Report on the December 29, 2009 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will meet as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.
January 19 is an election day, so we may meet elsewhere or not
meet that day.

Other events

The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Kingston, RI is hosting a
Sing-it-yourself Messiah on January 3rd, 2010 at 3:00pm (with a simple
supper following the event.) Whether you’re an accomplished singer or just
enjoy listening to great music, we invite you to join us for music
and fellowship. The concert will be led from the piano by Judy Conrad, an
Early Music specialist who is Good Shepherd’s organist-pianist. Proceeds to
benefit local families in need.

Pictures from Christmas in Fall River

They had a tree:

[Christmas Tree]

And a crêche:

[crêche]

They put more energy into decorating than I do, so there are
also things like this mobile:

[mobile of illuminated birds]

They also do a lot of baking. Here’s the baba after its
second rising:

[baba sponge]

I wasn’t in a good position to take pictures at the party when
all 40 people were trying to cram into the living room, so I
don’t have one of Judy
playing Chopin, but here’s one of our friend Harold playing
Christmas carols:

[Harold]

And here are a bunch of everybody being zonked after the
party. Judy had the best reason to be zonked:

[Judy after party]

Monte didn’t have as good a reason, but if you’d barked as
strenuously as he did at the beginning of the party to make sure
all 40 people knew it was his house, you’d be zonked
too:

Monte zonked

Sunny doesn’t look so zonked, but he is anxious:

[Sunny]

My mother, with 80 years of experience throwing parties, hardly looks zonked at
all:

[Helen]

We don’t know why Teddy was zonked:

[Teddy zonked]

Chopin Preludes

[circle of fifths]

My sister’s party yesterday was a success. She starts it by
playing about an hour of piano music. This year the big piece
was a selection of Chopin Preludes.

I knew there were 24 of them, in all the major and minor keys.
I hadn’t realized he had arranged them in the Circle of
Fifths. The book starts with C major and A minor, and goes
around until the end is F major and d minor.

This March is Chopin’s 200th birthday, and she’s planning a big
all-Chopin concert for February 21, which may feature a
performance of all 24 preludes, but she hasn’t learned them all
yet, and in any case, she had other music she wanted to play for
her one hour. But she played a good chunk, and some of the ones
she skipped, she played the beginning and end of so that we
could hear how they fit with the ones before and after.

People who experience music or literature as excerpts from an
anthology often don’t get the idea of many short works being
part of a larger whole. I’d never realized that before about the
Chopin Preludes, and I know lots of people who never saw it
about the Morley Canzonets.

Phone and electric outlets

My mother’s house, where I’m staying until tomorrow morning, was buit in 1948. At that time, phones came from the phone company and ran on power that came down the phone line.
So nobody thought it was necessary to put a power outlet next to the telephone connection.
This started being a problem when my mother decided she wanted a cordless phone, which needed its base plugged in.
It’s now more of a problem now that they have DSL, and would like both the DSL modem and the wirless router plugged in.
I’m thinking about this problem because the current solution isn’t going to work this afternoon when 30-40 people come over for my sister’s Christmas party.
The right answer would have been to install an electric outlet where the original phone was, which is a corner of the hall central to the first floor of the house, with a smal table quite resonable for holding the mobile phone base, the DSL modem, and the wirless router. But instead of doing something that reasonable, they’ve been stringing electric cables around the corner to the kitchen and through the bathroom door, as well as an ethernet cable across the hall and into the guest bedroom.
They have of course also strung phone cables to various other places in the house, so I’m about to go see if any of those places have enough electric outlets that I can move the DSL stuff there.
If not, we’ll be off the internet from whenever we take things down until whenever we put them back, or in my case, whenever I get back to Cambridge.

Networking success

I told you I was having trouble getting my sister’s computer upgraded to a modern setup.
We now have a wireless router installed. I can connect wirelessly to the network via her desktop on windows and linux, and via my laptop on Linux.
I tried installing her new monitor, but it turns out to be DOA.
Linux is running her display at 800×640, so it isn’t very usable. If her new monitor worked, I would play with this more, but since she doesn’t use it, and I have the laptop, this doesn’t make sense to waste time on now.
You can complain about computers being user-unfriendly, but networking is definitely lots easier than it used to be. When I set up my router at home with the new Comcast connection, I had to manually clone the mac address from the computer Comcast had originally connected to to the router. If that happened here, it was transparent to the user.
Of course, it doesn’t look like you would be able to set up this router from Linux at all, unless there’s some magic screen on the network interface I haven’t found. But maybe you could run the setup program under WINE.

Christmas Eve in the melting pot

The clash between family tradition and the American protestant tradition was even more plangent with my sister’s new church.

The Polish tradition is to have a large meal on Christmas Eve and then go to midnight mass. The American protestant tradition is to have a church service on Christmas Eve, and then the large meal on Christmas day.

Since my sister has been a church organist in protestant churches, we’ve had to reschedule the large meal, usually to be after the service. But this year, she had to play two services: one at 5 and one at 10, so she didn’t get home until well after midnight. Her current church is an hour’s drive away, so she had family dinner with the pastor, and my mother an I ate a fairly simplified version of the Wigilia meal, and we exchanged presents after midnight.

One church she played at had a large population of Liberian immigrants, who also have their large family dinner on Christmas Eve. So they just didn’t come to church at all. So I never saw the whole choir or heard the wonderful congregational singing my sister kept telling me about, because it didn’t happen on Christmas Eve.

I tried telling them about the Mexican tradition of having the large dinner after Midnight Mass and then exchanging presents and then going to bed on Christmas morning, but they weren’t interested in adopting that one. It probably works better for people who normally eat late in the evening than for people who eat at 6.

Kolya

This movie is set in Prague in 1988 at the end of the communist regime. It’s a heart-warming look at the effect of politics on personal relationships.
It’s the European kind of good movie, with subways that look like subways and apartments of starving musicians that don’t look like Hollywood sets. I particularly enjoyed the view of the scary escalator in the subway station from the point of view of the 5 year old boy.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000065V3D&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Christmas is coming

I’m trying hard to clear my TODO list of everything that I
can’t do in Fall River. The major thing is that I’d really like
ot mail off the accounting for Bonnie’s estate, so that we can get
that closed by the end of the year.

I wrote the basic document yesterday, and I’m checking all the numbers
for consistency. If I’d known yesterday morning what I know now
about how to use a spreadsheet for that kind of thing, yesterday
would have been easier. But today is still a bit
nervewracking.

Anyway, when that’s finished, I go run a couple of errands and
then pack up and go down to Fall River. We’ll have the
Christmas Eve dinner, and the Christmas dinner, and my sister
will have a large party with lots of eating and drinking and
singing and piano playing on Sunday.

I’ve made some progress on dragging
my sister into the 21st century, so I expect network access
to be pretty good. But if I miss some posts, it will be because
it’s not.

I notice that the number of hits on my websites is already
below normal, so I expect a lot of you won’t be reading this
until you’re back from your seasonal celebrations. But if
you’re reading it before, have a joyful celebrating time.

Woes of an Executrix: taxes

I swore I’d get the First and Final Accounting of Bonnie’s
estate done by today, so I’ve chained myself to the desk and I’m
working on it.

This means I don’t have time to write anything new today, but
it also means I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff I wrote when
I was trying to figure out the taxes and such.

Here’s my
description of trying to deal with the IRS on the phone:

I finally decided I had to do something about the taxes, so I called
the IRS. They played me the Blue Danube Waltz for 45 minutes or so
and then someone came on and told me what number form I needed to send
in so that she could talk to me about Bonnie’s taxes. She wanted to
tell me a fax number, but I told her that faxing was a pain so I
needed snail mail or email. So they played the Blue Danube Waltz for
a while longer, and then she gave me an address. I should have looked
at the form while she did that, because it turns out to be a Power of
Attorney form, and it isn’t at all clear that it applies to an
Executrix.

Did you do anything like this? Do you have any way of finding out
what an executrix needs to do to get tax information? I can go
downtown with the shoebox and see if they’ll help me if I talk to them
in person. I can send in form 2848 with none of the boxes checked and
a note that they should have another box if this is the right form,
but that seems like a pretty forlorn hope.

The upshot was that my tax preparer friend and I went down to
the IRS office in downtown Boston with my executrix appointment
and spoke to a very nice man who gave us printouts of everything
they had in their computers. It turned out that Bonnie hadn’t
filed any tax returns since 1996, and they’d only caught her for
2001. They subsequently caught her for 2006, so the estate ended
up paying a lot of taxes and penalties, but possibly not much more
than she would have paid in taxes if she’d paid the normal
way.

This is not the way those of us who file our taxes every year
believe the system is supposed to work. Nor is it the way the
nice man in the IRS office believed it was supposed to
work, but he didn’t sound real surprised that it had in fact
worked that way.