spreadsheet junkie

Since I have both diabetes and high blood pressure and am doing everything I can to avoid more medication, I have been monitoring my blood sugar and blood pressure on a daily basis. As you can imagine, this is a drag.

Not only do I hate having to think about every calorie/carb I consume or burn, I also hate writing it down. I've been keeping it all in a notebook, but I find myself not wanting to record the higher numbers; evidence for the doctor that I need another pill.

But I flipped through the book the other day and noticed some interesting patterns - like my blood pressure is always high on Sundays (go figure!). And my blood sugar is high when I first wake up and for a couple hours after I run. Finding these patterns makes me want to find more, so I've decided to throw it into a spreadsheet. Then I can easily sort it by day of the week, time of day, amount and type of exercise, or however else I want.

This thought made me unreasonably happy. Almost giddy. Why? Because I am a spreadsheet junkie. I am addicted to spreadsheets. I love them. Give me a bunch of information, randomly scattered about in my head, or the house, or wherever information scatters, and I will plug it in to a color-coded document, ready to sort and display in a variety of ways.

I first started creating spreadsheets for work, but now they are a daily part of my personal life. My "gateway" spreadsheet was a basic ledger I set up in Excel. It is simple, but much better suited to my needs than any of the money software programs I've tried. From there, I was hooked.

I now have spreadsheets called "run times," "2011 goals," "home improvement projects," "piano attendance," "piano ledger," "practice cards," "diabetes journal," "calorie list," "garden planning sheet," "gardenplanner2," "garden planner large," "garden planting calendar" and the list goes on and on. In fact, those were just the ones that came up in my recent documents list.

Sometimes, while day-dreaming about a new way to set up or sort a spreadsheet, I feel like an enormous geek. But I guess as far as addictions go, spreadsheets are not so bad...