Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a dedicated worker bee. Sometimes I wonder what in the world I’m thinking when I start a project on a Saturday afternoon knowing I won’t be able to finish it. Maybe I forget how dedicated this bee can bee. Be.

As it turns out, no one has been reconciling the Kennel’s bank statements for a long, long time. I’m not even sure how many months it adds up to, because until now I’ve been working backwards. I started with the current month, moved on to last month, and worked my way back until I was thoroughly confused. On a happier note, in this process I also uncovered a humongous bank error that put a few thousand clams back in the account.

Today, in the midst of trying to find numbers here and numbers there so that I could make sense of all the discrepancies, I decided to find a starting point, make an adjustment, and work forward. For some reason I picked January 2008. Maybe that’s because it was the earliest bank statement I could find without digging through boxes in the garage.

But it was a mistake to start so late in the day, because once I got going I didn’t want to give up until I’d uncovered all the errors. It seemed important to know exactly how much money we had in the bank. It might keep us from bouncing checks, as we did last summer when we thought we had a few thousand more than we actually had. It was scary and creepy and enough to keep me going until the wee hours. Stupid, stupid bee.

Somehow, though, I got through six months without working too far beyond midnight. It was ever so satisfying when balances started to fall into place, because I hadn’t actually balanced a statement without pulling an arbitrary adjustment out of the blue for a long time. And along the way, while I was working, I managed to listen to three Beatle albums and “A Prairie Home Companion.” So it wasn’t a totally lost Saturday night, except by non-bee standards.