Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 14, 2008

Wrapping

Posted at 7:21 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Note to self: Borders has nice boxes of holiday cards at buy 2 get one free EVERY YEAR. I do not need 3 boxes of Christmas cards a year. I still have many of the cards I bought last year, in addition to the ones I got this year, and writing this year's cards will not use them up. Try to remember to skip buying cards next year.

On the other hand, having refilliable tape dispensers in the wrapping paper box doesn't do much good unless you actually buy some tape refills. I'll buy some tomorrow when I ship out the packages I wrapped today (just barely enough tape) so I have tape towrap things for the local people. I should also check my crate of traveling office stuff: I may have more tape in there, unless

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Slow Boat

Posted at 1:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

(written 11/29, the day after Thanksgiving, but didn't upload properly)

I spent today celebrating National Clean the Kitchen Day. I really need more counter space for dealing with a project as big as a turkey. Cleaning up starts loooking like a Towers of Hanoi algorithm: in order to get at anything I need to move three other things, and then move them someplace else to get at what they were stacked on.

I also called Kitchenaid about the broiler pan and roasting rack set I ordered in September. They said it was still backordered.

One of 5000 sets that are backordered... I wonder if the reason the oven came with a coupon instead of a broiler pan and rack was because they were out of stock and delaying their order for the pans and racks. In any case, someone is obviously not handling the JIT ordering properly. Being out of stock on things at the start of the holiday buying season is stupid, never mind having 5000 units backordered.

They said they are expecting a delivery next week, so I assume there is a shipping container of broiler pan sets somewhere between here and China.

The customer service rep said I could track the order on their website, but the site apparently does not include rebate department orders. And the rebate department is not answering their phone today because of the holiday weekend.

I'm having pasta with red sauce for supper. Turkey for dinner and supper yesterday and lunch today is enough.

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Finance Files

Posted at 1:29 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This is weird. Most years I am eager to get out the Christmas ornaments and do the baking and wrap stuff. And I love listening to Christmas music. This year, except for the Christmas music, I can't get in the mood.

Yesterday I found myself reorganizing kitchen cupboards and the pantry instead of wrapping the presents that MUST ship tomorrow.

And I stayed up until 5 am working on tidying my (online) financial files. (And then didn't sleep long or well, so now I have no energy for wrapping...) There was always one more little thing to tweak.

It's a sad day when housework and bookkeeping are used to procrastinate about doing Christmas stuff.

It isn't even current bookkeeping: the stuff from the past year or two is in pretty good shape. But it is hard to see it, because I have about 95% of my data since 1992 online (with data for some accounts going back to 1990), including data from long-closed credit cards, old mortgages and car loans, etc. And some of the older data is a bit messy in part because I have used GnuCash for the past few years, and used Quicken before that.

GnuCash enforces something a lot closer to proper double entry bookkeeping than Quicken requires. I had already been doing extra double-entryish work in Quicken. (Before Quicken I used a spreadsheet/database product from Borland to do my own semi-double-entry account tracking, and I kind of imported the system into Quicken.) So the import was fairly clean, but there were missing balance values that Quicken hadn't caught, and some of the ways GnuCash adjusted things just look weird to me.

I have created some folders called Closed Credit Cards, Closed Liabilities, Closed Investments (for the 401Ks I just rolled over), etc. I moved old, inactive accounts with zero balances into the various Closed folders so they won't clutter up the top level Accounts list. I also cleaned up some redundant accounts that had been generated during the import because of typos and inconsistencies that Quicken didn't care about.

Then I started figuring out why some old, inactive accounts that should have zero balances didn't. The redundant accounts were a big part of that, but some of the data entry had also gone squirrelly during the years I was traveling and stressed out. Some things that should be transfers ended up as redundant entries, and some statements for less active accounts never got properly entered.

Now that I have noticed these discrepancies, it will give me some incentive to attack my project of cleaning up my hardcopy files to get things to actually balance.

There is one redundant account that I made by mistake which needs to have some paperwork checked to figure out where its single entry should really be transferring from.

There is an account 'Unspecified' that GnuCash generated during the import that needs to have its entries moved to the proper accounts (I took care of most of them last night, but the remaining entries need research.)

There is an account Imbalance-USD that results from changing values in splits that aren't updated when, for example, I didn't (or couldn't) accurately record how much of a car payment went to interest vs principle.

There is an account Retained Earnings that needs to be scrutinized. Some of the values in it are because my financial life started before the earliest values in the online files. Some of the values are just GnuCash guessing wrong about things during the import, or not being able to tell that the asset that balances a car loan liability is a car (so there are two opposed records in the Retained Earnings account). Some records are Retained Earnings of zero created when new accounts are created, which I find annoying clutter and will probably nuke.

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