Writing the First Game of the Year: Part One

Okay, this will be technical for a bit.  Bare with me.

First thing I do is to go to a Word file called, oddly, "Flashback."  It lists (literally it is a Word list) all the games since my old computer crashed in 1998.  There are 505 of them.  Our 1961 game will be 506.  They are sorted by Flashback year.  This tells me what years I've done and the date they were written for (not necessarily the date they were run since life intervenes).  I go to the list and I type in "January 5, 2011   1961."  Autonumbering makes this Game No. 337 and drops the last game, a 2007 game run on September 29, 2010, to No. 506. 

I then open an Access table template called "Table 1" and save it as "01/05/2011 1961".  Of course, that's not what I type.  I type "01/05/2010 1961" and have to go and change it.

We Jews have been writing 5770 on our checks for months now.

I then open a screen called "Relationships" and associate our new table with a table called "Books 14", which allows me then to open a query in Access called "Query3" (because Query, Query 1 and Query 2 didn't work) and add our new table to it, deleting from it the table from the 1911 game.  This query is a permanent file that allows me to add the book number each time I write a question, and then immediately gives me the book title (to make sure I got it right).  It will be transformed into another query and saved for this particular game at the end.

I then reopen Books 14 and filter it for the game, putting the titles in alphabetical order.  Why is it called Books 14?  Because Access is about as user friendly as Al-Qaeda.  It won't let me add more Relationships after a certain number.  So I have to copy the file again and start a new set of Relationships.  This has happened 14 times since I started keeping track of the sources.  It's a bitch, because it takes so long that I forget how to do that copying and have to learn it all over.  I don't use Access for anything else.  I learned Access to do this and I hope never to have to use it for anything else.  Luckily, my job does not require a lot of data entry.

Now I start a blank Word file, and change it from Microsoft's font du jour to Times New Roman 12.  I type "Q:"  and hope for the best.