A deep love affair with Excel

I've mentioned before what a little nerdy birdie B is.  And grad school has really brought that out in him even more.  The talk of lasers has dramatically decreased since there are no lasers in his current job, but the talk of spreadsheets has dramatically increased.  Every discussion often ends in "I think we need a Gantt chart.  No?  Well then how about a Venn diagram? Still no? Hmmm..."

It was no different when the discussion recently turned to our vacation schedule.  We have a lot of mini-trips planned for this summer so we're trying to get things organized.


B - I need to figure out if I'm going to have enough vacation days for our trips this summer and fall.  Can you look at the calendar and write up all of our plans?  Maybe just make a spreadsheet for me.

Me - Uh.... I am absolutely not making a spreadsheet of our vacation days - how would I even do that?? - but I'll definitely send you a list of everything on the calendar from now until the fall.


This is what I got back an hour later.  Click on the picture if you need to make it bigger to see the detail.  You really owe it to yourself to see the detail.  And in case you don't understand the chart at first glance and have no use for x and y values, I will tell you that the bottom value is time (left to right), the top value is vacation days used and earned (bottom to top), and the little boxes are explanations. 

You can't make this stuff up, folks, this is really what our life is like.