I’m not smart. (Version tracking in Google’s suite saves my sanity.)

I use the Google Docs Editors suite occasionally to keep track of miscellaneous stuff. Like my dogs’ food. Gone are the days when both of my pups ate the same food I could always find at the local Centinela Feed Co. and would buy a bag every 3 weeks or so. No, my Lab is on one food, a Labrador-specific product, and goes through a bag every ~4 weeks, My mutt is on a totally different food (not even the same brand!) specifically for seniors, and is on more of an 11 week schedule. I live in a relatively small apartment, and don’t want to be storing food longer than I have to. (And I only have so much space in my Vittles Vaults.)

So I’m basically using JIT with Chewy.com’s autoship. (With a bit of nail biting at the beginning of the pandemic, but, it always worked out.) And being a nerd, I’m constantly refining my algorithms to get food delivered as close to when we need it as possible (I usually build in a 1-2 day buffer). So imagine my heart attack when I realized, the last time I weighed my Labrador’s food vault to predict how many more meals we had on hand, I neglected to note the date the data was entered!

As I was in the middle of firing up my email to search for the Chewy.com autoship reminder that spurred me to update my measurements, I realized – duh, I can look at the version history for the document and just see when the numbers were added.

Screenshot of Google Sheets document used to track dog feeding

I have my mutt’s schedule dialed in precisely, but her kibble is small and I can eyeball scoops easily to ensure she gets a consistent amount with every meal:

Purina Pro Plan Bright Mind 7+

The Labrador kibble is an odd size, leading to some variation (not enough, I don’t think, to be nutritionally significant, but enough to thwart any attempt at reliable consistency when trying to predict an exact number of scoops remaining over several weeks):

Royal Canin Labrador