the little wild kingdom

[flowerbug]

UGH! But, glad it's melting away quickly enough that you don't have to shovel!

if it would stay only in the assigned spots i would like it to be there for the next three weeks at least...

it's already long gone and the sunshine and warm today will make sure that anything that isn't gone by now will be evaporized!

i was so excited by finishing up editing that file of transactions that i had to plug it into the greater puzzle and see how they all played together. found a lot of mistakes and edits still needed and was up way too late doing that...

luckily i can take a nap today but it would actually now count as a 2nd nap and then i could have 2nd breakfast and perhaps 1st hot chocolate...

 

[flowerbug]

some people like to do visual puzzles. i'm not much into sitting, but i can sprawl with the best of them.

i'm closing in on fixing the worst of this recent round of stitching 3000 ancient transactions together with the rest of my transactions i've already balanced - but there's still big gaps i have to plug in yet - i have the rest to do... 20 more years of this one account and then 40 years of another and chunks of others too, but i'm closing in on finally having as much of it in as i can get, and then the more nitpicky stuff can happen later as i comb through some old papers for whatever details i can add - a likely next winter project.

it's a math puzzle really and the nice thing about doing it right is that you know it is as correct as you can make it when things balance as they should. there's zero rounding errors. the FUDGE is clearly labled (i call it SLUSH ), but for a while i was calling it COCOA. and then there is Equity:Opening-Balances... as time goes on and i get further along this amount keeps changing and it's interesting. what it really means is that these are the numbers that must be used to get about 100,000 transactions to perfectly balance. that is they are assumptions about the degree of COCOA or SLUSH in the puzzle. they are 100% correct assumptions which makes them rather golden in terms of proofs or mathematics.

perhaps you didn't think that accounting could be philosophical? at heart math and logic really are philosophical because it can bring clarity about what you assume you know and the degree of how much you don't really know, but at least you can spell it out and put up signs "THERE BE DRAGONS!" or in my case COCOA or SLUSH.

[i suspect @FarmerJamie may understand this post too - perhaps even more than me ]

 

[FarmerJamie]

Too early in the morning for me, I forget what this project of yours is.

I do understand your enjoyment of getting the data "right", though. Although, I have, on occasion, said "good enough". Lol

 

[flowerbug]

Too early in the morning for me, I forget what this project of yours is.

the short version is i'm getting my entire financial history put into a format that can be used to do accounting. i'm using a program called beancount to process the results.

the longer version (eyes glaze over in the audience - that's ok) is that i've already in the past typed some of my history into text files in columns and they've been a starting point for me to get other things done, but up until now i didn't work on the most complicated file of all which is my checking account from a credit union. they did not offer any kind of electronic version back then so up until more recent years it was all paper statements and then electronic ones, but the actual transaction history i could use was more recent. so all those old transactions that i typed in took me to midway through 2005 and then i stopped making entries. so the file is not complete, but at least i did not have to type it all in again to get this far. pretty much four days of editing though to get it all cleaned up and being more consistent and adding details as i recall them.

one mistake i thought i made threw me off until this last editing session where i realized i'd conflated two things into one and the positive numbers i was depositiing were actually correct when i though they were a mistake. it came back to me that yes, this one guy was renting a room and was paying me his share of the rent. so those lines had to be re-edited again and turned into Income instead of an Expense.

so getting those 1980 - 2005 entries edited and properly classified and fixed up to be more consistent was a five day project. and then the program i'd already written for another project was adapted to work for this one so that was another few days. if you ever need a column/table wrangler type of program "petl" is useful and the computer language Python was fun to work with more for doing this... (i'm gradually making more sense of it as i'd not done too much with it before, in the past i've normally used shells scripts for the quick stuff and C for the more complicated things that i had to write lexical and parser grammers and then use those, but i'm able to do that easily enough)...

now that i have all those done for now i can move on to the paper statements and adding the years between 2005 and halfway through 2020 when i pick up with the current data. i'll have to go grab my checkbooks and see who and what i may have wrote on the recipts, but it is possible those are not legible any longer so i may only have the amounts and guesses...

I do understand your enjoyment of getting the data "right", though. Although, I have, on occasion, said "good enough". Lol

yes, i have to do some of that. guesstimating... many times i just withdrew money and called it cash but might not have kept any notes on the check or ... and at those times i also had old e-mail files to work with to give me context but those were lost and at one time i decided that even if i kept working on retrieving those files i didnt want to so i wiped it all including my recovery files and my backups to keep me from dredging through it. now i wish i'd kept it anyways. oh well...

when i get to that point i'll tag those entries with a code which means i'm guessing about it somehow.

i'm just glad now that i'm somewhat done with the longest running account (mostly done) and am working on the next longest running account (which is much more complicated) but now the first part is done so i can move on to the next part of it (money market acct), but i can reuse the tools i've already developed so that will speed it up quite a bit...

just to be on the homestretch of the project instead of the other end when i started out months ago... feels good and helps keep me going to know it will mostly soon be done (in a year or less).

in the meantime what i've done already is helping me keep current too. so i'm not as behind as i was before.

 

[flowerbug]

fed the worms yesterday and they're doing ok. a part of that involves spider hunting since i'm moving the buckets around anyways. i knew there was a likely spider under the paper shredder and that was in the last area for moving the buckets out of the way, plus i had to dust that area of the floor so it was a three for one deal.

yes, there was a spider there that was evicted. another juvenile or male spider, no signs of egg sacs anyplace.

continued working on other projects and took a break to read for a while. nice rainy day.

outside project is about half done. it will be too wet to do much for a few days but we may try again tomorrow. i'm not sure what Mom's schedule is like. we have a lot of daffodil bulbs to get rid of...

 

[flowerbug]

we have our very own Stonehenge (we call it Igor) many years ago Mom built a pedestal and then put a blob of cement on it and then attached various things including small mirrors.

around every spring and fall equinox there are some days when the sun beam will line up on this basket.

you can see a snow covered Igor in the back of this picture (behind the boy).

oh, here is a less snow covered Igor.

 

[flowerbug]

garden club meeting today, i took my maybe planting beans with me to work on just in case nobody showed up. it was cold and windy today so i thought everyone was going to stay home. well, no the regular three of us were there again.

i woke up feeling tired and worn out and had very little energy and was thinking all morning about just taking a nap all day, but responsibilities meant i had to go into town so i did get things done as needed and then the garden club meeting.

for the most part we sat and talked about what had been going on for the past month and some of it was gardening related but then we got onto parents issues and care taking and ...

i did get some beans put into the seed library since the supply was a bit low. i'll take some more with me next time i visit to fill up a few more packets.

 

[flowerbug]

uhg, picked up some kind of crud last week and it bloomed a few days ago.

not that i have to do much of anything at the moment with the mixed rains/snows but it's nice to think that perhaps i could do something if the weather cooperates. an illusion at this time...

in a few weeks i'll see what the weather forecast looks like and maybe poke in some peas and beans. i have plenty of certain beans that i can always plant and they seem somewhat able to tolerate the colder snaps (if i cover them from frosts). the peas don't need to be covered at all.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Sorry you're feeling cruddy - hope it resolves quickly!

 

[flowerbug]

Sorry you're feeling cruddy - hope it resolves quickly!

thanks. so far it seems like it can't figure out what it wants to do. i have, however, figured out what i want to do (nothing much at all )...

2nd groundhog sighting. not sure if i hit it with the air rifle or not.

piddling on projects as i get inspired (not much but oh well... lol ).