accounts, I'd better have a solitaire game handy.
I haven't done the full end-of-year financial analysis yet, but I'm delighted to find that I stayed under all but one of my tracked budget categories. (The one I missed on was "office supplies". Not sure if I would have been on-target if I hadn't had to buy a new laptop. Also, I was on-target for "food" only if you combine the sub-categores "groceries" and "prepared food". I went under on the former and over on the latter, but only by small amounts.) Since the budget tracking is something I use as a reference reality-check, rather than having unbreakable set-asides, this means that I've internalized my budget targets sufficiently.
And I believe I have all the paperwork and data necessary to do my taxes! So that's a project for tomorrow.
My excessively-over-engineered integrated financial tracking database has passed its next test: rolling over to the new year. There are certain features built into the files that assume each year's data will get archived out of the working file. Well, ok, one is a feature and one is a bug. The cumulative budgeting figures (i.e., whether I'm on-target for the categories with a specific budgeted amount) work off a "total in-category divided by day-of-year" so there's an awkward period between the start of the new year and the point when the old data gets archived when a year-plus's expenses get divided by just the "plus" number of days. The bug is that some of the internal complexity of the files makes navigation start to get r---e-----a-----l-------l---------y slow as more and more records are added. For most data entry it doesn't cause problems, but when I want to review the running balance for one of the sub-accounts, I'd better have a solitaire game handy.
I haven't done the full end-of-year financial analysis yet, but I'm delighted to find that I stayed under all but one of my tracked budget categories. (The one I missed on was "office supplies". Not sure if I would have been on-target if I hadn't had to buy a new laptop. Also, I was on-target for "food" only if you combine the sub-categores "groceries" and "prepared food". I went under on the former and over on the latter, but only by small amounts.) Since the budget tracking is something I use as a reference reality-check, rather than having unbreakable set-asides, this means that I've internalized my budget targets sufficiently.
And I believe I have all the paperwork and data necessary to do my taxes! So that's a project for tomorrow.
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