Wednesday 9 April 2025: Spreadsheet woes

After a busy week and a full weekend, I was amazed I was even up on time on Monday morning. I could have slept for another hour. But I had things to do and the month is already fast running out on me.

Monday

I started with my dirty cuppa while I caught up on social media. Then I hung out a washload and fed the birds. I did put together another washload, but I wanted to make sure there was nothing else that could go in the same wash before setting it off. Apparently our power was going to be out for half the day on Tuesday and I wanted to make sure everything I need to do on a Tuesday morning was already done.

I went straight to my desk then, to start catching up on last week’s work. I started with Monday’s blog post, which I should have scheduled on Friday. It was written, but I’d left it open while I did my weekly backup and the weekly backup too so long we ended up going out and leaving the computer on running. Monday morning was the first time I went back. So I finished the post and posted it.

Next was yesterday’s blog post, about the weekend. I’d normally merge the weekend post with the Monday or Tuesday posts, but as I already had nearly a thousand words for each, I decided to merge Monday and Tuesday for today’s post. I moved a few things along I should have done last week and now had to fit in this week, and I set about this week’s diary, bearing in mind the power outage Tuesday morning and a tradesman’s visit on Wednesday, neither of which I was expecting previously.

I started to update my 12-project planner spreadsheet but as soon as I knew that my monthly statistics would now not be 100% accurate, due to not having anywhere to put this month’s activity on A Mystery At Whitehorse Farm, I had to do something about it. So I did some more research to see if there were any multi-project word-count planner/trackers already out there. I found one for 50 books, but it was a tenner. And I wasn’t sure everything on it would be useful for me or if it had enough usefulness in other areas.

The 2 new tube feeders and the nijer feeder arrived, so I put those together, filled them up and hung them out. I discarded the 2 older tube feeders because I didn’t want to contaminate the new ones. But later, when he got home from work, the poet retrieved them again, vowing to give them a good and thorough clean. They’re metal feeders and very good quality. They were just very dirty and kept getting clogged up. 

When we’re at home I’ll probably still use the regular feeders, apart from the 2 new tubes, which the goldfinches already love. But the birds need to be familiar with the large capacity feeders too for when we go away for a few days.

Back at my desk I had my spreadsheet solution. I just had to turn my 12-week multi-project planner into a 48-week one. I can’t imagine me needing more than 48 project slots in a year. In a regular year I should I have:

• 12 novellas ➕
• 12 short stories ➕
• 1 continuous blog post record ➕
• 1 continuous newsletter record ➕
• 1 novel ➕
• 2 non-fiction books 🟰
• 29 projects

The only reason I have A Mystery At Whitehorse Farm to add in is because I wrote it last year and I’m revising it this year, so the word-count was added to last year’s spreadsheet. I have one other novella from last year that needs revising this year, so there are another 2 projects = 31. Generally, if I can write and revise something in the same year, there are already 2 columns: one for words written, one for pages revised. Any extra words will therefore still work on the same spreadsheet.

So 48 could well be overkill, but if it is, I’ll just make next year’s 36. And as I typed that, I thought I may as well just make this one 36 too. That will give me breathing space for 5 more. But it is time consuming to get it all right, plus I’ve also been learning how to copy the colour coding over in LibreOffice Calc as well as how to create and edit charts and graphs. And that’s what I spent the rest of Monday working on.

I worked out how to get the tags on the blog posts on BlueSky. Just repost with the tags as a quote. It still means I have to go into BlueSky to do it, but I can do it any time and reposting a post is much easier than the initial manual sharing.

Tuesday

We’d been warned of a power outage on Tuesday morning, from 9am until midday. So I made sure my first dirty cup of tea of the day was made by 8:30am. As an extra precaution, I also filled 2 thermos flasks with boiling water. It was too early to eat anything, as we’re doing the 16:8 diet. I fed the birds (the new tube feeders were still very full!), hung out some washing, and had a natter with our neighbour over the wall, giving their dog lots of fuss in the process.

By the time I got to my desk, we still had electricity, so I cautiously started work. At about 11am a notice landed in the residents group on Facebook that the electrical work had been cancelled. The user had been notified at something like 10:30am by the power company. Another bird feeder delivery arrived. This time the large capacity water drinker and the 2 large capacity feeders, both designed for chickens. I’d already fed the birds, though, as the last time I tracked both deliveries, they were coming by 8pm. So they stayed in the kitchen until my next Pomodoro break.

See how I avoided an unnecessary distraction there? I deserved a biscuit at least for that, just not until after 12:00 midday.

I opened up today’s blog post and updated it as far as I could. Then off I pootled to make a 36-project spreadsheet instead of a 48-project one, although I did keep the work I’d already done on the 48-project spreadsheet in case I need it in the future.

When I checked the deliveries, one of the feeders was missing. I checked my order and I’d definitely paid for 2, but there was definitely only 1 in the box. I even checked to see if they were stacked together. They weren’t. I filled in the ‘problem with order’, and the auto-reply said that they’d get to it within 48 hours. 

I couldn’t really wait 48 hours as we need to test these things over a couple of weeks. So I made the phone call. They’d only sent 1 out with the order, so she said she’d arrange another one right away and put it on the van for next day delivery. Excellent service there. She even confirmed it in a message. I put the other feeder together and filled it up with a mixture of food, and the poet, who’d not long got home, filled the drinker. 

We placed them on the patio so the birds would get used to them, but only our female blackbird with a big white feather on her back noticed them. We call her Al…short for Albino, but as she’s a girl, it gets changed to Ally. She stood between the 2, looking from one to the other and back, then hopped over the feeder and went straight to one of the ground-feeding trays!

I had to do a lot of jiggery pokery with my new 36-project spreadsheet, and I kept having little breaks. It’s a good way to learn the package, though, to just try and put together something that’s more complex than a basic spreadsheet. I’d got all the colours sorted, all the formulae, all the figures feeding into fields, etc, everything working, except for 2 cells where the percentages weren’t calculating correctly. Everything was right, the formula was right, but it wasn’t having it, despite the same formula working elsewhere on the same sheet.

The poet came in to see if he could see what I’d done wrong, but we couldn’t work it out. I took out all of the formulae and tried manually inputting the initial figures, but that percentage formula just didn’t want to play. And then I realised. The cell it was looking at was actually 3 merged cells and I was trying to get it to calculate the M column instead of the L column. As soon as I sussed that out, it all worked. 

Satisfied I’d done all I could before duplicating the working sheets, I put it all to one side and decided to sleep on it before checking it again this morning. If it’s working, then I’ll name the current sheet ‘April’ and duplicate it from May to December, changing the number of days where necessary. (I only fade out the font where it says 31 but there are only 30 days.) I’ll leave January to March as they are because there’s live data in those sheets, even if they do look a bit messy. I’ll create a blank version for 2026, and then the workbook will go live. Again.

The poet went up to the campervan to seal those panels he removed on Sunday to repair the leak, and when he got back we called it a day.

Today I intend to do proper work.