Spread-Sheetin'

This has been a mostly-fun weekend. We did some financial planning, of a modest sort, and I spent some time on a health spreadsheet.

The financial planning: We've kept track of expenses over the past four years on a month-to-month basis. I take in numbers from our monthly bank statement, as well as from a financial listing of the checks we've written, and categorize them into about twelve categories. Over time we've gotten a pretty good sense of how much we spent each month, and we can see when there is a significant variation. The totals from that go into another spreadsheet that projects income and expenses for the next twenty years. Its a very simple spreadsheet, conceptually, but it lets us feel that we know where we are, financially, and where we can expect to be in ten and twenty years. Ceteri paribus, as they say. The addition this weekend was what we called an 'estate planning' spreadsheet. It's nothing more than a listing of all of our banking accounts, insurance accounts, health accounts, and so forth: where they are, what the key account numbers are, and where the papers related to them are filed. We hope that it's never used, but we know it will: its intended for when one of us has died and the other needs to get a quick handle on what's where. Its a morbid concept, but we're glad to have done it.

The health spreadsheet: over the last seven months, I've kept a detailed history of what my blood sugar readings have been, at least three times a day (morning, before dinner, and before bedtime), and sometimes more. Over the last four months, I've expanded it to include a summary of what we had for dinner, and amounts of insulin taken during the day. The intent has been to get a sense of what foods tend to trigger high sugar values, and of those, which ones tend to persist -- some go down pretty soon after taking insulin, and others do not. I'm familiar but not comfortable with the idea of 'glycemic index', but that describes what I'm trying to get a handle on. Professional health people will say that of course there are foods you should not eat; the best I can do is know that when I do -- and I will -- I need to keep a sharp eye on what my body's doing, afterward. I can't accurately forecast, yet, but I feel that I'm doing a good thing, and so I'll continue to do it.