The trouble with the Big Project is that the more I work on it, the further away the end of it seems to get. It’s just a bunch of spreadsheets, but it takes me the whole year to get the data together, and all of the spreadsheets have to tell the same story. That means the numbers in one have to correspond to the numbers in all the others. When they don’t, I’m in trouble. I might even have to start over.

That’s what I’m going through these days, and it’s the reason I’m a little frustrated. I don’t really have to start over whenever I find a discrepancy of fifty-three cents in expenditures of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, as I did today. But I do have to track those fifty-three cents through all the different spreadsheets and make sure that once I find them, they show up wherever they’re supposed to.

So when I get close to the end, and I find another mistake, no matter how small, it means I have to redo things I’ve done and redone a number of times already. It sucks a lot of the fun out of the process, and it tends to dry up whatever good humor I’ve been able to retain. If I’m a little out of sorts, that’s the reason. If I tell you today wasn’t a very good day, you can maybe start to see why.