Strange idea of fun

My sister does a lot of walking and is doing one of these Walk a 1000 Miles challenges.  She did it last year too and smashed it.  Every day we get social media pictures posted of interesting things she’s spotted on her walk and last year she had a series of themed days, say, where everything was a letter of the alphabet, or a colour, or shape etc.

This year she’s decided that she’ll just post a weekly summary, so that we don’t get bored of her pictures.  Not that we will, it’s lovely to see the countryside and the ever-changing landscapes throughout the seasons. 

I happened to ask whether she keeps a spreadsheet of her milage.  I’m a bit of a spreadsheet fiend and have them for just about most things.  A trait that it seems I’ve passed on to my daughter who has a box set viewing spreadsheet of all the programmes they watch, how many seasons and episodes so they can calculate how long it would take them to get through them all if they watched x number per day/week.

Anyway, the answer was yes she does have a mileage spreadsheet.  Nerd alert.  Follow up questions then came thick and fast.  Does it plot this year’s mileage against last years by day/week/month?  Is it annotated so you know what the cause and effect was of say, poor weather, sickness, holiday etc. Does it have a trendline?  A plot chart? Can you tell if you are on target to achieve the same, if not more mileage than last year? Pivot tables, charts.  Oh the possibilities.

She’s not as nerdy as me, and just has the raw data of what mileage she did each day, nothing fancy.  Oh, let me at it, purlease! She said that I probably have more fun things to do.  But this is fun. Let me at it, let me at it.

Then, one of our mutual friends joined in.  He’s also a data nerd.  Between the two of us, we got very excitable.  My sister was probably thinking that we’re a pair of freaks.  What’s one person’s idea of hell is another’s idea of fun.

Anyway, she has sent me her spreadsheet, and I shall enjoy having a play and see what I can come up with.  This is gonna be fun.