Keeping Books, Running Numbers

Once upon a time, I parasailed (twice!) over the bay at Puerta Vallarta.  That took no gumption at all; I was stupid at the time.  However  a current activity of mine is drawing on my reserves of daring:  I'm keeping the financial books for my husband's psychotherapy practice, since he left a large practice and went solo a year and a half ago.

Oh, mon Dieu!

I am a wordy person, not a numerical person.  Evidence:  In first grade, my friend at the next desk was roaring through workbook 2, while I was still sullenly staring at a middle page of workbook 1. (She has become composer and professor of composing, Meira Warshauer; music people are good at math, you know.) In junior high, I had to get a tutor to get through algebra II. In high school, I was remanded to unaccelerated chemistry. Once, as an older person who should have known better, I tried to learn how to sell mortgages and utterly failed.  Everyone has more sense than to buy a mortgage from me. (I did bond well with people on the phone; some of them continued to want to chat after they'd already bought their refinancing from someone else.) 

It's true that I've done the bookkeeping on my writing/critiquing business for these 39 years.  But my business and I have grown up together. 

Now I'm not only dealing with a new kind of numbers not my own,  I'm also trying to make the records look more legible, more professional, less tatty-little-notebook.  In short, I'm using a spreadsheet.  I'm giving it until the end of the year and if things don't get better, I'm getting a second little notebook. 

My husband, whose income and outgo I am recording, seems trusting except for the occasional flash of alarm when he thinks I can find a particular paper quickly.

At some point this airplane is surely going to level off in the air and it will become second nature, right? 

 

Categories: enhancing creativity