Workers’ Day
Yesterday was a holiday, Workers Day. I thought it would be a good time to catch up on some things other than homeschooling and the hospital, and it was. I didn’t rest, I worked more hours than in an ordinary day, up to midnight, so I guess it was appropriate for Workers Day.
One of the long-put off tasks was getting back on track with monitoring our finances. Yuck. I just hate dealing with accounts, receipts, and all that. It’s funny, because as I was growing up and even in college I kept meticulous records of my expenses, down to buying a candy bar. I still have those notes somewhere. Now, though, I pay little attention to finances. That, of course, is a rather foolish approach.
Now, I’m not totally financially irresponsible. But I figure that as long as we don’t spend more than we earn, and we pay off our credit card bills every month (zero balance), and someone does our taxes for us, we’re ok. And there are so many more interesting things to do in life than keep an eye on our budget.
This year, though, the mission is no longer doing our taxes for us, and I hadn’t looked at our retirement or investment accounts for about two years, and I didn’t even know whether we had saved or lost money over the 
past two years. Even worse, we haven’t been monitoring our mission statements monthly to know who has been supporting us, and to thank them. So all in all, it’s been an area of sad neglect.
So, that’s what I started working on all day yesterday. I reinstalled Microsoft Money 2000 and tried to open my accounts file, but it was password protected. No problem, I keep all my passwords in a well-protected password file. Except that somehow it didn’t contain this one. I tried and tried all I could think of, combinations of this and that, variations on that and this, but it was no use. Sigh.
Next stop: look for programs to crack passwords on Microsoft Money. I didn’t find any free ones, though, and the one I downloaded to test triggered my anti-virus program. Besides, I always try to use reasonably strong passwords and the cracking programs in this case said they work basically by brute force and dictionary attacks, so it might take quite a while to find the password I had forgotten.
Oh well, I suppose I don’t really need all that old information anyway, do I? Well, it would have been nice, and maybe I’ll go back and try to get it later, but I just went ahead and set up everything from scratch. Anyway, by the end of the day I did get everything set up more-or-less right and reflecting the state of affairs on January 1. Now, can I get it up to date and keep it that way for the rest of the year?
I did take a break to help Luke play with the erector set construction toy we bought at the garage sale Saturday. I quickly realized it was beyond his patience and ability to start working on it alone. He wanted to build the biggest thing on the cover of the manual, a large airplane, but despite some resistance, he was happy with the tiny scooter that was the first project.
After dinner, I worked on Textbooks for Theological Education in Africa: An Annotated Bibliography. Saralynn is proofreading it as part of her job, and I was asked about getting it online, so I’ve been working on that. A tip for everyone: if you’re going to enter a lot of data into the computer, like 700 text reviews, recipes, real-estate ads, or whatever, be sure to use a database or at least a spreadsheet, or some other form of structuring. If it’s only entered into an ordinary word processing program, it is hard to manipulate, even to do something so simple as to make the page numbers bold.
I finally got it all put back together and reformatted, and it’s here. It actually looks like a great resource for those teaching Bible and theology in Africa. Now, if we can just get some of the actual books posted online as well …