It’s been at least a month since I last opened Quicken, and I was beginning to feel a little guilty about it. So I sat down this afternoon to get caught up.

Quicken is one of those programs that I’ve used for years but never really liked. It’s only recently that they’ve offered a reasonably-competent Mac version, but the current edition does everything I need – if I can figure out how to get it to behave. It likes to associate my credit card automatic payments with the wrong account (sometimes it’s the wrong credit card account; sometimes it’s the wrong checking account; sometimes both) but I’ve learned to double-check them and get them to the right place.

My problems today, though, weren’t Quicken’s fault. I blame Apple and Goldman Sachs.

Both Diane and I got Apple Cards when we bought our most recent Apple products to get the 3% rebate, and there are other times when we choose to use them. At first, the only way to look at your card activity was on your iPhone, and there was no way to export the data to Quicken. Later, Apple started exporting to CSV, and people found a convoluted path to get it into a format that Quicken would accept.

Last month, Apple (or Goldman Sachs, but probably Apple) unbent a little and added a QFX format export – that’s Quicken’s native interchange format these days (replacing QIF, “Quicken Interchange Format”, which they’ve obsoleted). You still have to export the data from your phone, but it’s easy to move it to the Mac and then to Quicken – and I did that today for both of our accounts, current to the end of June (because you can’t download transactions for the current account for some reason).

When I tried to reconcile the accounts, neither of them balanced. I carefully examined each and every transaction to make sure nothing was duplicated or omitted from the time I’d had to manually enter the data – nope! I even looked at the QFX files in a text editor to see if anything had been omitted there – nope! I finally decided to skip reconciling, which bugged me no end.

”¨A couple of hours later, I had a brainstorm and went back to look at the QFX files. One of the fields in the file is the “Ledger Balance”, which Quicken shows as the “online balance”, and which is the target balance for reconciliation. Here’s what it looks like in my download of May transactions:

<LEDGERBAL><BALAMT>-123.45<DTASOF>20200729120000[0:GMT]</LEDGERBAL> 

Or, in English: my balance was $123.45 as of 12:00:00 UTC on July 29, 2020.

There are at least two problems with this:

1) July 29, 2020 at 12:00:00 UTC is still in the future
2) The balance shown is my true current balance as of right now, but I have no way to download this month’s transactions (and I was looking at May, anyhow).

No wonder things didn’t balance! Thanks, Apple!

After I’d had enough of Quicken, I finally did get around to processing a couple of days’ worth of photos from 2005. I kept the last photo we took of our first Prius after it gave its all for Diane, and I found the first photo I took of RPI Reunion 2005 – the bed in our room at the Hotel Desmond. I’m not sure it was worth the effort of firing up Lightroom for those two photos – you be the judge.

When we remodeled our kitchen in 1999, the last thing to be finished was the kitchen desk and bookshelves. Somehow, when the plans were drawn, the bookshelves came down all the way to the surface of the desk, and when everything was installed, the desk was basically useless. The contractor quickly redid the bookshelves to leave the surface of the desk free, but it took months (and our withholding the final payment) for them to come back and finish the trim around the desk.

Bookshelves that go all the way to the ceiling seemed like a good idea, but the top shelf is awkward to get to, so all we’ve ever used it for is storing our supply of Sunset books (most of which we only looked at once or twice).

When we’ve found a new recipe we like during the lockdown, I’ve printed it and put it in a page protector; the stack of recipes has gotten fairly unwieldy (and slippery) over the last few weeks, and we wanted to organize them before doing our meal planning for this week. We’ve got plenty of spare 3-ring binders (thanks, IBM!), so I grabbed one and put the recipes in – but then I had to find a place to put the binder.

The bookshelves over the desk were the obvious place – but none of the shelves were tall enough to hold the binder. So I had to take everything off the top three shelves so I could move them around and make room for an 11-inch binder.

”¨But to do that, I had to clear off the desk so I’d have somewhere to put the contents of the shelves. And that got me to look at what I had on the desk – did I really need the itinerary and tickets from our 2014 trip to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Probably not.

Nor did we need a 1978 edition of “The Complete Medical Guide”, or a copy of Consumers’ Checkbook from Spring 2011, or….

When all was said and done, I had a lot more surface area visible on the desk; our accumulation of postage stamps was in one place instead of scattered; and I’d finally sorted the address labels that charities and companies have sent us over the years into “his”, “hers”, and “ours”.

Maybe I’ll do some photo editing tomorrow.