Running behind today...

It' after 6 pm, and it just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here today.

Oops.

I guess that headache isn't as gone as I thought it was.

It should be gone. I slept late today (the first day this week I haven't had to be up and out early). Other than doing some housework and reading, I haven't really done anything today. The weather is nice - in fact, this was the first day it really, really felt like fall around here, for all that it was still 79 degrees for the high today. Despite that, when I went out to take some bottles to the recyclers, there was something in the air that made it feel like autumn rather than summer. And I'm really glad of that. I'm over the whole summer thing for this year.

Except, I lied. I did do something else today. I did homework. Well, kind of.

I'm learning how to work with Excel. It's something I need mainly so that I can put it on my resume to increase my chances of getting a job. Not that I can really imagine myself in any job where I would have to do anything even vaguely like keeping books. Yeah, I know, spreadsheets are used for lots of things besides bookkeeping. But numbers are often involved and I have what you might call an adversarial relationship with numbers in general and manipulating them in particular. It isn't that I can't do math, understand. I just don't like it much.

Although, one thing I've discovered that I really like about Excel is that it does your math for you. Yes, you need to understand what needs to be done to the numbers (add them? multiply them? a little of both?), but once you figure that out, you just put the equation together and apply it, and you've got your sum or your product or whatever. Yay.

The thing that I'm finding interesting is that it isn't the numbers part of Excel that is giving me fits. Instead, it's the formatting. Putting in and taking out borders. Centering things in cells. Adding titles and colors.

Drives me crazy. I think I broke my brain on the stuff I was working on this afternoon. Now, I feel a definite sense of accomplishment at having finally conquered the project. Yes, I do. But my headache, which has been with me for pretty much all week but had seemed much better after sleeping in this morning, was back by the time I was finished. Along with a bonus tic.

No. Literally. All the muscles around my left eye were in spasm by the time I printed out my final product and shut the computer down. No clue what that was all about, but I was really happy when it stopped.

I'll figure out all this spreadsheet stuff eventually. I haven't worked with spreadsheets since I took my very first computer class, back in about 1989. I don't remember much about it. Might have been Lotus? It's really been a long time.

At any rate, I've been good, I've worked on Excel and I've written, and I vacuumed the carpets. Now it's almost time for dinner, so I'm going eat and maybe do some knitting, and let my brain rest. It is the weekend now, after all.

Friday after 6 pm does count as the weekend, doesn't it?