Guile and cunning

9:11 p.m.
“Looks like I may actually get to bed at a decent hour,” I said to myself.
“Wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute!” I said. “This Escape mileage spreadsheet is wonky. What happened to the chart?”
How come every time getting to bed early seems doable, I get a stinking ‘pyooter hairball?
The Escape is my 2012 Ford Escape. I keep track of its mileage on a spreadsheet.
It’s only two rows: date-of-gas-purchase, and mileage, which I figure on my calculator.
I know I could have my spreadsheet be the calculator. Four rows: date purchased, miles since last purchased, gallons, and calculated mileage in the bottom row.
I could write a formula dividing miles by gallons to get the mileage.
But I got better things to do than figger out a formula. Zippity-do. Engage calculator, my iPhone.
My mileage spreadsheet is Apple’s “Numbers,” Apple’s competition to Microsoft Excel®.
My other spreadsheets are Excel-for-MAC. My knowledge of Excel is better than Numbers.
The main thing is Numbers lets me easily do a line-chart: mileage over the year.
Excel will make charts too, but not as easily as Numbers, or so it seems. I hafta keep what I do within my limited computer-savvy.
Plus my Excel charts weren’t useful, so I tossed ‘em.
So something strange and unknowable happened to my Numbers mileage chart.
What to do here?
Down-and-dirty time.
ENGAGE GUILE-AND-CUNNING!
I dickered the erroneous chart. It looked like it compressed into a vertical row of traffic-lights at the beginning.
I tried expanding; nothing.
I never had no manual; I have no idea how to do anything!
So how can I salvage all the info in those two rows and not lose it?
Maybe I can copy it all and save into a new Numbers spreadsheet, and then make a new chart on that.
Two ways:
—Copy both entire rows; not needed.
—Copy just the info in those rows.
Then PASTE clipboard contents into a new spreadsheet.
Of course, my new spreadsheet has 89 bazilyun rows I don’t need. I only need two.
I tried “delete,” but it only deleted one row at a time.
What a pain!
Then I noticed “delete rows;” I ended up with only my two rows.
But wait a minute. My rows end at June 6th. Where’s July and August?
How do I work around that? Maybe I could copy/paste from June 6th on.
Then I noticed my new spreadsheet could expand.
I took it out to more columns than August.
Meanwhile, I used “Command-X” to copy my earlier content, which emptied my erroneous spreadsheet. Which I trashed because my new spreadsheet had the content — but only to June 6th.
Bad mistake. I needed to copy all the content in my earlier spreadsheet, and its rows were now empty.
Drag erroneous spreadsheet back out of trash, but the rows are empty.
Last resort: “Edit” in the menu bar. “Undo” the “Command-X” = put all the info back.
It restored the content, but I didn’t know that until I happened to scroll back to the beginning of the erroneous spreadsheet.
Unbelievable! I’m snatching redemption from the jaws of fate.
“Copy” restored content, “paste” into new spreadsheet, generate chart, and toss erroneous spreadsheet.
10:06; not too bad.
And I no longer have my computer-programmer wife around to hold my hand. She died over four years ago.

• My computer is an Apple MacBook Pro; supposedly “of-the-Devil” to my Windoze siblings.