Validation for my Other Side

Most of my life, I have been someone who did not mind messes, who left projects unfinished, who only remembered to pay a bill when it was shoved in my face; someone with little to no organizational skills.

While some of these qualities are still a constant battle, I have trained my brain to be freakishly organized about a few things. I keep an extremely detailed budget on file (really, it is a combonation of balancing a checkbook and planning ahead for major and/or consistent costs). Spreadsheets have become a bit of a crutch for me, but I just LOVE them!

Every week I get an email newsletter from AllEarsNet.com - they are a website essentiallly designed to help you plan vacations to Disney World (WDW), with some additional tips for DisneyLand and the cruises. The bulk of the newsletter is an article; sometimes these are completely boring or irrelevant to me, other times they are fun bits of history or trivia. This week, the article is all about a mom whose WDW vacay plans are always meticulously planned out on spreadsheets. Let me tell you, reading her article was so cathartic and validating! I have never been more proud of my own neurosis. As she discussed her specific design and her plan strategy, I got the itch to go look at mine from our last vacation. Mine may not have been quite so set-in-stone as hers, because I knew we would need spontaneity for Brad's first trip, but the idea and the feeling were the same.

Now I cannot wait to start planning our next trip, but I can't get much progress done any time soon. We are hoping to visit again next November; it would essentially be a birthday trip for me, which is why we would hop over to Universal to see The Wizarding World fo Harry Potter theme park, which is slated to open around that time! I have never been to WDW outside of summer, so this will be a whole new perspective ("A whole new world!") for me, and the WWoHP will be immeasurably wonderful.

Anyway, my point is that I cannot plan too extensively yet, as the park prices are not set for Nov 2010, and it would be pretty hard to set times/dates/prices for flights then, as well. But I can dream, and oh-so-slowly accumulate plans and tips.

Spreadsheet, here I come!