Last week I forgot to mention we watched a delightful movie last week. It’s “My Cousin Vinny” (1992). If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hoot.

I help count the collection for our church once every four weeks. There’s been a strong push to make the count exact. The collection is comprised of many separate collections (regular weekly, Easter, Missions, etc.) We count each collection separately, recording results in an Excel file, one worksheet per collection. Then we throw everything into one pot and count the whole enchilada. Cash is tedious but fairly straightforward. Checks have been troublesome. Checks can have any value. We can’t bin them by check value because we don’t know ahead of time what all the values will be. With no bins, we don’t have a way to focus on where an error is. Last week’s count was $30 off. We had been working for four hours. It was 2:00 and there was no way we could re-count all the checks again.

This week I wrote a new worksheet that reads all the checks, bins them, and prints the sorted result. We ran the new spreadsheet against last week’s file and quickly found the error was in a small subset of all the checks. The next time this happens, we should be able to quickly find and correct the discrepancy.

The worksheet consumed me for most of the week, but it was a lot of fun. I have done a lot of this kind of work with Access and Word but not with Excel. Plus I have forgotten much more than I remembered. I had two screens. The left screen was for Google searches. The right screen was for the spreadsheet. I spent more time reading than writing. Now it’s done, it works, and it should be a big help going forward.

Danita ran into an unexpected obstacle when visiting Bud this week. Because there is a COVID case in assisted living, visitors have to have evidence of having passed a COVID test before entering. Visitors can go to the medical suite and get a test, but that would take a lot of extra time. There were several people trying to get in and much confusion. One couple decided to do a “window visit”. The weather was nice and their parent is on the ground floor. The parent didn’t know how to open the window, so the they used their cell phone to called the parent. It was a kind of low-tech Zoom.

Danita happened to have a picture of the results from our Easter test on her phone. She offered that and was admitted. She was lucky to get in because the entry clerk can swipe up and see the date the picture was taken. Moving forward, she will take a test at home before she visits Bud.

We were supposed to have the “Greek on the Street” food truck Friday. This is one of the better food trucks that visits. The Joneses and we were planning to have a food truck dinner together. Unfortunately, the bums cancelled. We decided to do a carry out dinner instead. Cheese steak sandwiches aren’t very healthy, but they’re no worse than Greek French Fries with Feta cheese.

That’s a lot of news for one week. I hope everybody is doing well.