Husband's Spreadsheet For Dough Hydration Now 47 Sheets Long; Spreadsheet For Wife's Birthday Preferences Remains Empty

The spreadsheet titled "Autolyse Duration vs. Crumb Aperture: A Longitudinal Analysis" contains 47 sheets, 12,004 rows, and a pivot table that took Greg Halloran three weekends to build. Sheet 48, titled "Sandra — Preferences/Dates," contains one column header and zero rows. It was created in February 2023. "He color-coded the hydration bands," said Sandra Halloran, 41, gesturing at a secondary monitor displaying what she described as "a heat map of bread." "Green is optimal. Red is crisis. There's no column for my name." Greg, 43, disputed the framing. "The spreadsheet is a living document. Every bake generates data. You don't just leave a row empty — that would compromise the dataset." **Table 1: Spreadsheet Metadata, Halloran Residence (as of March 2026)** | Document | Sheets | Rows | Last Modified | |---|---|---|---| | Autolyse Duration vs. Crumb Aperture | 47 | 12,004 | 6 hours ago | | SD-7B Strain Activity Log | 23 | 4,891 | Yesterday | | Sandra — Preferences/Dates | 1 | 0 | Never | The Baker's Bulletin obtained a read-only link to both documents. The hydration spreadsheet includes a regression model predicting oven spring from ambient humidity, a 90-day fermentation temperature log cross-referenced against weather API data, and a tab labeled "Near Misses (Philosophical)" containing 34 entries, each annotated with a brief emotional response and a corrective hydration adjustment. The birthday spreadsheet has a note at the top that reads "add stuff here" and was shared to Sandra's email in what Greg described as "a gesture of good faith." Sandra confirmed she has never opened it. The couple's marital status is currently described as "complicated" — a term Sandra uses and Greg has entered into Sheet 31 as a potential confounding variable.¹ The precipitating incident, per Sandra, was the morning of March 4th, when Greg rose at 4:47 a.m. to score the loaves and forgot their anniversary entirely. Greg maintains the session produced "genuinely exceptional ear development" and has the photos to prove it. "He showed me the ear," Sandra said. "I said, it's our anniversary. He said, I know, I logged it." She paused. "He had logged the scoring time. Not the anniversary." Greg maintains that SD-7B — a *Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis*-dominant culture he has tended since 2019 — requires morning attention or "the fermentation gets away from you." He estimated the culture's emotional needs as roughly equivalent to a houseplant and significantly below a pet. Sandra placed its emotional footprint somewhere above their marriage (p < 0.05). Couples therapist Dr. Renata Osei, who specializes in what she terms "precision hobby displacement," said the pattern is increasingly common among home fermenters. "The spreadsheet is not the problem," she said. "The spreadsheet is the symptom. Hydration has acquired moral weight that relationships have not." She added that she recently started a waiting list, which she keeps in a spreadsheet. Greg's position is that Sandra *is* in the document. He pulled up Sheet 12. Row 847 contained the annotation: "Sandra entered kitchen during bulk ferment, ambient temp rose 1.2°C. Discarded batch."² The Hallorans have couples therapy scheduled for next Thursday. Greg has already created a tracking sheet for session outcomes. It has four columns: Date, Therapist Notes, Action Items, and Crumb Structure (Control). "He said the last column was a joke," Sandra said. She did not sound certain. --- ¹ The entry reads: "Household tension — possible cortisol effect on fermentation activity? Requires controlled trial." ² Sandra's response to this discovery is not logged anywhere.